peter

Fantasy baseball advice for those who ask.

Murray Chass on WAR

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For much of my long adult life, Murray Chass wrote about baseball for the New York Times, my hometown paper. His old-school ways provoked the enmity of bloggers and sabermetricians and a few years ago the Times chose not to continue to employ him. But thankfully Murray soldiers on, because despite his myopia about the numbers of baseball, he is a fine prose stylist with a well-stocked rolodex of baseball contacts. His voice is of value, even if he’s not au courant.

I’m writing this because of a recent Chass post on his website (at which he writes short articles about things that interest him twice weekly while abjuring blogs) about the relationship between the Hall of Fame Ballot, which was due last Friday, and stats like Wins Above Replacement, which try to objectify a player’s value to his team. You can read Murray Chass’s blog post, er, article here.

I don’t read Murray Chass’s site regularly, and in fact came to this story via Tom Tango’s The Book Blog, where Tom tried to answer some of Murray’s questions about WAR the other day. Interestingly, his post provoked an avalanche of debate at Baseball Think Factory about whether Tom’s tone was inclusive or condescending.

Tom says he was trying to be helpful. Murray says he thought Tom was trying to be helpful. Case closed. But the lengthy discussion reveals lots about the issues. We love baseball because it’s a game played by humans, in all their variety, that excites us because of the skill of the players.

But we also love baseball because it is a game played outdoors in warm weather. Baseball provides spectacle to fan and family member who couldn’t care less alike about the actual game, but enjoys the experience visiting the ballpark provides.

And some of us love baseball because it is a closed statistical system, that allows us to munch and crunch the numbers in many clever ways to discover things that may not be directly related to describing the humans who play the games, but does give us insight into the way the game works.

I think Murray Chass is wrong about bloggers and sabermetricians, but I think bloggers and sabermetricians are wrong about Murray Chass. We need all the voices who know anything at all about baseball contributing if we’re to get our analysis and history right.

A New Year Resolution

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Ask Rotoman will be active this year, at least until the middle of April. That means Rotoman will be answering questions. So please, send away, to askrotoman at gmail.com. (Please fill in the blanks)

In the meantime, I’ll be uploading the Rotoman archives. Mostly the ESPN stuff. You can still find my work at Baseball Prospectus and MLB.com on their sites.

Thanks for visiting. Have a great new year! And visit us at pattonandco.com, too.
Peter

First Pitch Arizona 2010

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I’m back from the best baseball event of the year. That’s where we watch the coming young ballplayers of the Arizona Fall League, with great weather, lots of friends, and endless talk about baseball (and rock and roll for some reason). This year’s big conversations were about Bryce Harper (he just looks like a ballplayer, but he’s awfully young, too, so we’re going to have to be patient) and Brandon Belt (coming off a breakthrough minor league season, he made great contact when he made contact, but I saw some troubles with the curve) and Michael Taylor (big dude) and Jeremy Jefferies (cracked 100 multiple times on the scoreboard gun, and was scoring higher on those of the scouts).
MLB.com’s Mike SIano was there and made a video, inwhich some of us talk about what the event means to us.

Loving Bill James

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David Lederer has done a lot of work indexing the information that is in Bill James’s Baseball Abstracts.

You should read all of David’s summaries of the Abstracts, and you should read all of Bill James, from the Abstracts to after.

I hope you knew that, but if you didn’t, now you do.

David’s summary of Bill James’s last Baseball Abstract is most excellent. A place to start if you don’t know all this stuff, and a place to collect your thoughts if you already do.

BTW, I have probably written about this post multiple times before. Nuff said.

Ps. One of the greatest insights in this piece is Bill James’s notice of how great an influence defense has on pitchers. We’ve all been noticing this the last few years, and major league teams have been acting on this idea, but Bill James pointed it out 22 years ago. Plus, he could write.

Tom Tango’s Forecaster’s Challenge: Final Results

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You can read Tom’s recounting here.

My projections scored in the top half in 2009, but fell off this year, ending up in the lower part of the middle group. I haven’t broken down what happened yet, but reading through the comments and results it seems that using the community playing time forecasts in the future might be a good idea. Many of the leaders are using either the Fangraphs or The Book playing time forecasts, capitalizing on the crowd’s ability to incorporate localized information. This isn’t a luxury we have in February, but as this information becomes available in March, it makes sense to make more use of it.

I’d like to point out that for the second year in a row John Eric Hanson won. Congratulations John!

The Rotoman Teams

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The season is done. Here’s what happened to my teams in capsule form:

American Dream League (AL-keeper): The Bad K were in last place in late May, but I knew this was a better team than that. I traded Adrian Beltre for Felix Hernandez, to shore up what had been a dicey pitching staff. The team roared forward in July and played cat and mouse between fifth and second into September, finishing with 66 points behind Alex Patton’s perfect Sweeney of 74.

