peter

Fantasy baseball advice for those who ask.

Metsgrrl’s Guide to Citi Field

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Yes, the new home of the New York Mets is more than a year old, and I haven’t been. To see the Mets, that is. I’ve been to the very beautiful ballpark for the Tout Wars drafts this past March, hosted by the NFBC, and I entered the year looking forward to visiting the new ballpark for fun. In otherwords a game. But once baseball season starts we begin work on the football magazine. Spare time goes to the family. Time flies, there is editing to be done. Etc etc you know what I mean.

But now the magazine is on its way to the printer, and longtime Guide and Patton$ contributor Mike Fenger is in town with his baseball loving daughters, and we’re going to the yard.

Metsgrrl (on the right)

So, I started casting around for information and came upon this excellent piece of work. Metsgrrl has guides to other parks and tips for traveling to them. The wider travel site is newish, but you can see the seeds of a similar love for the ballpark experience her work abroad as the metsgrrl blog shows for all things Mets. All highly recommended.

Ps. In my list of favorite ballparks it’s hard to fend off the glories of Fenway and Wrigley (Chicago), and alas I was a dues paying member of the Save Tiger Stadium committee for a while but never got there to see a game (I did once stand outside while the Tigers were out of town, and soaked in its surface glories), but I’d like to make a quick case for Comiskey Park. Beautiful ironwork, old style enclosed ballpark, excellent sausages even in the 80s, and a general feeling of the dusky dark appeal of the morbid baseball fan. I can see why they moved on, but that place was baseball’s Notre Dame.

One other story: I did see a game at the Polo Grounds when I was wee lad of seven. It was a night game, Mets versus Colt 45s, and I remember it similarly had a darkness similarly to Comiskey, except that the game I saw in Chicago was a day game. Those two were baseball parks Edward Gorey might love (though I dare say his game was more badminton than rounders). Lost and mourned, at least by those who got to get there.

Blog Advisory!

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I’ve not been posting here much. I have some plans that are having to wait until this year’s Fantasy Football Guide hits the street (or at least goes to the printers sometime in June).

Who would you like to see on the cover? If you can get past the registration process, please vote in the comments. I’m aiming for Brigitte Bardot. Whaddaya think?

I’ve been commenting too much at thtfantasy.com and crfantasybaseball.com in recent weeks, because I think there are really good reasons to challenge the conventional wisdom, but I have to admit that I’ve been frustrated. But the discussion has been intense, weird, and should be of interest to anyone who plays the game. I regret that Robert and Bill aren’t more assertive. When challenged they withdraw rather than discuss, but I think that aligns with their actual position, as smart guys who have figured out where the rest of us were 15  years ago. The issue for all of us since then is how we move the ball forward. I hope they end up contributing to that talk, but in the meantime you have a lot of really good fantasy heads hashing things out at the cardrunners site.

And I haven’t even gotten into the position scarcity issue in deep leagues. There will be less  here at the askrotoman blog, maybe none (as there is every year) until the mag is closed, but I appreciate your visits, and next up is, finally, as far as I’m concerned, Rotoman’s Guide, which will explain it all. Get ready for that. I need your thinking caps.

Cheers,

Peter

Clint Barmes is Dead to Me.

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I try to draft my fantasy teams based on my state of the art diagnostic mathematics, but as we all know other stuff happens.

In this case, I paid the going rate this  year for Clint Barmes, a player I’ve long hated, because he was the best available dude and he earned $19 last year.  Was that stupid?

Don’t answer that. It appears to have been. Stupid, I mean.

Calculating the nexus between talent, opportunity and foregiveness is complicated, and one of the great joys and/or pains of playing fantasy baseball is the verdict. I wouldn’t mind being wrong about Barmes if he was hitting for me the way he’s hit for all the years he was hitting for someone else!

Well, the joy is getting it right, which is delightful!

So let me be blunt: As we all knew, Barmes isn’t much good, and has now apparently lost his job. And at this point I don’t care if he’s ever any good, except I know he will be as soon as I find some sucker to take him off my hands. Grrr.

Top 200 Fantasy Team Names

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CBSsports hosts more than 100,000 fantasy leagues and have compiled a list of the Top 200 team names, which is heavily studded with references to movie teams (Chico’s Bail Bonds, Kobra Kai) and, disappointingly, real team names (Yankees? Red Sox? I thought we played to make up our own teams.). In the public so-called experts leagues I play in I go under my own name, which is its own kind of boring, but in my home leagues I have made up names:

American Dream League: Bad Kreuznachs, a nod to my ancestral home town across the water and, I guess, either George Thoroughgood or Jim Croce.

Rotoman’s Regulars: Jorge Regulas, a pun off the Regulars league name and nod to the old Moldy Peaches song.

Neither of these names made the Top 200 this year.

More Cardrunners Debate, at THTFantasy.com

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In a previous post I wrote about the Cardrunners League I’m playing on, pitting quants vs. so-called fantasy experts. This has become a rather unwieldy mess, in part because the central issues keep erupting into flashes of debate about whether analysis or intuition matters more. The funny thing is that even when there is too much blather in this pissing match, there are interesting issues that come up about what we know and what we don’t know about the game of fantasy baseball itself.

