Answers to fantasy baseball questions (and much more) since 1996
Rotoman ESPN.com – MLB – Injured Ellis won’t play for A’s this season
Frank Menechino is hurt and Esteban German has the offensive chops to get by in the big leagues. He may not have the defensive chops, but especially in light of the analysis here (which all but gives Menechino the job), German is worth trying to sneak onto your team.
Menechino is a favorite, but he’s never really lived up to the hype from his younger days, when he really wasn’t all that young. Or productive.
TOUT WARS: Battle of the Experts
I’ve been remiss in promoting the Tout Wars draft, mostly because my access to my website has been screwed up. The blog has been it.
The Tout Wars drafts are today and tomorrow. There should be live commentary via the Tout Wars site. I’m participating in the NL draft, which starts at 10am tomorrow.
Tout Wars was the first 5×5 so-called experts league, but unlike LABR all the participants are actually involved in the roto industry (whatever that means).
You’ll find 2004 bid prices for pitchers and hitters in an excel file here. These are up to date through this afternoon (2-26-2004).
Major League Baseball : Ask Rotoman
The new one is out. Is Justin Morneau a rookie? Which high-risk high-return outfielder do you want? Does anyone believe in the salary drive? And there ‘s other stuff, too.
Roto Times Sports: Nate Ravitz on LABR
Nate’s comments are right on, generally, until the very end, when he screws the pooch.
If more pitching comes into a league (the AL in this case) the value of top pitchers goes down. Not up. Prices are relative to overall value.
Same with hitting, of course. This year the AL should see a much more gradual curve to prices than in recent years, with a lower high. The best players won’t stand out quite so much. And, of course, the opposite will be true in the NL.
ESPN.com – MLB – MLB Transactions
Some significant cuts today. Some, like Bud Smith, remind me of bozos who called me a moron for suggesting a few years ago that Bud’s future wouldn’t be that bright if he couldn’t stay healthy. I wonder where that bozo is today?
Others aren’t exactly surprising, but merit comment:
Deivi Cruz has dug his own grave. He has a great swing but no concept of the strike zone, which it seems will do him in. If he finds a job somewhere he should make the $3 bid price I gave him in the magazine look good. But I’ve embarrassed myself with him before.
Fernando Tatis had a great year a long time ago. We shouldn’t forget that. Certainly the Expos won’t.
Todd Jones and Mike Williams are veteran arms, the sort that should have had a chance in a sinkhole like Tampa. But wherever they land they will have no apparent fantasy value.
Fred McGriff needs nine homers to reach 500. All reports all winter were there was no spot for him on the TB roster, but they were giving him some exposure as a courtesy. I put him at $5 in the magazine, which was a mistake, but I still think he’s worth an endgame shot. If you have the dough go $2. He’s a pro.
The following came in the mail today from BP after I signed up.
STAT OF THE DAY
Top 5 2004 NL center fielders, by PECOTA projected VORP
Player, Team, VORP
Jim Edmonds, SLN, 34.0
Wily Pena, CIN, 26.7
Andruw Jones, ATL, 26.4
Mike Cameron, NYN, 25.6
Juan Pierre, FLO, 25.5
For more projections, check out the 2004 PECOTA cards:
Okay, so what’s striking is that they have Wily Mo Pena ranked as the second best centerfielder in the National League this year. When it comes to projections this a defining moment. If Pena turns out not to have a major league career, as I think he may not, there can be no justification for this projection. And if he does have a career, and it doesn’t start soon, the projection is also worthless.
I run the risk of turning into the BP police here, the sort of person who monitors the New York Times for inaccuracies, and I promise you that isn’t what I want to do. But I find it amusing that in the BP book they say of Pena’s PECOTA projection: “If Pena hits his PECOTA projections, it would be a shock.”
Nuff said.
Major League Baseball : Mark Prior
This is huge news, and while the Cubs continue to spin it as simple caution, the fact that he’s been nursing his Achilles since last September suggests that there might be more here than we’re being told.
I think he could miss a month and still end up the top-earning pitcher in the NL, so it isn’t time to panic, but even more caution is warranted than was.
I don’t subscribe to Baseball Prospectus for many of the same reasons I don’t subscribe to cable tv. There are only so many hours in the day and paying for constant content that far outstrips my ability to consume it rankles me. With cable my problem is also how much they charge, and that there are commercials. With BP my problem is how often they congratulate themselves for modest achievements.
But today a friend sent me a Will Carroll column (from today) that contain’s Will’s usual excellent listing of current injuries and their prognosises, and also includes an open letter to Jim Palmer, who recently claimed (based on no evidence at all, except the homers he hit) that Brady Anderson used steroids the year he whacked 50.
I wrote about this two weeks ago, pointing out that absent evidence this is scurrilous slander of the lowest most egregious sort because Palmer admits he doesn’t know anything. Today, Will enlist the help of the most valuable Keith Woolner to come up with a list of players whose homer total jumped by more than 25 home runs in one season.
While Brady’s was the second biggest jump in the history of the game, the first biggest was Davey Johnson’s surprise season in 1973, and among other players who show up on the list are Lou Gehrig, Harmon Killebrew, Dick Stuart, Rico Petricelli, Cito Gaston and Bob Cerv. Unlikely juicers, every one.
This is fun stuff. Will’s column is chock full of very useful information. If you have sampled it you know that. If you haven’t and you follow baseball and are just a little bit obsessed by it BP is worth checking out. Just don’t worship these guys as if they were the Christ. And let’s keep an eye out for some industrious soul to really analyze what is happening in all the projections that are out there.
Because apropos my earlier rant this week about the BP projections, Nate Silver can be found on the BP website, on the front page, in a free article (which is basically a sales pitch for the book and stats on the site) about projections, laying out why PECOTA (or really Pecota, since acronyms of five or more letters should be upper and lower) is the best projections system around.
That got me to thinking about things some more, and I have to admit that if PECOTA is a correlation point or two better than other systems consistently then that is genuinely valuable. So, I’m going to shut up about this after this post, until I come up with a way to measure accuracy in a meaningful way. And then we’ll take a look at what’s going on here, there and everywhere.
Major League Baseball : Ask Rotoman Projections
A few people have asked. The above link takes you to the updated hitter projections posted at the end of February at mlb.com.
Check in the Fantasy News folder in the left nav and you’ll find a link to the pitching projections.