Answers to fantasy baseball questions (and much more) since 1996
Have been posted at Real Time Sports.
What you need to know: Tanaka went for $19. Most expensive starter was Yu Darvish at $28. Scherzer and King Felix were $27.
Jose Abreu went for $24, and Prince Fielder in Texas went for $33. Top hitters were expensive, generally. Pujols went for $29, Manny Machado for $19. Trout was $45, Miggy went for $42.
Dear Rotoman:
Which of these 2 outfielders would you rather have for 2014?
| Â | Average | HR | SB | Runs | RBIs |
| Player A | .284 | 19 | 20 | 97 | 60 |
| Player B | .277 | 21 | 38 | 76 | 67 |
Player A is Shin-Soo Choo. Player B is Carlos Gomez. These statistics are their averages over the past 2 seasons. Gomez has the advantage, perhaps, but if you extend the timeline to four years Choo is clearly superior.
Shouldn’t we value consistency more?
Dear Fantasy Assembly:
As you can see from the above signature, I cheated. You, Fantasy Assembly, didn’t write asking my advice. I happened upon your site today and was interested in your story about consistent players. Hat tip to Ray Flowers, too.
Not because you (and he) are necessarily wrong, but because I think if you frame the question differently (as they slyly do, in fact) you’ll see that you clearly don’t want consistent players.
Here’s why.
Let’s say everybody in your league knew the right price of every player. And let’s say that they price enforced so that every player was bid up to the exact right price. If every owner knew exactly what the player was actually going to, say you were drafting last year’s stats, then every team would pay $260 for $260 talent. You’re looking at a 12-way tie!
Of course, players aren’t predictable. They have good years, bad years, better and worse years. Sometimes it’s luck, good or bad, sometimes it’s injury or distraction. But in our experience some players are more consistent than others.
One guy may earn $24-$26-$27 over a three year period. An average of $26.
Another might earn $38-$15-$24, also an average of $26. Now, if the down year was due to injury, it would be tempting to say this guy is a $26 player, too. Or close.
On draft day, both players are taken for $25. A $1 bargain, their owners think, but what is likely to happen?
Mr. Consistency might lose a couple of dollars or earn a couple of dollars. Not bad, but fairly low impact.
On the other hand, the wildman could earn $15 or he could earn $37 or he could earn $27, depending on which year you land him. That obviously hurts if you catch the bad year, but championships are won with clusters of good years. A midseason look at how the Tout Wars teams who had last year’s biggest breakouts were doing showed that one big win was not enough to drive a team to the top.
So maybe spending par to buy consistent players to shore up your stats isn’t the right way to go. Maybe taking riskier guys, with a bigger swing of potential outcomes, gives you a better chance of winning. Sure, in years where it all goes wrong, you’ll get killed. But in the years when things go right, you’ll have a dominating team.
Now, Fantasy Assembly kind of nods to this way of thinking, when it suggests you buy some consistent players and then make your upside plays in addition. Which may be enough, but I’m just not sure. The logic suggests that if you get fair prices on the erratic guys, they’ll give you a better chance of winning than the consistent guys, who give you a better chance at fourth place.
Of course, one great challenge is figuring out who is truly inconsistent, but with potential (not on his way down).
Tilting wildly,
Rotoman
Dear Rotoman:
Fantasy BB Guide is the only place I’ve seen Teixeira rated higher than Ortiz. The others I’ve looked at have Ortiz higher, by a lot.
Larry Schechter
Dear Larry,
I was kind of surprised when I saw your post at pattonandco.com about Ortiz and Teixeira. I didn’t think my valuations were extreme. In the Guide I have Ortiz at $13 and Teixeira at $15. These are conservative bids on an old guy and a guy coming back from a wrist injury.
I don’t think they’re bids that buy either of them, and that’s okay. (I happen to have a $10 keeper on Ortiz in the American Dream League, so I’m hoping he can duplicate last year’s magic, but I don’t expect him to.)
After reading your post, Larry, I went to Wise Guy Baseball to see how much Gene disagreed with me. He has Ortiz at $15 and Teixeira at $12 (but points out that Ortiz should be expected to miss time this year, and Teixeira’s price will go up if he shows power during spring training), which is not really much different from my take.
But then I picked up the Baseball Forecaster and see what you’re getting at. They have Teixeira at an optimistic but reasonable (if he’s healthy) $17 for the coming year, and Ortiz at $27, which for some reason makes me want to say Kiss my grits!
