Answers to fantasy baseball questions (and much more) since 1996
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:
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
For years we ran this chart in the Fantasy Baseball Guide, but in recent years we’ve added some advertisers and had to cut some content. The multiposition and profit loss charts seemed to be the best suited for transfer to the web.
The spreadsheet includes all players in the 2014 Guide who had 15 or more games played in 2013 at two or more positions in the majors (in the first chart) or the minors (in the second).
How this works in your league will depend on your rules, but it’s a good place to search out players who have more roster flexibility.
How did every hitter and pitcher stand at the end of each month this season? The ups and downs in numbers…
Get the whole spreadsheet here.
Chris Davis’s three month scan: $43, $45, $45. Could he be for real?
Matt Harvey’s scan: $38, $42, $46. Where does it end?
See all the prices here.
Who is earning what in 5×5 roto? To find out please check out the first monthly earnings report of 2013.
These prices add up to draft day prices for the top 168 hitters and top 108 pitchers in each league. Compare expectations to earnings for an idea about which player’s are driving the winning teams in your league, and the failing teams, too.
Chris Liss has a history of trying to calculate historical fantasy prices. He recounts that history in a post at Rotowire that is well worth reading.
His post reminded me of my first post as a short-lived Baseball Prospectus writer back in 1999. I wrote a long impassioned screed hating on ESPN, my former employer, for totally misunderstanding the fantasy game and the informational needs of us players. BP Bowdlerized it, probably for my own good, but frustratingly. They left the results of my data driven look into baseball history intact.
What I did was calculate roto values, in league context, for every year in baseball from 1903. The results are interesting because of the way they demonstrate Stephen Jay Gould’s point about the way that a limited sample increases the relative achievement of the elite. The point, I think, is that in a small league with limited talent, the best players dominate in ways that can’t happen when the game is more universal and talent is more widely distributed.
(The results are far more useful in post WWII era, when the player population has stabilized, gradually. Those year-to-year numbers became the basis of the Magic Grid I started using back then to find comparable seasons in order to assess likeliness of performance (earnings) for different types of players based on their histories.)
What would it be like to play roto in 1915? My values win, hands down. That’s what they calculate. But Chris measures something else that has its own value.
Since the original Fantasy Baseball Guide, in 2000, a section in the back of the book called STATLAND has included Profit and Loss charts and Multiposition Eligibility charts from the preceding year’s play.
This year, when the player profiles were longer than the hole we had to fill them, we decided to move STATLAND online. Here are the charts in a variety of formats.
The Book crowdsourced defensive ratings are here. I’m posting as a place holder, planning to compare the various defensive ratings once the Guide goes to the printer.
One note: Eric Thames rates really badly, which might explain why there was no patience with his slump. Delmon Young is rated really badly, which adds cred to this enterprise.