peter

Fantasy baseball advice for those who ask.

Patton $ on Disk 2007 March 29 Update is Live

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The Prices are updated

If you’re looking for a cheat sheet with Alex Patton’s and my updated 4×4 prices, as well Mike Fenger’s 5×5 prices, along with my projections, updated through Thursday, at a price, click this link. You also get Alex’s excellent roto evaluation software, though you probably won’t want to tackle learning the software if your auction is this weekend.

Tout Wars – Battle of the Experts

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The draft list

One of the great disappointments of Tout Wars is that we’ve never figured out how to make the live experience work for those with the good sense not to visit a hotel somewhere in the New York area on a day they could be seeing the Allman Brothers in their annual visit to the Beacon Theater.

But the first few rounds of this year’s AL draft as recorded here tell a story that Matt Berry better back up with results. He bought Santana, he bought Halladay, both for relative cheap (because the so-called experts are wimpy when it comes to pitching), but then he interestingly continued to buy star powered players.

He turned a lesson in how experts don’t value pitching enough into a lesson in how you should buy chalk players, and let everyone else scramble. It may have worked out, but we’ll need the resurrection of the Tout Wars software to let us know who Matt is actually jamming with.

What we know now for sure is that (barring catostrophic injury) he won the league by grabbing Santana and Carpenter at those prices. Unless he paid too much for his other guys.

(Tout Wars NL will be taking place Sunday morning, March 25, at 9am, at the Marriott whatever at 6th Ave and 42nd Street. See you there.)

Patton $ on Disk 2007 March 22 Update is Live

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Ask Rotoman News

The newest data is posted for purchasers of the Patton $ on Disk 2007 program. There are also Excel spreadsheets and text files, for those who don’t want to learn a program, but want Alex Patton and Rotoman’s 4×4 bid prices, or Mike Fenger’s excellent 5×5 bid prices.

But don’t buy the program because you want to see Jon Papelbon changed from a starter to a closer. I’ve stubbornly projected Papelbon as a closer (albeit a cheap one) all spring. Sometimes you just know a brain trust is going to come to its senses.

Enth.com

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a baseball stats database and search engine

I received a press release today about enth.com, another database of baseball stats since 1871. The interesting things they’ve got going:

They’ll have daily updates with inseason stats from Stats Inc., and

They have developed a natural language query to get at the data.

Which means you can ask Which player hit the most Home Runs in 2006 and played more than 20 games at shortstop, and get a list of the top 10. The problem right now is if you ask the same question but substitute 2003 in the query you get no answer.

But that’s what beta software is for. Will this prove to be a better approach than those used at baseball-reference.com and baseballmusings.com? I think I’m always going to prefer a forms based system, but I’m not ruling out the possibility. And it’s always great to see smart people giving us a chance to explore new systems.

Good luck, enth.com.

Bleed Cubbie Blue

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Watching Mark Prior

I was tipped to this post by baseballmusings.com. BCB watched Mark Prior pitch in a scrimmage Friday morning, and has many interesting things to say about his condition, his apparent confidence, and his stuff (not as impressive as Jason Marquis’s).

He also posts some pictures of Prior on the mound that make him look wan, to say the least.

This is good stuff, but it doesn’t knock me off my main point about Prior this spring. He’s working his way back. It may take a few weeks, it could take a lot longer. But he doesn’t have to be the same pitcher he was before to win again in the major leagues.

As his price plummets he’s the sort of guy to grab late in the day. This report makes me a little less confident that things are going to work out this year, but despite the good intentions I know that a lot of what looks like one thing in March becomes something different in May. That’s a reason to dog talent, even when it looks this crippled.