I mean, as an Ortiz owner I’m hoping against hope that he can do it again. He earned $32 last year, so it isn’t out of the question. But then I think about last year’s auction. Ortiz was coming off a $21 season. going into his age 38 season. He’d averaged $25 a year the preceding three years, and he went for just $10.
Why? Because he’s an old DH, and he looked so seriously overmatched in 2009 that it is hard to put the images of his flailing out of one’s mind. That he hasn’t looked overmatched since counts as a little miracle. That his 2008 and 2009 problems were wrist based and similar to Teixeira’s now is certainly meaningful. But most importantly, David Ortiz is going to be 39 years old this year, and old guys with no defensive value do not decline slowly. They’re here, they produce, and when they stumble and fail to produce they are dragged out into the woods to die a noble death, after which they are eaten by bears.
I think it is possible that Ortiz could earn $27 this year. If he was 31 years old I would expect him to, but he’s far older than that and he’s very vulnerable. What I know is that he cost $10 in a keeper league with inflation in 2013. Bump him a few for his great season, but anybody who bids him up to the high teens is trying to beat back time. Good luck with that.
Now, I may have been overly optimistic on Teixeira. He is expected to recover from surgery and be as fine as a 34 year old coming off wrist surgery could be. Which means that maybe there will be a power problem, which would be a big problem because between the defensive shifts he faces and his demonstrable inability to hit for average, if Teixeira doesn’t have any power he’s a poor first baseman. But he is expected to recover, at some point.
The Yanks are slow rolling him into practices and games, supposedly to help his rehab, not because there are concerns about his health. There’s no way to read that except cautiously. If he was 100 percent he’d be playing. He’s not 100 percent, which doesn’t mean he won’t be ready come April. But it certainly doesn’t mean he will be.
So maybe I should have been more cautious about Teixeira. Maybe Gene got the ratio right. I’ll mess with this as we learn more. But what I’m sure of is that paying Ortiz as if he wasn’t going to be 39 years old this year. as if he didn’t qualify only at DH, is a mistake. Unless you think, because he’s going to be 39 years old in November, he’s a young 39.
Which has me wondering. How high will best-selling author Larry Schechter (see the ad in the sidebar, buy the book Winning Fantasy Baseball) go on the Cookie Monster in Tout AL a mere four weeks from now? He ended up wasting $6 on Teixeira in last year’s auction, but it didn’t hurt him (and was a worthy effort). Is he targeting Ortiz? Or just trying to stir up interest among the gullible?
Designated,
Rotoman
Dear Rotoman:
I appreciate your magazine ..love the experts picks and pans ..strategy ideas…etc. You guys set the bar. I would like to offer an addition to your magazine for ’15. How about a cheat sheet that is perforated that can be torn out to use at drafts? Or at least a centralized location  for rankings and dollar values for easier reference.
Thanks and continued good stuff!
“EZ Tear”
Dear EZ:
Thanks for writing. I got a fair number of requests for a Top 250 or Top 300 cheat sheet last year, enough that I seriously considered adding the feature this year. But after careful consideration I just couldn’t do it. Here’s why:
First off, there is the matter of format. What rules should apply to the list? The Big Prices in the Guide are a buyers guide for only-league Rotisserie players, but they have the virtue of identifying and ranking players for 12 and 15 team roto, and 8 and 12 team ESPN leagues, and 12 and 20 team Yahoo leagues. List players by position and you have a fair rank order.
But each of these leagues would have a somewhat different Top 250 because league depth changes the values of the rare talents at each position relative to the polloi, the easily replaced guys, which will change the ranking order a little, depending on the size of the league.
The categories matter, too, of course. Everybody has different scoring rules. I play in a 12-team AL 4×4 league, a 12-team NL 5×5 league that uses OBP, a 15-team mixed 5×5 league that uses OBP, and a 20 team Yahoo 5×5 league. Each of these leagues would have a different Top 250, even before we factor in the reserve and FAAB rules in each league (which also change values).
And then there is timing. The fact of the matter is that the 2014 Guide closed on December 9th, 2013. The rankings and values in the Guide, as in all the print magazines, are a valiant attempt to keep up with events before they happen. That’s why so much of the Guide is given over to the player profiles, which address each player’s past history and intrinsic talents.
Those life details are the elements that will help us make up our minds about each guy as the spring proceeds. I do my best to make the best values for all players in the Guide, but realistically we all have to know that much is going to change. Ryan Dempster is going to take a year off, Cory Leubke is going to have another TJ. Etc etc.
