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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.

New Version of Patton $ on Disk

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Support Ask Rotoman Page

A weekend of bug squishing led to the release of an updated and improved Patton $ on Disk.

The program includes updated projections, bid prices from me and Alex Patton for 4×4 and Mike Fenger for 5×5. It is a great program for sorting lists and pricing players in the traditional 4×4 and 5×5 formats. The ease of updating projections and prices, the auction manager with bid values and all that make it useful for smaller mixed formats, too, but the pricing is not adjustable.

There is also an Excel worksheet with all the data available, and text and Word files will be out tonight.

The price: $25.

Clutch Hitting: Fact or Fiction?

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Clutch Hitting: Fact or Fiction?

This is not a recommendation, but it isn’t a condemnation either. Mr. Dolphin approaches the issue of Clutch Hitting with all his statistical wherewithall intact, and uses his tools to figure out if hitters perform better when the game’s on the line.

He swings and misses in part because, of course, clutch hitting is always in opposition to clutch pitching. If everyone wants to win how do you measure their desire?
His study doesn’t seem to take this into account. Yet he does find what he claims to be a statistically significant difference when hitters face pitchers in “clutch” situations.

Others may better critique Dolphin’s methods, but I find his attempt to take on the sabermetric shibboleth that there “is no such thing as clutch hitting” kind of charming. But I reference it here as a warning. He may well be right, but until he can clarify in English what all his efforts really amount to, I’m not going to pay much attention.

Ps. The author of this study is one of the authors of The Book, which attempts to statistically answer some of the more contentious baseball issues using genuine data and real math. The Book is on its way to my house, and I’ll write about it at some point. I guess my biggest point is that as interesting as technical baseball statistical issues are, if you can’t write about them as anything other than a math problem, you’re probably not going to get a lot of traction.

The Thomas George–Dollar Value Calculator

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Fantasy Baseball – Dollar Value Calculator

With the Rototimes.com dollar value calculator skulking into the site’s pay section, hidden away like the Rotowire price calculator, an old standby moves on. The Thomas George is a venerable roto site with its own free calculator. It allocates percentages to hitters by percentage, which is not right unless you play in a league that auctions position by position, but a quick runthrough found it to be usefully accurate nonetheless. Maybe you can hack the percentages so that they treat all production equally.

Reviewing The Fielding Bible

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The Crucible of Competition — The Hardball Times

I seem to have waded into the Hardball Times and I may never get out.

John Dewan is Bill James’ somewhat more pragmatic partner, and his attempt to harness the great cache of information that Baseball Info Solutions has harnessed the last three years in service of identifying what qualities make a good fielder have to be respected.

Dan Fox, in his review, gets pretty excited about some of the minutia, like whether Alfonso Soriano is better going to his right or left, or on balls in the air or on the ground. It would be so great to have confidence in these numbers, but even with all the safeguards and adjusters in place in TFB, the small samples and differing conditions for all players make it really really really hard to be definitive about objective defensive measures.

But this sytematic approach may teach us something we need to move to the next level. I’m not a naysayer at all. As Dan points out, the data is the thing here. How we massage it and to what ends is going to determine its value. My copy hasn’t come yet. I can’t wait.

Forecasting 2006 — Tom M. Tango and Marcel the Monkey

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The Hardball Times

It has been clear for years that the science of player projection is something of a scam. There is a finite amount of stuff we can know about a player’s performance the next year and a certain amount that is stochastic, random, unknowable. I’ve put the unknowable part at about 25 percent, based on various ways of measuring the accuracy of my expert projections.

This big random component means that the lens of a single season tells us only a little about about a player’s actual abilities. And while we use these small slices to tell us more about the player’s game, as a player ages his game changes. The measures that matter for a 25 year old are different for a 30 year old and different still for a 35 year old. The very smart Tom Tango set out to see how much of the potentially knowable 75 percent he could project using a very raw set of weighted averages building in regressive factors, and writes about it here.

The Amazing Fan Graphs

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Baseball Stats, Graphs, Analysis | Fan Graphs

Have a month or two to do nothing but click on links on a website? Visit Fan Graphs. You’ll find stats here, but you’ll also find 70 charts for every player tracking daily and seasonal trends. Most immediately interesting to me were the daily graphs tracking AVG, OBP, SLG, K/9, BB/9, and on and on. Stats are compared to a ML average, so you can visually judge relative improvement or decline. Plus righty/lefty and home/away splits are also graphed. Simply awesome.

Make your own team stats lists

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Statmaster : A Baseball Team Statistics Tool

Another way to make lists is this bit of webware from Baseball Almanac. As the site points out, every major site has player stat pages organized by teams, but it can be hard to find the particular stat you’re looking for. Statmaster has a long list of available stats, and you click off which ones you want to see. It doesn’t allow you to pull leaguewide lists, which is a shortcoming, but it does offer what could be a faster way to do research than sites where you have to scroll across multiple pages to find the more esoteric numbers. Worth checking out, and it will certainly be bookmarked by some.