CREATiVESPORTS > Baseball Articles > Mr. Replay > Losing to Guys Who Aren’t Even Playing
It is often overlooked how much damage we do to our teams by lusting after the quantitive stats, as if the rate stats would fall into place. I’m sure that happens sometimes, but an awful lot of the mail I receive suggests that an awful lot of the time it doesn’t.
My favorite roto story (which I’ve told before and will tell again) reflects badly on me. Some years ago in my home league I played my heart out all summer, and ended up in fifth place. In those days, at the end of the year, we got a supplementary stat report for the league as if we hadn’t made any moves at all.
These “hypotheticals” were usually of dubious vailidity, because every change one team made led to other changes, and in this stew it was hard to figure out what meant what.
Except that in 1998, a year in which I finished fifth, the hypotheticals showed that I would have won the league if I’d fallen asleep (or dropped dead) after the draft and never touched my team again. The numbers showed that I had drafted a perfect team, and then screwed it up pursing a more perfect pitching staff.
I’m not sure there is a lesson you can learn here, except that with every toss of the coin comes different circumstances. And it’s not a good idea to chase wins.