I use the Guide all through the preseason to remind myself about what we all said about players, to help me fine tune my player evaluations as the news changes a player’s role or team or makes me rethink his skills.
In this context, making a fixed Top 250 in December seems not only quixotic, but misleading. To tell you the truth, as we approach March 1st and the start of the exhibition season, it still doesn’t make much more sense to me, for all those category and format reasons. But enough people have asked that I think I’ve come up with a solution.
When I post the March 6th projections and prices update for owners of the Guide, I’m going to create some sort of one-page position-by-position ranking of players. This will be a one-page updated version of the Draft At A Glance charts in the Guide.
I will still suggest that you use the provided spreadsheet to create your own list of bid prices based on your league’s rules and your own evaluation of players. Isn’t that the fun of the game? But I’m happy to offer up mine at that point, for your entertainment pleasure.
Listing,
Rotoman
Ps. I’m reminded, however, of a day when the lists in the Guide were used in a real draft.
It was a draft Major League Baseball Advanced Media held to launch the MLB network. This was maybe 2000 or so. There were 10 or so experts (I was a columnist at mlb.com) and a few regular guy contest winners, drafting a bar on the Bowery in Manhattan that had deep pod-like booths for weekend night mating reason. I ended up sitting in a booth with Craig Leshen, one of the regular guys. Craig is a nice guy and he knew his stuff, but he also used the Draft at a Glance pages in the Guide throughout the draft to help him choose players.
Because of the need to take breaks throughout the draft, to film segments for the MLB network, it got late and patience started to get short. At some point MLBAM announced that the winner of this draft-and-hold league would win $2000, which got our attention.
Needless to say, perhaps (for why else would I be telling this story), the season started and Craig’s team got out to an enormous lead. One it did not relinquish all season (though it was telling how, over the course of the season, without transactions, the teams that got off to bad starts improved, and the teams that got off to good starts did worse, a prime example of regression to the mean).
For Craig, it was money and glory, just a little of the latter which reflected on the Fantasy Baseball Guide.
This week’s update includes more batting order and pitching role info, a listing of the MLB Top 100 Rookies, updated projections and team assignments, and the ever evolving bid prices of Rotoman and Mike Fenger in 5×5, and Alex Patton in 4×4. Updates will continue through April 3.
Subscribers can update at the secret download page.
For more information about the software, spreadsheet and text files, visit software.askrotoman.com.
Todd Zola and I were members of the alt.rec.fantasy.baseball usenet group back when George Clinton was president. We knew what was coming.
And now, today, umpteen years later, we both published charts linking draft order to auction prices, which seems to be the new orange. Make of it what you will.
I think Todd’s story does a fine job pointing out that using ADP for your mixed draft analysis is not enough. And I’m happy to embrace Todd’s perfectly independently concluded idea that draft value is akin to auction value.
FWIW Todd and I are talking about sharing data and working on some new ideas, too.
Dear Rotoman:
Your values for top players seem low. I am in an AL 4×4 12-team $260 keeper league. Its the keepers that inflate the value of the top players on draft day. Do you have a formula I can apply to your prices that takes into account how many players we are drafting and how many dollars are left (after keepers).
“Inflate Me”
Dear IM:
Yes! You are absolutely right. In a keeper league (4×4 or 5×5 doesn’t matter), where inexpensive players are carried over from one year to the next, you need to adjust the startup prices in the Guide or prices create yourself or you obtain elsewhere to account for these lower priced players.
For example, I allocate $3120 for 168 hitters and 108 pitchers in each 12-team AL and NL league, because that is what is going to be spent.
In your keeper league, however, you may have 50 hitter freezes and 20 pitcher freezes. What you need to figure out is how much money is going to be “saved” by your having these freezes.
To do this, list the players in your league who are going to be frozen. Then compare their keeper prices to the startup league prices from the Guide (or the updates). Total each column.
Let’s say the 70 keepers in your league are going to cost their teams $700 in keeper fees, but my price list says that they’re actually worth $1000. How is that going to affect your league’s prices in the auction?
1. To start we have $3120 in value.
2. In your league (after keepers) you’ll have $3120 minus $700 which equals $2420 in cash for buying the available players.
3. Based on the values in the Guide, this money is chasing $3120 minus $1000 Â in value, which equals $2120 total value in your auction.
4. Figure out an inflation rate by dividing the amount of cash you have by the amount of value ($2420/$2120) which equals 14 percent.
