Answers to fantasy baseball questions (and much more) since 1996
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And no matter, be sure to watch Willy DeVille’s version of Cadillac Walk. He’s relatively young here.
He’s much older in this version, and still devoted to getting it right.
One of the players my projection and my initial bid price deviated on most was Victor Martinez. VMart was one of the game’s best hitting catchers, but he missed all of 2012 (his age 34 season) with a torn ACL. After earning $26 and $21 the preceding two years before the injury, he would seem to be a $20+ player this year, even while aging. But a closer look made me wary.
Between 1947 and 2000, four players earned 10+ dollars in their 33rd year and then missed all of their 34th year. None of them played again.
In that same time frame, five players earned 10+ dollars in their 32nd year and then missed most of their 33th year. Only one, Danny Tartabull, came back, and he had one $10 season and then retired.
During that same period, four hitters earned $10+ dollars in their 31st year and then missed most of their 32nd year. None of them earned more than $6 the next year, though two did earn $17 in their 34th year.
Obviously these are small samples, but when we widen it to include even hitters who weren’t that good the year before they missed a season, the tendency is clear: Once you’re in your 30s it’s hard to come back.
None of which is to say that VMart can’t come back. He’s swinging a hot bat so far in camp, and is going to be hitting behind Miguel Cabrera and Prince Fielder, which isn’t going to hurt. But while the projection, which doesn’t really figure in the injury, is strong, my sense of where the bargains lay makes me wary. History says he’s not likely to be nearly as good as he was before he missed the entire year, because of rustiness and conditioning and aging issues. I wouldn’t be unhappy with him for $10 at all, but he’s likely to go for more like $17-20. At that level I’ll pass.
Creating my initial Bids and my initial Projections are two discrete processes.
For the Bids I sit with a player’s history of Cost and Earnings, look at his age and any injury information, and try to determine how much I think he’s worth and how much I think everyone else thinks he’ll be worth, since everyone else is who I’ll be bidding against. If I’m way higher than I think the market will be, I’ll shave my bid down so that it will win, but not tower above the competition. And if I’m way lower than I think the market will be, I’ll bump my bid up to just below the market. I want to indicate my predilections, but I’m also trying to describe the market as a whole, so the prices are useful even if you disagree with me.
My projections come in two phases. The first is running a player’s historical data, including a bunch of component parts (batted ball data, mostly), through my projection formula, which also takes into account age and league and home field and league. This gives a rough idea of what players will do but has to be adjusted for playing time, and for changes in roles. After those adjustments the projections run in the Guide, and a similar but more complex set (more categories, mostly, and more time to smooth anomalies) run in the Patton $ software, at first. As spring training progresses I tweak the projections manually, mostly for playing time with veterans, but also to deal with differing situations on teams with platoons and competition and as I get a better sense of new players and their roles.
Once the projections are loaded into the Patton $ software they get priced using Alex’s formula, which is an excellent way to discover what the projection formula is telling me, especially when it differs substantially from the bid price. I’ve been going through the lists, looking at some of the substantial differences, assuming that these are players who might be of special interest this year.
HITTERS (Proj$, PK5)
Mike Trout ($49, $41): The bid predated the reports about Trout’s reporting weight. It assumes he’s not going to be nearly as good as last year, but still plenty good. THe projection is a result of increased playing time, even though he’s projected to not be nearly as good as last year. Verdict: Assuming he can run once the season starts, I would be fine standing by the projection, but I think there’s enough risk of sophomore slump and/or other issues that I wouldn’t bid more than $41.
Albert Pujols ($36, $31): The projection is remembering Albert’s past greatness. Age deductions of significance don’t kick in until the mid 30s. He could be great again, but the trend is clear. Verdict: One reason to bid $31 on Pujols is that he could put up another $36 year. But counting on an aging player to keep running is a mistake. I’ve bumped his projection down a bit, especially the SB.
PITCHERS (Proj$, PK5)
Joaquin Benoit ($15, $1) The bid is wrong. It is the standard bid for a setup guy in 5×5. Especially a guy on a team with a different pitcher named as closer (Bruce Rondon) and at least two other worthy CIW candidates (Al Albuquerque and Phil Coke). But it’s wrong because I’m projecting Benoit to be the closer at some point this year, and to do a good job at it. So, I’m bumping him to $3. That may seem silly, but that’s what he’s worth if Rondon does the job (I doubt it) or one of the other guy ends up the closer. Verdict: Right now Benoit is a closer in waiting. Maybe not even first on line. The reason closers in waiting are valuable is because you don’t pay much for them. So until there’s more smoke, I’m going to keep the bushel on this fire.
