peter

Fantasy baseball advice for those who ask.

Reviewing The Fielding Bible

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The Crucible of Competition — The Hardball Times

I seem to have waded into the Hardball Times and I may never get out.

John Dewan is Bill James’ somewhat more pragmatic partner, and his attempt to harness the great cache of information that Baseball Info Solutions has harnessed the last three years in service of identifying what qualities make a good fielder have to be respected.

Dan Fox, in his review, gets pretty excited about some of the minutia, like whether Alfonso Soriano is better going to his right or left, or on balls in the air or on the ground. It would be so great to have confidence in these numbers, but even with all the safeguards and adjusters in place in TFB, the small samples and differing conditions for all players make it really really really hard to be definitive about objective defensive measures.

But this sytematic approach may teach us something we need to move to the next level. I’m not a naysayer at all. As Dan points out, the data is the thing here. How we massage it and to what ends is going to determine its value. My copy hasn’t come yet. I can’t wait.

Forecasting 2006 — Tom M. Tango and Marcel the Monkey

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The Hardball Times

It has been clear for years that the science of player projection is something of a scam. There is a finite amount of stuff we can know about a player’s performance the next year and a certain amount that is stochastic, random, unknowable. I’ve put the unknowable part at about 25 percent, based on various ways of measuring the accuracy of my expert projections.

This big random component means that the lens of a single season tells us only a little about about a player’s actual abilities. And while we use these small slices to tell us more about the player’s game, as a player ages his game changes. The measures that matter for a 25 year old are different for a 30 year old and different still for a 35 year old. The very smart Tom Tango set out to see how much of the potentially knowable 75 percent he could project using a very raw set of weighted averages building in regressive factors, and writes about it here.

Mastersball Sold!

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FantasyBaseball.com – The Official Website of the Masters of Fantasy Baseball

Jason Grey, Todd Zola, and Rob Leibowitz, the former Masters of Fantasy Baseball, have sold themselves to become the content providers at www.fantasybaseball.com. You have to admire the URL. The Masters have been frequent contributors to the Guide, and one hopes they’ll make tons of money and win even more experts league championships. Best of luck, guys.

The Amazing Fan Graphs

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Baseball Stats, Graphs, Analysis | Fan Graphs

Have a month or two to do nothing but click on links on a website? Visit Fan Graphs. You’ll find stats here, but you’ll also find 70 charts for every player tracking daily and seasonal trends. Most immediately interesting to me were the daily graphs tracking AVG, OBP, SLG, K/9, BB/9, and on and on. Stats are compared to a ML average, so you can visually judge relative improvement or decline. Plus righty/lefty and home/away splits are also graphed. Simply awesome.

Mendoza Baseball

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Mendoza Baseball

A friend tells me that this is a fantastic fantasy format. As best I can tell it’s a GM game. You try to get the best results using the fewest resources. But there is no salary cap (there is a luxury tax, however). Results are computed in team wins and losses based on the Expected Runs (Xr) formula for hitters, derived from 14 measures. The site is very handsome and the basic ideas of the game are sound. My only concern is that the scoring system will make the game play too flat, but if it achieves 50 percent of it’s apparent potential it should be an excellent experience.

Todd Zola on Position Scarcity

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Mixed Nuts – Articles

There has been a bit of discussion about position scarcity recently, as there is every March really. Along the way I remembered this interesting series (there is a part III, which can be found at http://www.mixednutsleague.com/nuthouse3.shtml). Todd is one of the mastersball.com posse.
One of the reasons I remembered it was because it got me thinking about this issue and looking into it further. But more about that later. For now, reading Todd’s story is a good place to start.

Patton $ on Disk

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Software for Player Evaluation and Drafting

Alex Patton has been selling his evaluation, projection and auction software for many years now. It is a very useful tool for pricing and listing players in a variety of league formats, and enables you to tweak projections (endlessly if you want), running what if strategies and honing your draft-day lists.

New this year, you get my projections, updated each Friday through this month, and bid prices. Patton and Rotoman, a pairing perhaps more Cass Elliott and Dave Mason than Eminem and 50 Cent, together again for the first time.