5. This extra money is available to be spent in your auction, which means that a player I gave a price of $35 might actually cost 14 percent more, or $40. (Multiply $35 * 1.14 = $40)
The important thing to recognize here is that teams that don’t take the inflation into account will stop bidding at $35 or $36, thinking they’re going over budget. The savvy player will know that a player’s par price is higher than that (in some leagues, depending on the keeper rules, it can be much much higher).
So, knowing your inflation rate is a big help while tracking your auction, but there are some confounding issues.
The 14 percent inflation is usually not distributed evenly.Â
For one thing, the 14 percent increase in price of a $3 player doesn’t round up to $4, so what rounds down is distributed to more expensive players. This effect is echoed up the line, so that more money is distributed to more expensive players.
But it also makes strategic sense to manually allocate more bid money to more expensive players.
Would you rather pay $4 for a $3 player, or get the edge when budgeting of going to $41 on the player who rounds up to $40. The fact is that you might still get the same cheaper player and the more expensive one if your budget allocates the inflation money to the top group.
In which case the important number is not the 14 percent, but rather the $300 extra you have to pay the available player pool. Go through your list and bump the prices of top players you like the 14 percent, and then distribute the remaining money (which you didn’t give to those players who cost less than $12) to the players you fancy.
This is subjective, of course, so you’re going to want to be careful, but the effect of inflation is somewhat subjective, too. As an aggressive player you should make sure you err going after the players you value more than those you don’t. Your budgeting can help make those choices clearer in advance.
Another reason to allocate the money to more expensive players is because if you don’t spend on them early on, you may end up holding the bag in the end game by either not having spent all your money, or by being compelled to pour too much extra cash into the last available (and now wildly overpriced) talent.
It’s much more effective to spend an extra dollar on three or four expensive guys than to spend $5 on a $1 player at the end. Or leave $4 (or more) on the table, unspent.
The bottom line is that the proper tracking of inflation can give you a huge advantage over owners who either don’t think about it or try to wing it. Knowing whether owners are spending more or less than they should in the early rounds of the auction will help you decide whether to spend now or wait for bargains later.
Coldly,
Rotoman
Dear Rotoman:
Jose Abreu gets hit by a TON of pitches. How much more valuable does that make him in a OBP-instead-of-Avg league?
“Abreuised”
Dear A:
One thing we don’t know is how many pitches Jose Abreu will be hit by in the major leagues. In 2010-11 he was hit 21 times in Cuba, which ranked fourth in the league. Considering he led the league in hitting and slugging and tied for the most homers (with Yoenis Cespedes), fourth doesn’t seem like a lot.
But let’s look at what it means to be hit a lot by major league pitchers. Last year the leader in the category was Shin-Soo Choo, who was plunked 26 times, followed by Starling Marte (24) and  Shane Victorino (18).
But as a percentage of plate appearances Marte led all of baseball last year, getting hit in 4.2 percent. He made a hit in 25.2 percent of his plate appearances and walked in 4.4 percent, so getting hit by a pitch represents one seventh of his on base value.
This compares with the average batting title qualifier, who made a hit in 24.4 percent of his appearances, walked 8.5 percent of the time, and was hit by a pitch 0.8 percent of the time (or about one thirty-third of his on base value).
There are two ways to look at this.
One seventh is 14 percent, a small but measurable part of a player’s value. Let’s say a hitter was worth $20, $4 in each of the five cats. One seventh of $4 would reduce his value in OBP from $4 to $3.42, or $3. His total value would be $19, not $20, which seems small but represents a five percent decline.
The other way is to note that the average player is hit about one percent of the time. Someone who gets hit like Marte is hit about five time more often, so he gets five times more value than players who don’t get hit. For someone like Marte, who doesn’t walk that much, the HBP boosts his OBP up to the average level for a batting title qualifier.
Either way, it matters, but isn’t a game changer.
One final thought about those HBP. In discussing them above, I treated them as if the choice was between a HBP or an out, but clearly some HBP would lead to bases on balls, and some bases on balls for a regular player might become a HBP for a player who crowds the plate or tends to dive in on the delivery. That narrows the difference some, and reduces the expected value of our most prolific guys with a talent for getting hit (not hits).
We don’t know if Juan Abreu is going to be Starling Marte or Shin-Soo Choo. He probably won’t be Mark Trumbo, who had the most at bats with no HBP last year in the major leagues, and he could turn out to be Ron Hunt, who holds the modern record for most HPB in a season. That would be 50 in 1971, which represented 7.8 percent of his plate appearances!
That was 20 percent of his on base value that year. Let’s consider that the ceiling, at least until we get to see Abreu play regularly.
