peter

Fantasy baseball advice for those who ask.

Evil and Boras

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Joe Posnanski

The always excellent Posnanski looks at an incident in the A-Rod book having to do with Scott Boras, and shows how the way our mindsets predispose us to play Boras as the villain, even though author Selena Roberts (maybe inadvertantly) sprinkles the stories with clues that suggest the Mariners were behaving the way Boras claimed they were. That is badly.

At the start of the piece Posnanski says he isn’t commenting on the main aspects of the book because he’s friends with Roberts, and anyway there is plenty of discussion out there, which stirs up a hornet nest in the comments that is interesting in its own right.

And, among other things, there is also a discussion about whether rising ticket prices are the result of higher salaries. One poster suggests, though he admits he can’t prove it, that if all salaries were cut in half, surely ticket prices would be cut, too. Why?

If prices are set by supply (x number of tickets) and demand (how much people are willing to pay), you would have to prove that cutting salaries would either increase the supply of tickets or decrease the demand. I don’t see how either happens.

One factor, if the players make less maybe the owners would make so much that they would be shamed into reducing prices. Except we only know how much the players make. We don’t know how much the owners make, so how can they be shamed?

Crawford v. Papelbon

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I don’t have ESPN and the Sunday late games are blacked out on mlb.tv, so I listened to the end of the Jays-Sox tilt tonight.

Well, I didn’t only listen. I also watched the data flow on mlb’s Gameday app, which shows location and speed and percentage of break and in what direction. I’m not a total believer in ths technology, though the potential is obviously huge. The problem is that the margin of error is great.

In tonight’s climactic Crawford versus Papelbon at bat, two out, men on second on third, the Rays down a run, according to Gameday, Papelbon didn’t throw a strike, but Crawford swung through three  high balls out of the zone.

I’m not saying this didn’t happen, I’m sure it has, but Crawford’s aggressiveness up and out of the zone shown makes me think the zone shown isn’t kosher. I have had the same problem with similar technologies on Fox and ESPN.

The point is, if you show this display but the game doesn’t follow it, all you’ve done is undermine the game. Umpires are far from perfect, but we have to assume they’re doing their best. Data presented as “objective” that doesn’t hew to the common perception is a problem.

Maybe Carl Crawford swung at all those high strikes, I’ll have to go back to the archive to see. If they let me. But until we can have a high standard of confidence in the recent hi-tech tools MLB is selling us, be a little skeptical. It’s what the umpire says, after all, that matters.

Eriq Gardner Looks at Player Raters

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THT Fantasy Focus

My April prices will finally get posted here, later today. They are like a primitive version of a player rater like those found at ESPN, Yahoo, CBS and Rototimes, the kind Eriq Gardner writes about at Hardball Times today. Primitive in the sense that the sophisticated big-media versions calculate their values automatically, plugging the stats into a formula and spitting it forth, while I cut and paste stats into a rather elaborate spreadsheet, make some adjustments because of the number of samples, and then generate a report.

Gardner’s point about what the player raters are actually measuring is a good one. Head to head values are a lot less useful to a classic Rotisserie player than straight 4×4 values. And vice versa. And, it doesn’t need to be repeated, values generated from current stats measure what has happened, not what will happen. But I think Eriq misses the main point with the raters and why they’re of value: they synthesize (or should synthesize) the fantasy categories into one score.

Looking at the stats of two players with different profiles, it can be hard to judge which is more valuable. A player rater that properly reflects the values of your league (or at least lets you know what it is measuring) let’s you assess the aggregated value of a player in all the categories. That Jason Frasor is more valuable than Felix Hernandez thus far tells us something about the teams these guys are on, and it tells us something about their stability in the standings.

The player rater also tells us which players are running ahead of pace, and which are running behind. If we know that Ian Kinsler is currently earning $52, we can judge that he is likely to earn relatively less for his team the rest of the way than he has thus far. If we know that Big Papi is earning $2 right now, we can hope that his contribution is going to increase dramatically the rest of the way (though, if we expected him to earn $20 on the year, and he’s earning $2 now, he needs to earn about $23 each of the remaining five months to get back on par). 

I don’t think you could tell the difference between a set of $20 and $23 stats, unless they were side by side.

Player Raters are overrated and underrated, too, it seems. Like most tools, it depends on what you do with them.

Is it too late to win?

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KFFL – Baseball HQ

There is something weird going on at KFFL. Old stories from BaseballHQ are showing up, which is fine, but with new dates. This story is from 2003, I think, but the data is important. I’m not so sure about the conclusion.

It is good to know when you can count on the overall volatility of the standings to have “setttled.” I’m not sure I wouldn’t have guessed mid May, but I like some evidence.

