Blogs

Derek Carty is Absolutely Right! Except that he’s wrong.

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Todd Zola ran a Roundtable I participated in over at KFFL this week, about Tout Wars move to on base percentage instead of batting average as a category in the Mixed league this year. The support of the merry knights was fairly strong, which surprised me. We decided to ease into OBP in mixed only because we’d disrupted the AL and NL leagues last year introducing the Swingman.

parry_riposteNow, Derek Carty has laid out an argument against using OBP, at his blog.

I agree with him 110 percent that the object of the fantasy game is not to mimic the real game. The fantasy game is derivative of a real world game, but it has it’s own very distinct rules and strategies and calls on totally different skills to play. For me this is a major point of the thing. When I was young I played baseball on the diamond. If I wanted to keep playing that game I’d play it, or a computer version of it. To my mind the genius of the fantasy game was the establishment of eight categories that collect data about the skills and roles of players, allowing one to create a great or crappy team based on one’s ability to collect the categories efficiently. I begrudge the move to ten cats, we don’t really need more than that, and I have no desire to play with more (though many people do).

As Derek points out, these basic categories are not the ones that best represent a player’s skills. What I want to point out is that these trad cats collect players with a variety of talents into a team that can compete against other teams, ensuring that diversity and scarcity are valued. But that doesn’t mean these cats can’t be improved, and I think the obvious improvement we’ve been waiting for has been adopting OBP instead of BA. There are two reasons for this:

1) Taking a walk is a fundamental skill, and the only ways the original roto categories valued walks was in runs scored (guys on base more score more) and stolen base opportunities. So, walks weren’t nothing, but they weren’t much either. OBP gives real value to hitters whose game involves getting on base more, at the expense of less-talented hitters who don’t take walks.

2) When fantasy leagues use BA as a category, a player who takes a walk can help his major league team and hurt his minor league team. Every BB in standard roto is a miss, a lost chance to get a hit or (usually) drive in a run or hit a home run. In standard fantasy, if you draft a team of guys who walk a lot you’ll lose the at-bats race, and often (though not necessarily) lag in the counting categories. Shouldn’t fantasy value the better hitter more if it can?

I think OBP is an obvious improvement over BA, and maybe the knights of the roundtable did too because many of them have played in the XFL, which adopted OBP 11 seasons ago. The differences aren’t huge, but suddenly the .255 hitter with a .380 OBP becomes the stud he is in real life and it feels right. That’s the way it should be.

Span

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I love Denard Span, out of proportion to his achievements.

Steve Gardner does a great job here of laying out why Span helps the Nats.

I think they made a good move.

Everybody Hates Chris Johnson.

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I just came across this Chuck Klosterman story in Grantland about how fantasy football is changing people’s relations and expectations for players. He concludes the piece with a quote from Bob Dylan, that famous fantasy football player, that simply kills it and is well worth reading the whole thing to get to. (I’m not quoting it here, because that would be cheap.)

But while you’re reading consider that Chuck may not have the changes fantasy sports have wrought exactly right. He says, “What I’m proposing has more to do with how a few grains of personal investment prompt normal people to think about strangers in inaccurate, twisted, robotic ways. It’s about how something fun quietly makes us selfish, and it’s about the downside of turning real people into algebraic chess pieces.”

I don’t think there’s any doubt that a few grains of investment from fantasy players has twisted investors’ thinking in fantasy sports. That happens. If you write about or play fantasy sports you see it all the time, the mocking of a player’s illness (mono!) or his guts (rub some dirt on it!) or delight in his injury (thank god!). But where I think Klosterman misses is in thinking this is a symptom of fantasy sports only, as if a barroom (or stadium) full of Phillies fans might not ride an player for not performing up to snuff, too.

One of the dark secrets of our obsession with sports, all sports not excepting the fantasy version, is the way we as fans invest our time and passion in a player or team and the way that investment can privilege us to strip away the humanity of the players involved and turn them into our entertaining (and sometimes disappointing) pawns.

It can, at times, seem as if the act of putting on a uniform turns the player into some sort of superhero, who is expected to endure the savagery that is heaped upon him in exchange for the veneration and material rewards he receives. This is not a function of the fantasy game, which really takes the original local team relationship and extends it to the entire universe of players in the league. Rather than focusing on our disappointment with our local football team and its players, coaching and management, in fantasy we apply those same emotions to a broader universe of players drawn from across the country, plus we have to confront our own failures of coaching and management layered on top. That’s one horse-sized bitter pill at times to swallow.

