Answers to fantasy baseball questions (and much more) since 1996
Sal Baxamusa — The Hardball Times
Sal looks at the way the Marcel the Monkey projections change based on a ballplayers’ (in this case Torii Hunter and Andruw Jones) recent hot and cold streaks. His charts do a particularly good job of showing how short-term changes shape our overall picture of a player’s skills and future value.
His conclusion is pretty dull, considering how much fun the charts are (if you like charts), but that’s probably right, too.
Would anyone like to see more of these?
A huge site that could use an editor, that makes all the cases that steroids are not the menace they’re painted to be. If you have an interest in the topic you will be challenged and informed by Walker’s arguments. I’m not sure he demolishes the notion that PEDs can improve baseball performance, though he seems to think he has, and I think the argument that they’re relatively safe is relatively disingenuous.
Which simply means there is more work and arguing and convincing to be done. But this is a fairly rational and exhaustive look, with evidence, at the issue without the hysteria, and well worth checking out no matter which side of the debate you find yourself on.
My friend Steve Hubbell and his host, John Patterson, debated on January 18th whether a Santana trade would be good for the Mets, or a disasterous miscalculation. The die is now cast, apparently, and the Mets made a slightly better deal than Patterson anticipated (Gomez not Martinez). I suspect this debate will have entertainment value for years to come. Nice job, guys.
The Baseball Analysts: Rich Lederer
The official numbers are out and Rich Lederer does us the favor of plotting the team salaries and games won on a chart, along with a sensible discussion of the implications. I’m assuming that revenue sharing numbers aren’t included, which would skew the chart in interesting ways. The Yankees would spend more per win. The Marlins would make more money per loss. But that’s not what’s at play here.
Click the link and find out how your team did converting dollars to wins.
On the other hand, the final numbers show that player salaries were less than 45 percent of total baseball revenues, a drop of nearly 10 percent since 1994’s cancelled post season, which was in large part a fight over a salary cap at something like 50 percent of revenues.
I’ve known Lenny Melnick a long time and he’s a good fantasy player. He’s got a website now devoted to using his smooth voice for unsparing but congenial fantasy baseball analysis. Yes, he makes podcasts.
Regular readers may know that I don’t think there’s time enough in the world for podcasts, but this week I participated in a so-called experts mock draft at mockdraftcentral.com (thanks Jason and Geoff), and Lenny and Paul Greco (of fantasybaseballguy.com) covered it live (and did a nice job). You can find the link to that mammoth production at Paul’s site.
In the link above Lenny breaks down the draft, team by team, and while there is plenty to quibble with in terms of judgments, the process does show what goes into making a good fantasy draft and team. Those are the same analyses that those who participate in lots of mocks when getting ready for the season tell me they go through.
If only there were more time.
A nice trend chart from the Baseball Crank shows that the longer you stay on the ballot the more writers support you for the Hall, though I can’t think of a good reason why that should be. I don’t take the Hall seriously enough to worry about the borderline cases. They make it or they don’t, and that’s fine.
I do find it hard to see why Tim Raines or Mark McGwire look like they should be in, if only there wasn’t the cocaine and the steroids. Based on the numbers both were very good ballplayers who were at best borderline when it comes to induction numbers. Given their questionable pasts the voters’ reluctance to enshrine them doesn’t seem that crazy.
Over three seasons the White Sox were better (they won more games, many more games) with Scott Podsednik in the lineup than not, even though Podsednik’s replacements generally played better. Sox Machine may have discovered this paradox, and attempts to explain it. His conclusions aren’t flabbergasting but his approach hints at baseball’s majesty.
Amazing. And they didn’t pay the extra couple of bucks to cloak the registrant’s identity.
I’m eternally dubious of enterprises like Yardbarker, simply because when I get there I can’t figure out what it is I want. But reading Dontrelle’s take on the trade, well, Nuthing Compares 2 It.
And I think there’s no doubt that Dontrelle wrote his stuff (no PR guy wrote it, though it was probably vetted), which changes the whole idea of news. Which, I think, is a good thing.
I say that as if news wasn’t already a version of PR.
Good stuff, Dontrelle, keep it up.
This somewhat rambling analysis of how to stock your pitching staff (if you’re a major league GM) strikes me as very smart. Don’t pay a lot because you need a lot. Pay a little because if you take enough small chances you can find a lot in the pool.
I think we need some real studies of what happens (namely, where the good pitchers on good teams came from) to buy into this fully, but given Rany’s survey of drafts it makes total sense to me that the best investment is in hitters.
And certainly major league teams are going this way now.