peter

Fantasy baseball advice for those who ask.

Is Nate Silver Funnier Than Steven Colbert?

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I’ve always thought that the virtue, if you want to call it that, of baseball prospectus’s PECOTA was a marketing angle. By defining confidence intervals it inverts the projection process. The projection is assumed right, and it is the player’s peformance that deviates. I met Nate a few years ago at a dinner and I was surprised by how much I liked him. We rode to Brooklyn together on the subway afterward and, while I wasn’t surprised by how much he knew about baseball projection, I was impressed by how open he was to other ideas.

Nate’s new venture is a website tracking and adjusting public opinion polls about this upcoming election we’re having. It’s called fivethirtyeight.com and it’s full of interesting facts, opinions ideas, and though avowedly nonpartisan, they’ve got Obama with a 90 percent chance of winning the election. That sounds good to me.

Nate was just on the Colbert Report and he’s really funny.

But probably not as funny as  Colbert, at least not for the long run.

Ask Rotoman :: The Season is Done

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Ask Rotoman :: My drafting is done.

The link is to my preseason post auction look at my American Dream League team. Rereading it now I have to say that if you’d told me that Josh Hamilton would be great, that Gavin Floyd would be very good and that Edwin Jackson wouldn’t suck, that Justin Duchscherer would almost lead the league in ERA, that K-Rod would set a saves record, that Joe Mauer would lead the AL in batting average, that Milton Bradley would lead the AL in OBP, I would have been very happy.

If you’d told me that I was able to trade Richie Sexson for Asdrubal Cabrera (who was awfully good from mid-August on), that I’d be able to trade both my closers for a hitter and a pitcher (though neither was great) and still finish tied for third in saves, that Glen Perkins came off my reserve list and did a very creditable job until mid-September, I’d have been ecstatic.

How did I finish 8th? Two black holes: I spent $28 on Travis Hafner and he earned -$4. I spent $33 on Justin Verlander and he earned -$4, too. That’s -$67 I needed to make up just to get to even, from my two most expensive players.

Josh Hamilton earned a profit of $18. Duchscherer earned a profit of $12. Gavin Floyd earned a profit of $15. Francisco Rodriguez earned a proft of $22. That gets us to $67. It took my four best buys to wipe out the misery of my two worst buys.

After that things reverse. Milton Bradley earned a profit of $18. Joe Mauer earned a profit of $6. Torii Hunter earned a profit of $7. Okay, up $31. But… Juan Uribe lost $8, Brad Wilkerson lost $11, Reggie Willets lost $8, and some costly pitching stints from Andy Pettitte, Livan Hernandez and Jason Jennings wiped out the rest.

In a winning season not all the pieces click, but you just can’t have your best picks be offset by disasters. In this case I blame my opponents, who drove up the price of power hitting to such a level that I had almost no choice but to spend ridiculously on Hafner, though he came with risk. I can only blame myself for Verlander. He looked like the best available starter to me then, and he still does now. But clearly I was wrong.

The irony was that in 2007 I picked the right stud pitcher in this league, Johan Santana, and the wrong cheap guys, Cliff Lee and John Danks, who this year earned $40 and $16 respectively.

(For the record, ADL was won by Steven Levy, who had good freezes but then made great choices all draft long. Others in the money, in order, were Alex Patton/Bruce Berensmann, Michael Walsh and Walter Shapiro.)

In the other leagues:

Tout Wars was a disaster. An impressive run of injuries early, some savvy rejiggering in the middle kept me in the middle, but the pitching staff fell apart in August and September. The bad finish is in part a tribute to a Go for it trade in June that didn’t work out all the way, but this was a doomed season healthwise for this team. (First place went to Mike Lombardo for the third time in four years. He’s a great player. Second went to Glenn Colton.)

Rotoman’s Regulars is a format (20 team Yahoo) that bewilders me. I finished third three years ago but the last two years have been a disaster, mostly because I don’t know how to churn good guys off my roster to pick up guys who are playing better. Some of this is about attention, some of it is about temperment. Some of it is about a bad draft (did I really take Andruw Jones and Kelvim Escobar?) I think for 2009 I will be hosting the league, maybe I’ll even be the commish, but I’m not going to play in it again. Too painful, but a great game and an excellent format. (The winner was frequent Guide contributor JD Bolick. Runner up was Eun Park, who won the league in its first year.)

XFL is a 15 team mixed league with an auction in November and a 17 round reserve draft in March. We were in a rebuilding year (it’s a keeper league) but I had an awesome auction and not a bad draft, and we finished fourth. My partner, Alex, thought this was a bottom of the standings team, but he didn’t see the blooming of Youkilis and Jose Lopez and the continued excellence of Bobby Abreu and Randy Winn (this league uses OBP rather than BA). (Steve Moyer finished first, going away, with Doug Dennis and Trace Wood somewhat behind after swapping places daily until a week ago.)

All in all a dismal season for me. Not the other guys.

For those who’ve asked, I’m working very hard on a video about butterflies that will be done very soon. Work on the magazine is underway. There will eventually be real content on this page again. This year, with no weekly gig, I spent less time writing and way more time managing my teams, which I thought would be good. Fail! We’ll see how it works out next year.

Thanks for reading.