Andy Pettitte ($12, $1) He’s 41 years old this year. He only pitched 79 innings last year, and took the year before that off. It’s fine to say last year’s injury was not age related, but not many pitchers stay effective and healthy into their 40s. The projection reflects what he might do if he stays healthy, but the bid is a severe hedge. Verdict: It will be in the $8-$10 range if he emerges from ST in the rotation.
More to come!
The new edition is out, with lots of updates. For more information about the software visit software.askrotoman.com. Some we missed that will be reflected in the next version:
Vicente Padilla is playing in Japan this year.
Dodgers signed RHP Mark Lowe to a minor league contract with an invitation to spring training.
Cubs signed RHP Carlos Villanueva to a two-year, $10 million contract back in January.
Brooks Conrad has reached a contract agreement with the Hanshin Tigers of Nippon Professional Baseball.
Brad Eldred has signed with the Hiroshima Carp of Japan’s Central League.
Cubs signed INF Alberto Gonzalez to a minor league contract?
White Sox signed INF Andy Gonzalez to a minor league contract?
Marlins acquired INF Adeiny Hechavarria from the Blue Jays in a 12-player trade.
Athletics released INF Luke Hughes.
Andruw Jones has finalized a one-year, $3.5 million contract with the Rakuten Eagles of Japan’s Pacific League.
Diamondbacks signed 1B Kila Ka’aihue to a minor league contract.
Brewers signed C Blake Lalli to a minor league contract.
Jose Lopez has agreed to a one-year contract with the Yomiuri Giants of Japan’s Central League.
Wil Myers appears twice on spead sheets
Tsuyoshi Nishioka has officially signed with the Hanshin Tigers of Japan’s Central League.
Diamondbacks avoided arbitration with SS Cliff Pennington by agreeing to a two-year, $5 million contract.
Scott Podsednik Free Agent
Vinny Rottino has agreed to a one-year contract with the Orix Buffaloes of Japan’s Pacific League
Braves claimed OF Jordan Schafer off waivers from the Astros.
Pirates sent INF-OF Drew Sutton outright to Triple-A Indianapolis.
Omar Vizquel said Tuesday that he is planning to retire from baseball at the end of this season.
Jack Wilson has retired from baseball.
Thanks to Russ Tibbett for these.
Chris Liss has a history of trying to calculate historical fantasy prices. He recounts that history in a post at Rotowire that is well worth reading.
His post reminded me of my first post as a short-lived Baseball Prospectus writer back in 1999. I wrote a long impassioned screed hating on ESPN, my former employer, for totally misunderstanding the fantasy game and the informational needs of us players. BP Bowdlerized it, probably for my own good, but frustratingly. They left the results of my data driven look into baseball history intact.
What I did was calculate roto values, in league context, for every year in baseball from 1903. The results are interesting because of the way they demonstrate Stephen Jay Gould’s point about the way that a limited sample increases the relative achievement of the elite. The point, I think, is that in a small league with limited talent, the best players dominate in ways that can’t happen when the game is more universal and talent is more widely distributed.
(The results are far more useful in post WWII era, when the player population has stabilized, gradually. Those year-to-year numbers became the basis of the Magic Grid I started using back then to find comparable seasons in order to assess likeliness of performance (earnings) for different types of players based on their histories.)
What would it be like to play roto in 1915? My values win, hands down. That’s what they calculate. But Chris measures something else that has its own value.
Tout Wars, you may have heard, is moving it’s Mixed Leagues to On Base Percentage this year, rather than that old standby category Batting Average. The reason, as described here, is because OBP measures a player’s ability to draw walks, which is a valuable baseball skill that the traditional fantasy stats undervalue.
Some Tout Warriors are arguing that OBP is a baseball metric that measures better baseball players, but that using it in the fantasy game will break the delicate balance of fantasy baseball’s categorical imperatives. Steve Gardner, in USA Today, summarized: “Dissenters pointed out that eliminating batting average gives far too much weight to sluggers, many of whom have higher than normal walk rates, when those power hitters already get additional credit in runs and RBI for every home run they hit.”
My first response was fear that this was true. That the guys whose value would jump most were already valuable guys. That wasn’t why we’d changed the rule. But the fact is that some players in every strata of the game, from homer hitters to speed merchants, show an ability to walk, while others with those same talents don’t show that ability. The adoption of the OBP rule was intended to value home run hitters who walked more than home run hitters who didn’t walk. It was intended to value stolen base guys who walked more than those who didn’t walk. It was intended to value guys who hit for a high average who walked more than those who hit for high average who didn’t. The bottom line was, walks are a valuable skill that fantasy baseball has valued only peripherally, and as I noted here the other day in the Derek Carty is Absolutely Right post: By giving up an at-bat when taking a walk, a player hurts his fantasy value overall while often improving his real baseball team. Guys who walk get fewer chances to homer, fewer changes to drive in runs, and can even end up with a low batting average while their high on base percentage helps their team win games.