I’m also sure that the volatility by category indexes, showing that stolen bases and saves change the least, is counterintuitive and correct. Alas, I’m pretty sure that the article’s conclusion, that this means buy steals and saves on draft day and trade for power later, is wrong, for all the reasons the article points out these categories are the most stable.

Still, despite its date of birth, this and probably other baseballHQ goldies are well worth checking out at KFFL.

Catching is the Cruelest Position

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By Peter O’Neil
Fantasy Baseball Canada

What branches grow/Out of this stony rubbish?
— The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot

A lot of fantasy players who made big investments in catchers are hoping that April is indeed the cruelest month, and that things will get better, because it’s certainly been a rough one for owners of studs like the disabled trio of Brian McCann, Joe Mauer and Ryan Doumit.

There’s bad news all around. Owners of Russell Martin, Chris Iannetta, Geovany Soto, Ramon Hernandez, Kelly Shoppach, Kenji Johjima and Chris Snyder all expected more. Martin is sure to bounce back, though perhaps not as much as owners expect, and his zero-for-two record in stolen base attempts appears ominous for a player who derives so much of his fantasy value from steals.

Some of the others, like Iannetta, face playing time questions if their struggles continue.

Matt Wieters owners, meanwhile, will be unimpressed with his strikeout rate so far this April in AAA, a level he was supposed to dominate en route to a call-up many expected would come as early as next week.

For those of us replacing the injured, or demoted, the pickings have been slim and grim:  Brian Scheider was struggling before he got hurt, and veterans like Jason Kendall and Greg Zaun look like they might not be able to make it through the year without facing forced retirement.  Jesus Flores and Rod Barajas have had nice little runs but they’ll come back to earth.

Are there bright spots? Absolutely.  Victor Martinez and Jorge Posada are bouncing back strong from tough years, Benjie Molina remains an RBI machine with remarkable durability considering his body type, and Brandon Inge has been a spectacular reward with owners who had the foresight to be optimistic about what he could do while being settled in a single, non-catching position for a full year.

Yes, it’s early, but first impressions are often powerful, and I’m wondering if this experience will have an impact on next year’s drafts and auctions.

Those of us who have been at this for more than a few years remember when closers went for sky-high prices, sometimes in the first round in drafts.  But in recent years it has become more and more clear that relievers often lose their jobs, or break down, which in turn means that saves can be acquired fairly cheaply. I’ll never forget the year I decided to “punt” saves by waiting until the very end of a draft to take three relievers who were merely candidates to close coming out of spring training. All three, including Eric Gagne, turned out to be 30-plus save closers. I won the category running away, and I’m pretty sure my experience had a deflationary impact on closer prices the next year.

There are experts who already have been urging fantasy players to avoid making big investments on catchers because of the injury risk and the wear-and-tear that impacts players like Martin — even if they don’t end up on the DL. I predict that the once-burned, twice-shy sentiments of owners this year, who are now looking enviously at the gleeful Inge owner in their league, will have a deflationary impact on catchers’ prices  in 2010. For those of you in keeper leagues I would suggest you assemble your team with this in mind.

Sign Says IHOP, but Syrup Says Vermont

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NYTimes.com

Part of remaking our economy is paying for quality. The Vermont iHOP charges .99 to serve Vermont made maple syrup rather than corn syrup. For me, and the writer of this NY Times story, that’s a reasonable price to pay.

What interests me is how paying local farmers a fair amount for their efforts results in a stronger local economy, because farmers are no longer impoverished by working. I don’t think anyone knows how this is going to play out, but I have a hard time not believing that most of us (the workers, on many levels) will benefit from more rational pricing. Eventually.

It May Be Time to Acquire Power

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Derek Carty–THT Fantasy Focus

The Hit Tracker reports that home runs are flying about five feet farther than they were last year and there is little chance this is random, which may mean the ball is juiced. Derek Carty explains how you can turn this into an advantage, maybe.

I’m not sure what to make of The Hit Tracker, Greg Rybarczyk’s trajectory simulator software. It is certainly impressive and I feel comfortable relying on it’s individual stats for the fun business of characterizing blasts, but is it really accurate enough to get granular over an average of five feet per homer? Is it accurate enough to say that the ball is juiced based on the Hit Tracker reports? 

I’m not saying I know it isn’t, but I’m skeptical. Still, it isn’t a bad idea to look at guys who had just barely enough power last year (Jack Cust leads that list, along with Ryan Braun and Mark Reynolds in the AL) and think that they just might benefit. 

Also, to clear up an issue in Carty’s story: If there is m ore hitting in the year, the value of the best pitchers generally goes up. And if there is more pitching, the value of the best hitters usually goes up.