Yost addresses dismissal on Tuesday

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MLB.com: News

Yost plays the fool a bit and–as ably pointed out by Joe Sheehan yesterday–isn’t a tactical genius, but in this story he shows his passion and his belief in himself, and it’s hard not to feel bad for him not being allowed to finish the job, one way or the other. In the absence of scandal it’s hard to see the fairness of the firing, the team did rock in August, but looking at a team that responeded in May when challenged (another time Yost seemed likely to lose his job) it’s hard not to see Doug Melvin’s rationale for putting the spurs to them now, when it might do some good.

Still, one of the problems with baseball analysis is that we don’t really know what works or doesn’t work. Yost, in this story, talks about the self examination he’ll be doing since his teams crumbled two years in a row in September. It’s worth looking at, but just because it happened two years in a row doesn’t prove it’s a trend. It might be. Or might not.

It’s difficult to imagine being in Dale Sveum’s position. With a rebound comes glory, and with continued decline comes frustration. The hitters have been sucking wind the last two weeks, but it seems like the pitching that’s falling apart. And isn’t that the place teams usually fail?

If Ned Yost messed up the pitching staff, it’s too late to fix it.

Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

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Tom Gjelten’s Website

Cover of Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba
Cover of Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba
This isn’t a post about Cuban baseball, though that’s an apt subject. As some of you know, one of my gigs is making websites for good books. You can see other book sites we’ve done at Booknoise.

I bring this up now because Tom’s site has been done and for some reason there has been a problem with Google indexing it. The initial issue had to do with the cloaking/forwarding service his registrar put on, and then it’s been slow going getting it into the system. It’s in there now, and I’m hoping to give it a little boost with a plug here and there. Tom is an NPR correspondent, so he has scores of stories and pages devoted to him the WWW already, something we have to overcome.

Plus, you might like the book, even if it’s about rum and politics rather than baseball.

And if you’re looking for some popular history to read, I can’t make a better recommendation, unless it’s John Capouya’s Gorgeous George.

Span’s the Man

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SportingNews.com – David Pinto

File this one under weird math, unless I’m missing something. David Pinto looks at Denard Span’s PECOTA projections for OBP and sees a man far outperforming expectations at the major league. Is this a sign that Span will regress?

Pinto then looks at Span’s Triple-A numbers earlier this season and sees that they match what he’s doing at the major league level, suggesting he’s taken a great leap forward. So far, so good. This is the essence of player projection, at least the verbal kind where we identify interruptions in the data.

But he then does some math showing that there is virtually no chance that PECOTA’s evaluation is correct, based on Span’s breakout numbers this year. I’m inclined to accept the verbal argument that Span has improved his approach at the plate and so is getting on base more, but have a hard time accepting as proof this year’s sample.

That’s why we compare small sample sizes to larger ones, as a reality check. And when the small sample is out of line with the bigger one, we should be very skeptical.

Notably, this year, Span is walking more than he has in the past, in Triple-A and the bigs, but he’s also getting on base much more on balls in play, and a significant part of his OBP is due to his BA. It looks to me that at the end of the day (and not necessarily this season) he should end up a .360 OBP hitter. His .399 OBP now is as much the result of good fortune as improvements in his game (though it looks like there are some of those, too).

“Hand-made Trophies Worth Bragging About”

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FantasyTrophies.com | “Hand-made Trophies Worth Bragging About”

Awesome Fantasy Football Trophy

The trophy we have in the American Dream League is your standard high school sports varsity participation trophy, except the golden posed player on top has been replaced by a 1940s era dial up phone. Similarly electroplated. It is an awesome thing, unique in every sense of the world, and fragile. One year the preceding year’s winner (winners keep the trophy until a new champion is crowned) delivered the trophy in a bag. Somehow the screws and bolts came undone and he just wasn’t handy enough to fix it. He hasn’t won since, though he’s in the lead this year (by a lot).

Trophies mean something, and these clever and handsome items are the work of a friend of a friend in my home town of Brooklyn, NY. The Throwback, picture above, made me laugh out loud when I saw it, which makes it a fit prize for the fantasy winner in your league this year. And it doesn’t look like it has any screws or bolts.

Joe Sheehan on a Righteous Three-way Deal

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Baseball Prospectus (free)

Maybe it would be better if the lives of trees were at stake (he goes on a little) but this is an excellent analysis of the Sox-Bucs-Dodgers deal yesterday. Maybe it’s that there’s nothing mind-blowingly original (Epstein good, Coletti bad), but every point is made clearly and in a larger context. Maybe it’s that he ends on a somewhat confessional insidery note. This is a solid piece of work worth reading.

All about the little people

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Sam Walker at Sportsline.com

Sam Walker wrote a very good book about fantasy baseball called Fantasy Land, which covered his first year in Tout Wars, which was also his first year playing fantasy baseball. As a Wall Street Journal reporter and with the estimable Nando del Fino as a partner, Sam finished in the middle of the pack his first year, but won Tout his second year.

He’s got a big lead this year, as filmmakers are using Tout AL and another newcomer to make a movie of Sam’s book. In this column at Sportsline he explains what he did to make that lead happen. Names like Duchscherer, Hamilton, and Ervin Santana go part of the way, but Sam thinks he did some smart things, too.

Yes, he did.

The art of making a Rotisserie deal

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Mike Pianowski

Let me again recommend an excellent but hard to find Tout Wars essay, this time from the hyper competetive Mike Pianowski. I don’t personally believe him that he’s writing this story for himself, personally, but I think that that only amplifies the content. And I’m pretty sure Mike knows that, too.