Tout Wars (NL): An incredibly frustrating team full of amazing successes (Buster Posey, Tyler Colvin) and agonizing failures (Aramis Ramirez, for example), mired deep in the second division as late as the end of June, had an incredible three week run in July that got it as high as fourth place. Trades for Ryan Dempster and Roy Oswalt helped, but I was never able to crack the BA problem and ended up in fifth place, behind Nate Ravitz, Brian Walton, and a tie between Mike Gianella and the Lenny Melnick/Paul Grecco team.

Cardrunners (AL): I spent much of the year in third place, but here too I wasn’t able to escape the BA yoke from the likes of Aaron Hill and many others, like Justin Smoak, who sucked me in with their power and then left me gasping for hits. This was a 10 team league, which changes the dynamic quite a bit. I ended up in fifth because, take your pick, Jon Rauch lost the closer job, or the first two weeks I had Danny Valencia he didn’t play as I expected, and I threw him back, causing me to hold onto Smoak for even longer, crushing my BA. I acquired Aaron Hill and Ichiro for Nick Markakis and Chone Figgins, and it didn’t help me! In the end, I finished last in BA and SB and slipped to sixth in Saves, but the real killer was Jon Lester’s last start, which cost me an ERA and two WHIP points, which allowed Jason Grey to sneak past me. Depressing for me, happy for Eric Kesselman, the leaguerunner, who parlayed his boundless energy into a big win over Chris Liss and Andrew Wiggins.

XFL (Mixed 15 team keeper)–Slow starts from Hanley Ramirez, Danny Haren and Wandy Rodriguez, made it clear this was a team that might fight for fourth but wasn’t going to win this year. Rather than grasp, as we have in recent years, usually finishing in the Top 4 or so, we decided to rebuild. Many trades later we have some attractive farm players, and Haren, Hanley and a few other core keepers. Meanwhile, Jeff Winick won the league for the third time. Congratulations! The draft is in one month!

Rotoman’s Regulars (Mixed 20 team Yahoo)--Taking Brian Roberts early hurt. A slight reach for Jair Jurrjens sealed the deal. I haven’t figured out how to crawl out of adversity in this oddball format, so despite fine seasons from picks like Drew Stubbs, Delmon Young and Colby Rasmus, and a big season from Miguel Cabrera, I finished in the second division yet again. Kudos to leaguerunner Steve Parsons for his victory over Razzball, who came on strong late but fell short.

Projections are not prices, Part 1

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PROJECTIONS ARE NOT PRICES, Part 1

Winning at playing fantasy baseball has two obvious components:

Player Projections and Player Pricing.

It is, one assumes, most helpful to have the best projections, because they tell us what players are going to do. The best set of projections would give you the best idea of who is going to be good this year, and who is going to be not so good, and this information should give you an edge over someone who doesn’t have such good projections (or no projections at all).

Plus, good projections should lead to better prices. If you know better than anyone else what the players are going to do in the coming year, you should be better able to value a home run, for instance, in the context of all the other home runs hit, and so on and so forth for all the categories. This would give you a better price in each category for each projection and overall more accurate prices for all players.

This is how good projections are thought to lead to winning fantasy teams, but it just isn’t so. At least not when it comes to the conversion of projections into prices to pay at auction. The fact is that accurate projections are a map of regression to the mean. In making accurate projections we average out the highs and lows of a player’s history, in order to better identify his baseline, which is the core description of his true talent.

A perfect illustration of this comes from the projection of at bats. In any given year six to 10 hitters will accumulate more than 700 PA. These are, obviously, guys who have and hold the leadoff position in the lineup, on good teams, all year long. But when one uses regression analysis to look at past history of players with more than 700 PA in a year, the math comes back that that sort of player will have 630 PA in the subsequent year.

What the formula does is look at the, let’s say, 10 hitters with 700 PA each (for a total of 7000 PA), and notes that on average in subsequent years a player in that group will have, on average, 630 PA. Now this could break out in a variety of ways. Nine might have 700 again, and one 0, or 5 might have 700 and five might have 560. The specifics are changeable, but the point is that based on the actual history of baseball players over the past 40 years or so, what we know is that on average each of the top 10 PA guys in one year will have 10 percent fewer at bats the next year.

What we also know, is that most of the leading PA guys in one year will be the leading PA guys the next year, with about 700 or more.

And what we don’t know is which player or group of players is going to fail and bring down the average PA of the group.

So, is a good projection the one that gives each of the 10 players 630 PA, spreading the risk between them?

Or is a good projection one that gives each of the 10 players 700 PA, getting more of them individually right, but making the misses that much more wrong?

The Players Who Weren’t Traded

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I don’t know about you, but I spent the last few days leading up to the interleague trade deadline clicking on the excellent mlbtraderumors.com. And even now that the deadline has past and the smoke (Smoak) has cleared, they’re still relevant and worth checking out.

This post about the players who weren’t traded is full of useful information, but none more so than the list of players who cleared waivers in August last year and changed teams. If you weren’t in the best position to cash in on the semi blue chippers who just changed leagues, have hope. If the past is prelude, there is more yet to come.