Battingstanceguy.com takes on a tough one.
peter
Come See Us at Foleys!
Tout Wars preparty this year is open to the public at Foleys Restaurant and Bar in New York City on March 18th. It’s the day after St. Patrick’s Day so there will be no vouching for the bathrooms.
Management has seen fit to release a March 18 Foleys Tout War Party Menu that gives a wink to some Tout Wars veterans and champions. If you’re in town and want to meet some so-called fantasy experts, please drop by.
I went looking for a clip of John Prine’s “They Oughta Name a Drink After You,” but the covers were all unlistenable, and then I found this great clip of Prine and band back in the day. Enjoy.
Brooklyn is in the House!
With his eyes closed!
Painful, Cracking Voice = Sincerity
This is soooo sincere… (tip of the hat to pentavarit)
LABR AL results are out!
A paper in Tucson, I assume a Gannet paper, has posted the LABR AL results.
A quick perusal reveals that Tom Trudeau, from Bloomberg News, appears to have overpaid for nearly every dude on his team. Oh, you can argue a few cases, but my prediction is that this is a last place team, unless the thousands of Saves points saves him.
The Accuracy of Projections–the hitting optimizer
I participated in my first auction last night, the Cardrunners League, and because we’re using CBSsports.com to run the league, you can easily get a chart with the projected stats for each team. I did that and learned that according to the CBS projections my hitting is mediocre (uh-oh, and they’re not as negative on Grady Sizemore as they probably should be) and my pitching is pretty good. Overall, it looks like 75 points or so for my team, which I’ll take.
But then I found on the CBSsports.com site, a story by Al Melchior and a widget that lets you graphically compare the CBSsports projections and the Accuscore projections. The differences are striking, and a good reminder that projections give you a very limited amount of information.
You can find out more about my draft at Patton and Co, in the Kevin Gregg discussion.
The Rotoman’s Regulars Draft
One of the ultimate oddball formats: 20 teams, Mixed, Draft, Yahoo Rules.
I came in third in year one, and have been near or in the basement ever since. I can say that this is one of the smartest groups of players I know. So this list may be of help, if you draft 5×5.
Brawny: Wise Guy Baseball
Gene McCaffrey is one of the sharpest fantasy guys around, because he’s smart and inquisitive and makes use of the latest data while watching the game closely. That’s the secret, of course, numbers and scouting combined.
Gene is a wizard of the Diamond Challenge, a game I’ve never played, though many say it is the best of the fantasy games. But he is also a roto guy, a former Tout Wars champion and a member of the world’s most original experts league, the XFL.
I’m writing this not to polish Gene’s knob, but because I was reading his annual book, Wise Guy Baseball 2011, and came across this nugget:
I don’t recall ever seeing fantasy players ranked as if they were fantasy teams before, and there’s something cool about it. The game is all about making better choices than the next guy, and doesn’t this show that clearly? The 2010 Mock Draft in the Guide went: Pujols, H Ramirez, A Rodriguez, Crawford, Utley, Braun, Kemp, Mauer, Mig Cabrera, Teixeira, Ellsbury, Fielder, D Wright, Upton, Howard. The top 15 in the chart are close enough to show who did best, but I’m thinking there is more when can learn from this simple technique.
You can order Wise Guy Baseball at wiseguybaseball.com or shoot Gene an email at genethem@aol.com
Meet the Seamheads Ballpark Database
Every ballpark, every year, every dimension, every park factor. The new Seamheads Ballpark Database promises to be an invaluable resource.
Marcel vs. the others
Having just finished and released my projections for the Patton $ Online Software product I’m thinking about the accuracy and usefulness of projections more than usual (and I usually think about this subject a lot).
Those of us who make projections want our projections to be the most accurate, but it turns out that measuring a set of projections versus what actually happened is a complicated business. Just how complicated becomes clear if you read the first two parts of Tom Tango’s analysis of five different projection systems from 2007-2010.
But you don’t have to, Tom says you can skip those parts, and you’ll still appreciate the results, which show that CHONE was probably the best projection system in recent years, but that it wasn’t much better than Marcel, which Tango invented as a simple baseline projection that could be measured against more sophisticated systems to evaluate them. If they don’t do better, they aren’t adding value.
The question is how much value any of the systems is adding. The answer depends on what you’re looking for, but the assertion by one of the commenters that accurate projections probably matter most to fantasy players rubs me that raw way. As the survey results show, using projections to value players for your fantasy league isn’t going to get you very far. The margin of error for each projection is far wider than the range of projections from all the various sources.
Different projection systems incorporate different aspects of baseball analysis. My projections use complex regression analysis of previous performance, filtered first by age, and then by my tweaking.
Other systems use other inputs. PECOTA draws on similar player/career arcs to project into the future, for instance, while ZIPS and CHONE incorporate some of the newer stats to establish complex systems of regressing outlying performance to the mean.
I have my doubts how far such empirical formulation will take us toward the grail of accurate projections, the ball hasn’t moved much in recent years despite lots of new data, but all the work is necessary to tease out what real information there is to be found in the numbers. Tango’s report and the many comments that follow it are invaluable for showing what the challenges are, and perhaps eventually suggesting a way forward.