Answers to fantasy baseball questions (and much more) since 1996
peter Tout Wars – Battle of the Experts
Want to know what the so-called experts “paid” in their demo draft? Tout Wars is the best.
That said, $25 samoleans for King Felix is wild. I’m rooting for Steve that it works out, but the odds are strongly against him.
Major League Baseball : Fantasy : Fantasy
Kotchman or Hillenbrand? I surprise myself with the answer. What affect does platooning in the real game affect the fantasy game, and is there a way the fantasy owner can take advantage? Five hurt pitchers coming back, or are they? And some chatter, too.
Pro Baseball Newspaper Articles Archive
The implementation is far from perfect, but if you have a spare 20 or 30 years and strong eyes you’ll find lots to chew on at this site, which claims to have 60,000 articles from baseball’s history. These turn out to be pdfs that on my computer, at least, are readable, but not pleasantly so. If you’re looking for newspaper writing about a particular moment in baseball’s pre-internet history, there’s lots here that as far as I know isn’t available elsewhere.
MLB.com has been running my player projections for the past five years, usually a set at the end of February and an update just before the start of the season. This year they asked for more categories (doubles, caught stealing, among others) and for a set at the end of January, which I delivered. And then nothing. I was scheduled to deliver an update the first week of March, but in all the busy-ness of things didn’t get to it until last week, when I also finally asked my editor what happened to the first set of projections.
It turns out they’re being used in a game. And now for the first time the MLB.com Rotoman projections are posted at mlb.com, along with bid values for 4×4, 5×5, and mixed leagues. There will be an update March 29, for posterity’s (and late drafters’) sake.
My oh my. Very nice.
SI.com – Thursday March 9, 2006 3:56PM
The best line: “Forget about kids using professional ballplayers as role models: Pro ballplayers have started to model themselves after kids.”
We’ve read stories where concert musicians and chess grandmasters have openly admitted to taking ritalin to calm nerves and improve performance. If there is an edge to be gained there will be players ready to grab it.
I was just the other day wondering why Kevin Goldstein had stopped writing the minor league player daily email for Baseball America (and how I noticed because it wasn’t quite so charming), and I didn’t notice until today that he’s been writing for Baseball Prospectus. It turns out he’s going to be writing 4-5 times a week for them. This is disturbing because his stuff is good, but I had pretty much decided not to renew BP (which they tell me expires in two days).
In today’s story he looked back at the Top 30 prospect lists from 2001 in BA and evaluated how many of the 900 included made the bigs and in what capacity. This isn’t a groundbreaking bit of news, but it’s an average of eight, most of the them not regulars. Goldstein, as usual, is judicious in his judgments and fair in his pronouncements.
I’ve been finding BP less than essential, but not worthless. Worth the dough they’re charging (I don’t know what that is)? We’ll see.
A few years ago a regular scanned all of the non player profile pages of Alex Patton’s roto ouvre. They were posted for a time at rototouts.com, but when I let that site lapse I didn’t get them reposted until this week. They’re classic, funny, smart, sometimes exciting and sometimes aggravating. I can’t think of a better place to get into the murky theoretical issues in fantasy baseball, and haul them out into the daylight. Prosit.
CREATiVESPORTS > Baseball Articles > Outside the [Batter’s] Box > Teeners are better than O’fers
I wish he’d applied his findings a little more rigorously to the real world model, and made some effort to list this year’s guys (that team isn’t going average pick 84 this year), but this is a worthwhile strategy to prepare for.
Major League Baseball : Fantasy : Fantasy
The new one is up over at mlb.com, with a perhaps too-lengthy look at league differences, a survey of the big bounceback candidates, an attempt to find this year’s Jon Garland, and a little chatter about Mark Prior.