Fantasy Sites

Rotisserie Concepts Done Right!

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Roto Think Tank

Mike Gianella knows a lot about rotisserie baseball and the way it should be played. He’s kind of like one of those old timey coaches, with a chaw in his jaw, a calculator in his pocket, and the good sense not to contradict either. I’ve written about Roto Think Tank before, but reading some recent posts today reminds me about just how sensible Mike is.

He doesn’t think much of position scarcity, but when he’s allocating bid prices he tends to favor the catchers and shortstops of similar value, since they’re harder to replace. That sort of thing.

I wouldn’t say that Mike is breaking much new ground, but in a world where the old ground is continually being ploughed under, there is a great virtue to clear writing and solid ideas, well explicated. (Note: Mike writes for The Fantasy Guide, too.)

The Fantasy Baseball Price Guide —

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Last Player Picked

Mays Copeland has made a player rater. He has explained how he derives the values of the rater, and how he prices those values. He’s made some software that makes it easy to customize those ratings and prices for your league. He has also, most impressively, created an interface that allows the user to use a variety of projection systems (Marcel, CHONE, ZIPS, others I’m forgetting, and even a composite of them all) to create a list for their league’s format. 

The problem? The smell test. I ran the numbers for my Tout Wars NL league and the answers stunk. JJ Putz was named the fourth most valuable closer in the NL, by virtue of his 19 saves (!). F-Rod ranked first, with a projected 35 saves. The cloud, it seems, doesn’t always compute. Will Albert go for $49, as the PG suggests? In a word, no. But that isn’t the mistake (it is only a symptom).

Bid prices are different than projected values. Ignoring this truism means imagining that Johan Santana might be worth $48, as the LPP site suggests, but we all know that is wrong, even if Johan is healthy, which he may not be.

The problem is that there is no automatic pricing system based on projections that is going to properly price players for auction. Why? Because projections are, inevitably, 25  percent (or more) wrong. Even my projections aren’t perfect. We value projections because they fix for us what a player is expected to do, but what matters are the prices everyone else is willing to pay. And how our expectations stack up against them. That market evaluation is where the heavy lifting of draft prep comes. It combines the information in the projection with our assessment of risk, and filters it through our knowledge about the league we play in.

A system that projects Santana for $48, when he will not go for more than $38 in your league, is failing to properly allocate $10, compounding the effect of the error.

I dig Mays Copeland’s efforts, and maybe he isn’t selling the Pricing Guide as a list of bid prices, but rather as a way to compare different sets of stats (projected and real), though that wasn’t what I took away. My problem is that when he disses other sites, like the rototimes player rater, he offends me. Actually, he makes me an enemy. It isn’t that the rototimes rater is perfect, it isn’t, but it’s a lot better than anything Mays has come up with. His strict adherence to category scarcity blithely ignores the way people actually play the game. 

From the spirit of his site, I would think Mays would find ways to improve the rototimes rater. but instead he chooses to diss it and promote himself. That would be okay if he got it right. Mays hasn’t yet.

Update: I went back and checked his 2008 prices, figuring that would be a better test of the Price Guide. It is better. The Putz problem is a result of the projections, not anything the pricer is doing wrong, but he’s still giving Steals and Saves full value, so he prices Mariano Rivera at $49 last year. That is probably correct in a math sense, but doesn’t reflect the way the game is played. Also, his 2008 stats have Matt Holliday in the AL, which makes them useless for evaluating what actually happened last year. So, an interesting efffort showing some promise, but there are kinks to work out.

18 Undrafted Players To Watch

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RotoAuthority.com

Everybody wants to know about Sleepers. For those of us in AL or NL only leagues that means aging vets who might get an unexpected shot, or a closer in waiting breaking out by virtue or good luck. If you play in a mixed league this list of players not generally taken in the first 278 at Mock Draft Central is a good place to start your prospecting. The only question is which guys taken earlier shouldn’t have been.

