peter

Fantasy baseball advice for those who ask.

Who Walks Most?

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BOW copyTout 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):

  • Joey Votto (475/14)
    Adam Dunn (649/41)
    John Jaso (361/10)
    Chris Carter (260/16)
    Dan Uggla (630/19)
    Carlos Santana (609/18)
    Jose Bautista (399/27)
    David Ortiz (383/23)
    Ben Zobrist (668/20)
    Carlos Pena (600/19)
    Bobby Abreu (257/3)
    Alex Avila (434/9)
    Joe Mauer (641/10)
    Todd Helton (283/7)
    Mark Reynolds (538/23)
    Mike Napoli (417/24)
    Jonny Gomes (333/18)
    Edwin Encarnacion (644/42)
    AJ Ellis (505/13)
    Dexter Fowler (530/13)
    Chris Snyder (258/7)
    Miguel Montero (573/15)
    Chipper Jones (448/14)
    Josh Willingham (615/35)
    Chase Headley (699/31)

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:

  • Miguel Olivo (323/12)
    Alexei Ramirez (621/9)
    Pedro Ciriaco (272/2)
    Luis Cruz (296/6)
    Josh Rutledge (291/8)
    Delmon Young (608/18)
    Ichiro Suzuki (663/9)
    Josh Harrison (276/3)
    Willie Bloomquist (338/0)
    Omar Infante (588/12)

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)

Derek Carty is Absolutely Right! Except that he’s wrong.

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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.

parry_riposteNow, 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.

STATLAND is here!

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Screen Shot 2013-02-13 at 1.58.42 PMSince 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.

STATLAND IN EXCEL
Multiposition PDF
2012 Profit-Loss PDF

Statland in Google Docs

Wise Guy Baseball is Here!

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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!

Rewriting the Guide: Chris Carpenter

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When news overtakes the Guide, watch us rewrite.

Screen Shot 2013-02-06 at 5.01.37 PM

BIG PRICE: $0

He made three starts last September, with a 3.71 ERA in 17 innings (1.12 WHIP, 3 BB and 12 K), and based on today’s news they are likely to be the last three starts of his illustrious if injury-riddled career. He is just about certain to miss all of 2013, and given his age it’s hard to see him fighting to come back as a 39 year old. Note to self: Scratch from cheat sheet.

ASK ROTOMAN: Calculating Inflation

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Rotoman,

Years ago The Fantasy Baseball Guide had a section where there was a formula for inflation in keeper leagues. I think maybe the article was from maybe seven to nine years ago? It may have been even 10 years ago. Would it be possible to have that formula again?

Thanks in advance,
Charles

Dear Charles:

To calculate inflation:

Subtract the bid prices of the frozen players from your total league budget. That leaves you with how much money will be available to spend in your auction.

Subtract the projected value of the frozen players from the total league budget. That leaves you with how much talent will be available to spend in your auction.

For instance, in a 12 team league the total budget is $3120. Let’s say the price of all the kept players is $500. Your league will have $2620 to spend.

If the projected value of the frozen players is $1000, your league will be chasing $2120 worth of talent with $2620 of money. Divide the talent into the money and you discover that your inflation rate is 24 percent.

Note that the inflation is usually not distributed evenly in the auction. You should allocate the $500 inflated dollars to players you want (being realistic about what other players might go for and distributing inflation to them, too). The danger is backing off the best players because their price is 24 percent over the “book” value, letting them go at par, and then getting stuck spending your inflated dollars in the endgame so you don’t leave money on the table.

Largely,
Rotoman

How To Make A Million Dollars An Hour

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Rotisserie analyst and pricing pioneer Les Leopold’s last book was about how the derivatives market was like fantasy sports, and how that contributed to the Great Recession. His new book takes a look at hedge funds and how they work. From the publisher:

Top hedge fund managers make more than Oprah, Rupert Murdoch, and A-Rod combined——but they aren’t running news and entertainment empires or playing baseball for the New York Yankees. Aren’t you curious about how these hedge fund dudes make so much doing who knows what? You may even wonder if you can get there, too. After all, this is America!

This book gives you the answers in a twelve-step guide to accumulating vast riches the way hedge fund managers do—by playing trillion-dollar poker with a marked deck.

Les is a clear and entertaining writer who targets the popular audience. I’ll post a review here after I read it.