peter

Fantasy baseball advice for those who ask.

Tout Wars – Battle of the So-Called Experts

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Tout Wars – Battle of the Experts

Tout Wars is big this year, in large part because of Sam Walker’s book Fantasyland. Sam’s outsider caricatures of his Tout Wars opponents seemed to ruffle some feathers, but these birds all liked the attention, which is why the draft was held in a conference room at a Times Square hotel, a huge step away from the year we drafted in Steve Moyer’s baseball shrine of a basement in Pennsylvania.
I drafted in the NL section Sunday, along with reps from Creative Sports, Mock Draft Central, Wise Guy Baseball, TQ Stats, Ultimate Fantasy Sports, Roto Junkie, RotoTimes, FantasyGuru, RotoWorld, BaseballHQ, Rotowire, and Fantasybaseball.com.

The only interesting thing that happened, as far as I’m concerned, is that I spent $11 on Colorado minor league DL candidate Ryan Shealy. This was one of those auction moments. I blame the NL. It’s really a sucky league. I kept not bidding on such talents as Jose Cruz and Jacque Jones beyond their projected value because, well, I really didn’t want those guys.

But there is such pervasive mediocrity in the NL that once you get beyond the top couple of stars at each position, it’s a wide sargasso sea of interchangeable pieces, some of whom are bound to pay off—but how can you tell?

You can’t. The teams that went Stars and Scrubs have an advantage, I think.

You can follow the link to see what we did. But back to Shealy. At the moment Shealy was nominated (by me) Lombardo, Zaleski and I had far more money than any of the other teams, and there wasn’t much talent left. I decided that Shealy, even if he only played a few months, was by far the most differentiated and valuable player. So, I went and got him. I was appalled that Lombardo kept raising me, but at that point in the draft it seemed like the time to commit, or end up with money at the end.
I subsequently got all the players I targetted, so from a strategic point of view I did the right thing. But I’m not sure my judgment that Shealy was the guy I wanted/needed was sound.

Auction is a great way to play this game because it opens up all these various pathways to success and failure. I look at the teams and I think the teams that went Stars and Scrubs (notably John Hoyos’s RotoJunkie squad and Jason Pliml’s Mock Draft Central) did best. That’s because the NL is so devoid of talent.

But if Shealy’s shoulder heals and he gets 350 AB in the OF, or if Helton’s back crumbles and he gets plenty of AB at 1B, I’m not surrendering.

(This story is a warning that expert league drafts are good fun to follow, and may give you an idea of what might happen in your league, but the exigencies of the situation are way more important than anything as pedestrian as projected values. Which is how Hector Luna ended up going for $8. But that’s the same story, just a different verse.)

Pro Baseball Newspaper Articles Archive

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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.

Major League Baseball : Rotoman’s Projections

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Major League Baseball

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.

Franz Lidz: Will big leaguers claim ADD so they can take uppers? – Thursday March 9, 2006 3:56PM

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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.

Baseball Prospectus

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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.

Alex Patton’s Notes for Masochists

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Masochism Archives

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.