Klosterman gets at this in his conclusion, but I think the difference he draws between real fandom and fantasy fandom is without distinction. The danger here is in the competitive gasses sports rooting fracks out of us. In both cases, that’s something we should not be proud of. Instead we might try to root better, though it doesn’t sound like Bob Dylan expects us to.

Fear the Duck!

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Don Drooker goes by the name the Duck, not because he waddles or quacks but because he, um, well, I don’t know. I’ve played with Don in the XFL for ten years now (our 11th draft is coming up in three weeks) and he’s won four times. It turns out that Don waddles and quacks in other leagues, too. He played in three auction leagues this year and won all three. He writes with humor and grace and pride about one of those leagues here.

Reviewing Your Work: Mike’s A Moron Edition

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My friends at Roto Think Tank put out a first-rate website full of servicey advice and strategic insight. RTT’s Mike Gianella has been a contributor to the Fantasy Baseball Guide for a number of years now, and today posted his comments about his Picks and Pans in the 2012 edition. How’d they work? Not so hot, which is why he gets to use the funny title. Though he’s way too hard on himself for Bonifacio and a couple others.

What I love about Picks and Pans is that it’s a blank slate. The experts are encouraged to pick and pan whoever they want, which usually means they meant it when they said it. So you get a somewhat objective view of a group of peoples’ subjective judgments about the upcoming season, before the season. And afterwards we get to see just how easy it is to be wrong.

Bravo to Mike for manning up.

Community Forecasters Wanted

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The Book Blog’s Community Forecasts Survey is under way. If you follow a team closely, contribute your estimate of games played for the entire roster. Pooled estimates have proved to be the most accurate playing time estimates out there, and player projections improve with better playing time predictions.

Vote for RotoRob!

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Voting for the colorfully named Canadian Blog Awards is underway, and our friends over at RotoRob.com are nominated for best sports blog. After carefully visiting and evaluating each of the other nominated blogs I voted for RotoRob.com, even though I’m only secretly Canadian. And you can, too!

The Forecasters Challenge 2011: We have a winner!

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Yes, in this quirky little game that Tom Tango has put together over at the ever enjoyable and challenging insidethebook.com blog, Ask Rotoman won the official Best Projections of 2011 competition, edging out the Consensus picks of all 22 forecasters (as well as beating the 21 other forecasters, as well).

You can read Tom’s post about the competition, which is for the most part his way of trying to demonstrate that the value added of a “projection system” over the weighted averages he uses for his Marcel the Monkey projection are slight. There is another side to that story, but we’ll leave that quarrel for another time.

The bottom line is that projections take many forms, for a variety of distinct purposes, and no one has come close to cracking the rather substantial variance in player performance that can only be attributed to luck (or unluck). I make projections for my own use, because I need to know what’s going into them, and I offer them to customers because they ask for them. I hope that’s because they trust that what I’m putting into them is the best stuff we have to work with. This year it turned out that the Challenge agreed, which is nice.

Congratulations to Consensus, RotoWorld and KFFL, each of which won one of the unofficial contests, and to Consensus and RotoWorld, which finished high atop the z-score derived standing for the four combined contests.

Dan Lozano and Albert Pujols: A Brian Walton Winner.

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Deadspin has published a takeout of “King of Sleaze Mountain” super agent Dan Lozano based on anonymous files it was sent recently. It is no endorsement of Lozano and his behavior over the years to say that this story of a preternaturally adept chameleonic salesmanship and cheesy hooker procurement leaves one feeling a little dirty, because there are only two real issues that seem to have legal legs and a sports implication:

Does Alex Rodriguez own part of Lozano’s business? This is not allowed under the rules of baseball, I gather, for all the obvious ethical reasons you can imagine, but there is some evidence that he does, and Deadspin doesn’t dig beneath the surface of the accusation to find out if that evidence is real or not. And,

Did Lozano push Albert Pujols into an ill-advised contract back in 2004 in order to generate cash flow he needed personally? Again, Deadspin makes the accusation and leaves it at that.

My friend, Cardinals-watching Brian Walton, didn’t leave it at that, and takes a look at the facts of what happened in 2004 with Lozano, the Cards and Pujols at scout.com. You can read his excellent piece at stlcardinals.scout.com.

All we can say to Deadspin is, That wasn’t hard now, was it?

Forecasters Challenge

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Tom Tango runs a neat little competition at The Book blog. He’s just published year’s first results for the three unofficial contests and the official one. My projections were in the top quarter in 2009 and are there again this year.

It’s exciting, even if the takeway is that our Consensus picks are better than any individual forecaster’s.