Painfully,
Rotoman
Dear Rotoman:
I’ve been playing in a dynasty league since it started in 2001.
Ed. Note: The writer goes on to describe the league rules, which are very complex and unusual, but the whole thing comes down to one fundamental question:
I’m in win-now mode and my main question is: who should be my No. 1 pick?
I have it down to Maikel Franco — the No. 26 prospect (the 25 ahead of him are all rostered) who also happens to be a 3B (unless they move him across the diamond) who would take over for Miguel Cabrera in 2015 at the hot corner, when Cabrera has only 1B eligibility, or…
Danny Salazar — who posted some obscene numbers last season over a brief 52 innings. Whomever I take, the other player will not be there at the No. 9 overall — my next pick.
Other available players include Khris Davis, Jonathan Villar, Josmil Pinto, Sonny Gray, Corey Kluber, Koji Uehara, Jim Henderson, John Lackey, Joc Pederson, Alex Wood, Arismendy Alcantara, Jose Quintana, Travis Wood, Garin Cecchini.
What say you?
“Classic Question”
Dear Classic,
For me it all comes down to the alternatives. While Salazar probably has a better shot of having a very nice and productive career, on your list of available players the only potentially transformative hitter is Franco. And while he’s hardly a sure thing, count me in the group that is dubious he’s going to put it all together, the Phillies did a great job with Domonic Brown, developing his rough skills. So there’s some reason to hope Franco will reach his potential.
And that’s enough for me to say take him. There is a chance there, while on the pitching side you have a bunch of pitchers who may be as good or nearly as good as Salazar. That gives you a shot at both a pitching and a hitting win you won’t have if you pass Franco by.
Potentially,
Rotoman
POSTSCRIPT: Which would have been the end of it, especially when the writer said that was exactly his opinion, but then he noticed that the Baseball Forecaster projected Danny Salazar to earn $21 this year. Â Could he be, the writer asked, that good?
He could be. Last year Salazar’s fastball averaged 96 mph, and two years after Tommy John surgery he showed good control. In fact, he struck out better than 11 batters per nine in both minor league levels and in the majors, while walking 2.6 per nine in the majors. The only fly in the ointment? He allowed 1.2 homers per nine, not far out of line given the number of fly balls he allowed, but obviously a blemish.
The notable thing about Salazar’s major league run last August and September is that he pitched better, pretty much, than he had in any previous season in the minors. One of the best signs of a pitcher making progress is when he improves his K and BB rates as he faces tougher competition. So it isn’t at all unfair to project Salazar to be just as good next year, based on the skills he’s shown.
On the other hand, how indicative of quality is a short major league season? It’s probably worthwhile looking at other pitchers who put up limited innings (fewer than 75) in their debut season before they turned 25. Since 1973 I found 99 such players. What I wanted to see was how predictive the short season results were for the next season.
I first sorted by WHIP in the short season, then looked at the Top, Middle and Bottom thirds. The results show the classic regression to the mean:
Top: 3.70/1.24 ERA/WHIP Â becomes 4.26/1.34
Middle: 4.62/1.42 becomes 5.00/1.49
Bottom: 5.77/1.67 becomes 4.56/1.41
But another way to look at it is to see how many pitchers in each group put up decent seasons the second year.
Top: 12 of 32
Middle: 1 of 23
Bottom: 2 of 21
As a group the top third didn’t collectively dominate the way they had their debut seasons, but talent definitely persisted and clustered.
Which doesn’t prove that Salazar will persist, but given his heater, his control, his ability to miss bats, he has a good chance to help the Indians this year. And he might even earn that $21. But absent a track record and insight into the way he might adjust once the hitters adjust to him, I think a much more modest bid limit is prudent.
In the Fantasy Guide I gave him a bid price of $8, and thought that was aggressive, but I’m going to bump that to $10. Given all the talk about him this spring, already, that probably isn’t going to get him. But it pushes a little more risk onto the guy who ends up rostering him.
And what I really hope for is the baseballHQ fans to get into a bidding war.
The 15th annual is on its way to stores now. It includes profiles of more than 1,400 players, Picks and Pans or more than 300 players by an awe-inspiring roster of fantasy baseball talent, special profiles of this season’s Top 25 Rookie candidates, an excerpt from Larry Schechter’s new book, an NFBC-rules Mock Draft of top industry professionals, five Strategies of Champions pieces in which winners tell how they did it, and our§ information packed Draft At A Glance pages for each position, filled with tier notes, bid price lists and fast facts about last year’s profits and losses.