My second response was to see if this claim that the guys who would be helped most actually were the supposedly already-overvalued home run hitters. Here are the top 25 hitters with 250 or more AB with the highest walk rate in 2012. These are the guys whose value would be most improved by using OBP rather than BA (in parens 2012 PA/HR):
There are a few sluggers on that list, many guys who hit home runs, but certainly not only the best home run hitters. Many of these are guys whose baseball creds are mocked by fantasy players, because they don’t hit for big power and have bad batting averages. Why do they even have jobs, the neophyte wonders? Because getting on base is a valued skill. It has real value that fantasy leagues that don’t use OBP aren’t capturing. It’s also a skill that a player like Joey Votto has when his power deserts him because of injury.
So, just for giggles, who are the guys with the lowest walk rate? Who will get hurt most by the change? Let’s go 10 deep:
It’s true, not as many sluggers here. And a lot of marginal offensive talents, or special talents (Ichiro) whose ability to hit for BA while not taking bases on balls should be noted, not applauded, by fantasy players. Welcome OBP!
(illustration adopted from bluejayhunter.com)
Todd Zola ran a Roundtable I participated in over at KFFL this week, about Tout Wars move to on base percentage instead of batting average as a category in the Mixed league this year. The support of the merry knights was fairly strong, which surprised me. We decided to ease into OBP in mixed only because we’d disrupted the AL and NL leagues last year introducing the Swingman.
Now, Derek Carty has laid out an argument against using OBP, at his blog.
I agree with him 110 percent that the object of the fantasy game is not to mimic the real game. The fantasy game is derivative of a real world game, but it has it’s own very distinct rules and strategies and calls on totally different skills to play. For me this is a major point of the thing. When I was young I played baseball on the diamond. If I wanted to keep playing that game I’d play it, or a computer version of it. To my mind the genius of the fantasy game was the establishment of eight categories that collect data about the skills and roles of players, allowing one to create a great or crappy team based on one’s ability to collect the categories efficiently. I begrudge the move to ten cats, we don’t really need more than that, and I have no desire to play with more (though many people do).
As Derek points out, these basic categories are not the ones that best represent a player’s skills. What I want to point out is that these trad cats collect players with a variety of talents into a team that can compete against other teams, ensuring that diversity and scarcity are valued. But that doesn’t mean these cats can’t be improved, and I think the obvious improvement we’ve been waiting for has been adopting OBP instead of BA. There are two reasons for this:
1) Taking a walk is a fundamental skill, and the only ways the original roto categories valued walks was in runs scored (guys on base more score more) and stolen base opportunities. So, walks weren’t nothing, but they weren’t much either. OBP gives real value to hitters whose game involves getting on base more, at the expense of less-talented hitters who don’t take walks.
2) When fantasy leagues use BA as a category, a player who takes a walk can help his major league team and hurt his minor league team. Every BB in standard roto is a miss, a lost chance to get a hit or (usually) drive in a run or hit a home run. In standard fantasy, if you draft a team of guys who walk a lot you’ll lose the at-bats race, and often (though not necessarily) lag in the counting categories. Shouldn’t fantasy value the better hitter more if it can?
I think OBP is an obvious improvement over BA, and maybe the knights of the roundtable did too because many of them have played in the XFL, which adopted OBP 11 seasons ago. The differences aren’t huge, but suddenly the .255 hitter with a .380 OBP becomes the stud he is in real life and it feels right. That’s the way it should be.
Since the original Fantasy Baseball Guide, in 2000, a section in the back of the book called STATLAND has included Profit and Loss charts and Multiposition Eligibility charts from the preceding year’s play.
This year, when the player profiles were longer than the hole we had to fill them, we decided to move STATLAND online. Here are the charts in a variety of formats.
Gene McCaffrey is a fine baseball and fantasy baseball mind, as well as a deft turner of phrases, and a killer rock’n’roll guitarist/songwriter. Plus he’s funny.
He writes about the fantasy game (or rather, games, including salary cap and NFBC format games for big money) in Wise Guy Baseball, his book. He also contributes to the Fantasy Baseball Guide via his Picks and Pans.
WGB is a book of many pleasures involving sabermetrics and good advice. I like to wade in, pick up fact-based bits about players’ skills and tendencies, and learn something. But what puts the fat on the fire is the sly humor: Of Nyjer Morgan (obviously before he left for Japan): The emergence of Carlos Gomez means less playing time. Gone are the days when we could bank on Nyjer leading the NL in caught stealings.”
Ordering info at wiseguybaseball.com. Go now!
I think Jeff Sullivan adds too much verbal frou frou to his excellent gif depiction of Boxberger’s substantially poor year as a defensive player (Small sample size stipulated, actually exploited.) I think.
But as usual he has an excellent thought and knows how to gif it.
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/a-complete-log-of-brad-boxbergers-defensive-chances/