Now, some THTFantasy writers are weighing in at their own site. Derek Carty is also a Cardrunners League competitor, but I like Derek Ambrosino’s take, which makes many of the points I’ve been trying to make, often with more wit. Derek also quotes a Mike Podhorzer piece about what makes an expert, which is a must read. Paul Singman also talks about the problem of identifying which players and which fantasy strategies actually work, which is certainly a huge issue. How do you decide what works if there’s no definitive way to test it?

For my part, I would love a tool that let me test different strategies in thousands of runs, to see what range of possibilities there really are. But I think the Derek defines the nature of the game in a most instructive way when he compares it to chess (a head to head game) and the stock market (a one against many game with many winners and many losers). Roto is a game of one against many with only one winner, which is different. Setting yourself apart would seem to be essential to win, but how is this done? The quants seems to think incrementally, by buying value. I think the so-called experts see more need for radical action, though it is certainly open to debate whether these are genius picks or zagging while others zig. All in all, a fascinating discussion if you have the time.

2009 Luckiest and Unluckiest Hitters and Pitchers

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Tristan Cockcroft for ESPN.com

I missed this story by the esteemed Tristan Cockcroft in February, and mention it now only because despite his consumer warning at the start (a low BABIP doesn’t necessarily mean that a hitter has been unlucky), and because of his interesting use of Expected BABIP, I have some concerns.

1) Tristan’s Expected BABIP is calculated without regard for a pitcher’s defense or a batter’s speed. No wonder Jarrod Washburn had a low BABIP last year in Seattle (as Tristan points out), he was pitching in front of a dee that turned hits into outs. Sticking with Seattle, isn’t it clear from Ichiro’s career BABIP that his expected BABIP, calculated from the components of his AB, is wrong? In this context, what use is the expected BABIP? Maybe some, but since it tells us less than it promises, it seems a little dangerous.

2) Component stats are useful tools, but they are subject to random variation, too. Just because you’re measuring the type of hit by a batter or a pitcher doesn’t mean that the results will hew to the expected number of hits and outs. A small sample is a small sample, and there will be error. How much and in which direction is impossible to say, which is a good reason not to count on players regressing to the mean based on expected BABIP.

3) But they do. Robert Sikon, at Fantasybaseballtrademarket.com, did some studies looking at 2008 BABIP and determined whether unlucky players improved the next year and lucky players batting averages declined. He reports that 64 percent of unlucky hitters improved the next year, and 90 percent of lucky hitters declined.

4) In 2008, Chris Dutton and Peter Bendix published at the hardballtimes.com an improved version of Expected BABIP. This was improved over Dave Studeman’s original formula, which was a rather simplistic Line Drive Percentage + .120. Dutton and Bendix ran regression analysis on years of data to determine which inputs were relevant and they claim their formula explains 39 percent of the variance in BABIP. They don’t publish the formula in this paper, however, so I don’t know how it has stood up, and can’t personally test it.  They do have a online tool to calculate xBABIP, which Derek Carty wrote about last year, but you have to enter the info by hand.

I think this BABIP work is really important and I’m glad smart people are working on solving it, but it seems worthwhile to point out that all conclusions are somewhat tentative at this point. We’re still working out how much genuine info is found in these data, and how much it will help us improve our projections, for isn’t that its real value?

The Cardrunners Discussion

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A couple of weeks back, I wrote about a new league I’m playing in called Cardrunners, after a poker instructional site that is sponsoring it. The league has a blog and home page, which has turned into a lively discussion about two divergent approaches to the game.

Bill Phipps is a poker player and a financial guy, and he thinks the general level of fantasy play is poor. He believes building a model of projections and valuation can help someone beat others consistently. Bill’s posts at the Cardrunners blog are provocative and confident. League organizer Eric Kesselman is a frequent contributor, too, with a sensibility similar to Bill’s, but without the bluster.

Rotowire’s Chris Liss argues that all the information of projections and valuation are shared by all the players in any competent fantasy league, and that the edge goes to the player who has the imagination to see what next year’s cheat sheet is going to look like this year, and draft accordingly. Chris has a post at Rotosynthesis called Lost in Translation: Why your projections and dollar values won’t save you.

One gets the sense that the Bill and the poker players don’t realize how tramped over this ground already is. Maybe I should send them to the Masochists Notes from Alex Patton’s books of the 80s and early 90s. The Masochists chapter that Alex blames for ending his run as a book author is here. It is about a retrospective draft experiment we set up, among other things.

Tout Wars Results

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I’m going AWOL for a few days, though how would you know it by my frequency here? If you’re interested in the seriously interesting Tout Wars results, you can find roster spreadsheets for AL, NL and Mixed, at toutwars.com.

I say seriously interesting because I think we’ve moved past the point where everyone has the same values. But the disassembling of the old way is hard to pin down. We still clearly all have the same price lists, but the way we value the intangible of risk (in all its colors) is different. And risk is a really hard thing to value. Just ask AIG.