Answers to fantasy baseball questions (and much more) since 1996
peter Major League Baseball : Fantasy : Fantasy
The new one is up over at mlb.com, with a perhaps too-lengthy look at league differences, a survey of the big bounceback candidates, an attempt to find this year’s Jon Garland, and a little chatter about Mark Prior.
I love it. A completely different perspective on the nature of the game of baseball. I’ve long thought that basketball might become a much better game if they dumped the transition and the game became a series of set plays launched from scrimmage, like football. No tackling, though, I don’t think. Stevenson’s thought experiment recasts the nature of the baseball schedule, and suggests how it might change our perceptions of the role of luck and small differences. Good stuff.
Dubois makes bid with a better bat
He’s not a great baseball player, but he’s lurking out there with a trail of disappointments behind him. For a buck, or on reserve, or as a claim when someone gets hurt, if he gets a shot at some point he’s going to get hot. He seems to suggest in this story that his problem is performance anxiety, and now that he’s failed so miserably he’s going to relax and let his talent loose. Maybe. Call him a sleeper.
Lots of information here about contracts and salaries, set up in such a way that you can scan a team’s coming obligations. I get lots of calls for lists of upcoming free agents. This site will let you find your own.
Searching for baseball’s Bigfoot – MLB – Yahoo! Sports
Twice in one day? This guy Jeff Passan seems to be all over the place, and this story about the gyroball is good fun. An excellent job on a piece of fluff.
A weekend of bug squishing led to the release of an updated and improved Patton $ on Disk.
The program includes updated projections, bid prices from me and Alex Patton for 4×4 and Mike Fenger for 5×5. It is a great program for sorting lists and pricing players in the traditional 4×4 and 5×5 formats. The ease of updating projections and prices, the auction manager with bid values and all that make it useful for smaller mixed formats, too, but the pricing is not adjustable.
There is also an Excel worksheet with all the data available, and text and Word files will be out tonight.
The price: $25.
Red, white and typical – MLB – Yahoo! Sports
This guy wrote a ridiculous call for Roger Clemens to save the world some pain and to retire already the other day, so I expected to hate him the way I regularly loathe Yahoo!’s Larry Biel. But this story about yesterday’s disquieting events in the Japan-USA tilt seems about right.
Clutch Hitting: Fact or Fiction?
This is not a recommendation, but it isn’t a condemnation either. Mr. Dolphin approaches the issue of Clutch Hitting with all his statistical wherewithall intact, and uses his tools to figure out if hitters perform better when the game’s on the line.
He swings and misses in part because, of course, clutch hitting is always in opposition to clutch pitching. If everyone wants to win how do you measure their desire?
His study doesn’t seem to take this into account. Yet he does find what he claims to be a statistically significant difference when hitters face pitchers in “clutch” situations.
Others may better critique Dolphin’s methods, but I find his attempt to take on the sabermetric shibboleth that there “is no such thing as clutch hitting” kind of charming. But I reference it here as a warning. He may well be right, but until he can clarify in English what all his efforts really amount to, I’m not going to pay much attention.
Ps. The author of this study is one of the authors of The Book, which attempts to statistically answer some of the more contentious baseball issues using genuine data and real math. The Book is on its way to my house, and I’ll write about it at some point. I guess my biggest point is that as interesting as technical baseball statistical issues are, if you can’t write about them as anything other than a math problem, you’re probably not going to get a lot of traction.
This site books bets on public issues with a long time frame. Today the lead bet is whether there will be bioterror event of 1M or more casualties by 2020. At first I thought this might be a good place to set up a discussion about Barry Bonds’ Hall of Fame chances, but I suspect that wouldn’t pass the importance threshhold. So I link to the site simply because it’s out there.
Fantasy Baseball – Dollar Value Calculator
With the Rototimes.com dollar value calculator skulking into the site’s pay section, hidden away like the Rotowire price calculator, an old standby moves on. The Thomas George is a venerable roto site with its own free calculator. It allocates percentages to hitters by percentage, which is not right unless you play in a league that auctions position by position, but a quick runthrough found it to be usefully accurate nonetheless. Maybe you can hack the percentages so that they treat all production equally.