Fantasy Sites

Will Carroll’s Tout Wars Team Unfiltered

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Baseball Prospectus

Will was invited into Tout Wars because he knows baseball and because he’s game and because he talks about stuff all the time, and that matters. I think he’s an exemplar of the information distributor in the post-publishing age, which is why his Post Tout analysis is important. Reaction in the peanut gallery during the draft thought Will was out of his depth, but looking at his team it isn’t hard to see how it could work out. As he and his helpers well know.

It probably won’t, as it won’t for 16 of the 17 in Tout Mixed League. But active engagement in the league is what makes Tout work. I expect Will won’t forget about his team.

Good luck!

Stephen Strasburg 3.5.09

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Minor League Ball.

This is one of a number of videos that Eun Park posted on John Sickel’s site.

After reading about Strasberg, seeing him is something of a let down. He seems to be short arming the ball, which is a way to gain some speed, at great cost to one’s arm. This clip is most interesting when the woman in the row ahead of Eun fluffs up her hair. The juxtaposition of hard working moundsman and sensual hair tossing is poetic.

On the other hand, this clearly wasn’t Strasberg’s best day, so it would be foolish to draw any conclusions. But watching this I wouldn’t give him $15m even if I had it.

Calling Out Will Carroll

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FakeTeams

raygu points out a Will Carroll chat yesterday (and quotes from it), in which Will ranks David Price and Steven Strasburg ahead of Clayton Kershaw. Obviously, what matters most is why you’re ranking them (and that isn’t clear from the excerpt, at least), but it also goes to the role of the expert and our belief in what experts say. 

Those experts who play in the media pool have to come with new stuff all the time, because bold declarative sentences are what work best on radio and television (and in print, too, really). So they always have to be coming up with newest thing, rather than carefully tracking the long arc of the real thing as it’s happening. I’m not sure it matters whether Will has seen Strasburg play, because what we know about him is exciting (he throws harder than anyone ever, except for Sidd Finch and Paul Bunyan)  and makes for a much better story than Clayton Kershaw’s right now (young pitcher is growing into his ability, showing he belongs in the big leagues, but is not dominant and maybe he won’t be, though we wouldn’t be surprised if someday he was). 

Nick Kristoff takes a look at the efficacy of experts in the New York Times today. It’s well worth reading, especially when culling the preseason picks of us so-called experts. It isn’t that Will or Jim Callis or any other baseball expert you care to pillory doesn’t know what he or she is talking about. The problem is that whatever ability we have to forecast what will happen in the future is slight, on any subject, and so (to my mind) the discussion should be a fox-like series of explanations and equivocations. What’s possible, why, and why that might not happen. 

But the world wants answers, because the entertaining bloviating of the hedgehog is seen as much more assured and credible–even though the studies Kristoff cites show they are more often wrong. Even, shockingly, the fox doesn’t know the subject and the hedgehog does.

[Ps. I don’t think Will is by nature a hedgehog. He tries to add nuance to much of what he says. One of the reason he’s been so successful, I think, is because he tells what he knows, and is usually pretty clear about what is conjecture. But in a chat or on TV or the radio, it works best to make the big statement, rather than a bunch of little nuanced ones.)

Target Percentages in Action

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Fantasy Baseball Trade Market

I’ve never seen anyone use this method for draft tracking. The basic idea: Set target goals to finish third in each category. Then rate players on your draft sheet by the percentage of the total you need in each category they provide.

I’m always skeptical of these sorts of strategies, because assuming that everyone knows what they’re doing, the value they pull out of the draft or auction is going to be roughly equivalent. Which means you should not be able to walk away from the draft board with a winning team. The proof of this is that in the example the writer uses seven of his first nine picks on hitters and just barely picks up 50 percent of the totals he needs in Runs, RBI and HR. You have to assume he’s not going to do better than that with his last seven picks.

But in leagues that don’t have much trading, especially, this seems like it would be an effective way to make sure you draft a balanced team.

Are Catchers Brittle?

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Roto Think Tank

It has always been a truism that Catchers get hurt more. I’m not sure this Roto Think Tank story about a Eugene Freed study goes very far to prove anything. But it does suggest that the opposite is true.

More math needs to be done over more seasons to be convincing, but the better argument (I think) is that catchers get hurt in fits and starts. Relying on a costly catcher may increase your risk, but getting real production from a dead position has its own rewards. The strategy changes if you’re trying to win one year, or every year.

Position Battles: White Sox 2B

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FanGraphs Fantasy Baseball

It is rather amazing how much writing about fantasy baseball there is out there. When I see something wrong or awful I try to note it here, but much of it is informative and pedestrian, like this story. It features useful and well-reasoned summaries of the careers of Chris Getz, Jayson Nix and Brent Lillibridge, and comes to the conclusion that Gordon Beckham is best qualified for the job and probably won’t play there this year. It is also dry as toast, which is certainly better than witless humor, but it also reminds me there are only so many hours in the day…

BP NL LABR Team

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 FakeTeams

This is kind of an odd post, since it’s a faketeams.com listing of Clay Davenport’s LABR draft. The big Fantasmagoria issue of Sports Weekly is coming this week, with all the LABR prices, but until then it’s interesting watching the individual teams dribble out.

My only question (and the reason I post this) is why Fake Teams would stop buying catchers at par (no bump up for position scarcity) if they got one?

The beauty of what Clay did here lies in the demonstration of  what happens when you spend you money on Catchers and Corners. It isn’t obvious that this team is a winner, in large part because the pitching needs help every which way, but it isn’t obvious that going to the extreme screwed things up, either.

There are lots of reasons this won’t end the argument. Try small sample size, for one. But it is a mock-draft-like demonstration of the benefits and costs of approaching the game a certain way.

Fantasy Baseball internet radio by Jeff Erickson

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BlogTalkRadio

In about 45 minutes I’ll be on Jeff Erickson’s Fantasy Focus radio show, on blogtalkradio.com. I’ll let you guess what we’re going to talk about. If you get here late, the program is also a podcast, which should live on forever. Classic.

Here’s the show:

We had decided to talk about wonky subjects, which was fine by me. I’m resistent to the whole “who’s your best sleeper” approach to the radio. I have a few elaborations.

In NL and AL only leagues position scarcity gets figured in if you properly price your players using the proper pool. That is, you give everyone their relative price and you find that you only have 10 positive values for catchers, and you need 24/26. You delete all the other players with positive and negative values who aren’t catchers, until the 24/26 catchers are in your pool, and then reallocate the money, making the last catcher worth a buck. Catchers alone don’t get all the benefit of scarcity.

The same holds true in Mixed Leagues, but there are two differences. It’s much harder to draw the line at the bottom, so it’s a little haphazard who makes the draft list and who doesn’t when the catchers are added. And, mixed league prices aren’t linear, so the best players get paid more for being reliable and better than the abundantly replaceable players in the middle and bottom. So the best catchers’ prices go up because they’re the best, period, as well as because they’re catchers. I’m not sure how you would go about quantifying this. I guess aggregated real world results compared to linear prices would get you part way.

As to rules, I don’t have a dog in any rules fight. I think players should play a game that satisfies them and makes them happy. It’s fine if you want to promote dump trading, and it is equally fine to squelch it. I discuss different rules and wrinkles with an eye to solving problems people are having in their leagues, which doesn’t make them happy.

The sleepers I wrote down before the show were Cincinnati’s Ramon Ramirez and the Cardinals’ Joe Mather. You can find more at pattonandco.com.