An article about Road Home Run Rates

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Derek Carty THT Fantasy Focus

The Hardball Times’ fantasy writer looks at which teams and players have the biggest changes in the home run rates of their road ballparks in the coming season. As he says at the end of the story, this is fun stuff, especially if you learn that one of your freezes (Josh Hamilton, let’s say) had one of the toughest road park schedules for homers last year. On the other hand, the team that gains the most this year is the Phillies, up 2.2 percent!

If they hit 105 road homers last year, this information suggests that this year they might hit 107! The last three years the Phillies have averaged 102 road home runs. Make of this what you will.

Maximum impact sluggers

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By the Numbers: Al Melchior

This is just a solid bit of analysis of power hitters we don’t know for next year. Or, like Chris Davis, who we think we know too well.

According to former BaseballHQer Melchior, Davis should be fine but not great, and you shouldn’t overlook all those strike outs (he shows you why).

Good stuff, though you shouldn’t overrely on strikeout rates to gauge future performance. Still, youngsters who fail to make contact have a lot of things they have to improve if they’re going to be successful the second time round the league. Most, as Al points out, don’t make it.

“Hand-made Trophies Worth Bragging About”

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FantasyTrophies.com | “Hand-made Trophies Worth Bragging About”

Awesome Fantasy Football Trophy

The trophy we have in the American Dream League is your standard high school sports varsity participation trophy, except the golden posed player on top has been replaced by a 1940s era dial up phone. Similarly electroplated. It is an awesome thing, unique in every sense of the world, and fragile. One year the preceding year’s winner (winners keep the trophy until a new champion is crowned) delivered the trophy in a bag. Somehow the screws and bolts came undone and he just wasn’t handy enough to fix it. He hasn’t won since, though he’s in the lead this year (by a lot).

Trophies mean something, and these clever and handsome items are the work of a friend of a friend in my home town of Brooklyn, NY. The Throwback, picture above, made me laugh out loud when I saw it, which makes it a fit prize for the fantasy winner in your league this year. And it doesn’t look like it has any screws or bolts.

All about the little people

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Sam Walker at Sportsline.com

Sam Walker wrote a very good book about fantasy baseball called Fantasy Land, which covered his first year in Tout Wars, which was also his first year playing fantasy baseball. As a Wall Street Journal reporter and with the estimable Nando del Fino as a partner, Sam finished in the middle of the pack his first year, but won Tout his second year.

He’s got a big lead this year, as filmmakers are using Tout AL and another newcomer to make a movie of Sam’s book. In this column at Sportsline he explains what he did to make that lead happen. Names like Duchscherer, Hamilton, and Ervin Santana go part of the way, but Sam thinks he did some smart things, too.

Yes, he did.

Rays of Light!

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Nate Silver Rocks

On this day, a couple of days past midseason, Nate Silver talks about how PECOTA only projected the Rays to win 88-90 games this year, an audacious projection that now seems a little lily livered. That’s how good the Rays have been.

My goal here is to shout out about Nate’s analysis, which is excellent, but I have another objective. In Joe Sheehan’s column today he also takes on the Rays. Tucked behind the BP pay wall I can only guess at his overall point, but the tease is apologetic for not getting the Rays analysis right in the preseason.

But, and maybe Joe is being coy here, it was his analysis of the deal for Garza and Bartlett (oh so many months ago) that turned me on to what seemed like the key preseason Rays story. This was a defense that was moving from crap to good, and there would be some pitchers who would benefit. Based on that analysis, of Sheehan’s,  I made a bet on Edwin Jackson, a post-hype starter who finished fairly strongly last year, but whose historical ineptitude made him a $2 pickup in the endgame.

There is a ton we don’t know about defense and how it helps and hurts teams, but when a team like the Rays moves from the bottom of the defensive efficiency ratings to the top, and at the same time dramatically reduces the number of runs it allows, it may be time to say that we at least know what works.

Without shorting the shrift of the excellent Nate Silver, I think this defensive shift has been Sheehan’s baby the last few years (at least) and he deserves a lot of credit for seeing what was happening.

 

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