Fantasy Sites

Baseball Prospectus | Unfiltered

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Christina Kahrl gets mad at fantasy baseball

Ten years ago when people got mad at fantasy baseball it was possible to blame ignorance of the game, but recent spiels by George Vecsy and this one from Christina Kahrl of BP are mind-bogglingly daft (as irrational as Murray Chass ripping on Win Above Replacement as a measure of a player’s value).

There is no special virtue to real baseball fandom, and no decadent inevitability to following your fantasy team. What Christina derides as the mindless accumulating of points rather than the apparently higher calling of putting together a winning baseball team is, as Baseball Prospectus has done much to prove over the years, very similar to the putting together of a winning baseball team.

I’m a big fan of the BP blog, Unfiltered. The shorter format and less formal setting showcase the BP talents much better than the longer form pieces, at least on a daily basis. Even Christina’s misguided spew is sort of fun. Just don’t give it credit for any real thought, it’s really just a ladle of tomato-y gravy.

Heater Magazine – Home

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Issue No. 1 2007

Looking for batting order information for Matt Murton and Cliff Floyd earlier today I remembered that Heater Magazine has such stuff. I nipped over to www.heatermagazine.com, downloaded the giant weekly compendium of stats, charts, baseball writing, more charts, graphs, lists and more charts and found exactly what I was looking for. Plus the writing of this year’s Guide rookies, Craig Brown and Jeff Sackman, and the always excellent Dave Studeman and Deric McCamey.

There’s also a Saturday supplement. This is what Baseball Weekly might have done with their stat pages, but instead John Burnson put it together. It’s cheap. Just $19 samoleans for the whole season.

The only problem is that all the information really makes me want to have one of those 30″ Apple CinemaDisplays on my desk. But even without it, this is one useful bunch of baseball/fantasy information.

Ps. I don’t make any money on this. It’s just highly recommended.

Last Patton $ on Disk 2007 Update is Live

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Ask Rotoman News

For those who have been tracking the P$oD07 updates all spring, the final one was posted last night. It includes the Patton software, merge files for those looking for updated bid prices from Alex Patton, Rotoman, and Mike Fenger, my latest (and last) projections for the year, and text lists and an Excel file for those who simply want the stuff.

Thanks to all of this year ‘s and future customers. May you kick butt all season long.

Tout Wars – Battle of the Experts

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The draft list

One of the great disappointments of Tout Wars is that we’ve never figured out how to make the live experience work for those with the good sense not to visit a hotel somewhere in the New York area on a day they could be seeing the Allman Brothers in their annual visit to the Beacon Theater.

But the first few rounds of this year’s AL draft as recorded here tell a story that Matt Berry better back up with results. He bought Santana, he bought Halladay, both for relative cheap (because the so-called experts are wimpy when it comes to pitching), but then he interestingly continued to buy star powered players.

He turned a lesson in how experts don’t value pitching enough into a lesson in how you should buy chalk players, and let everyone else scramble. It may have worked out, but we’ll need the resurrection of the Tout Wars software to let us know who Matt is actually jamming with.

What we know now for sure is that (barring catostrophic injury) he won the league by grabbing Santana and Carpenter at those prices. Unless he paid too much for his other guys.

(Tout Wars NL will be taking place Sunday morning, March 25, at 9am, at the Marriott whatever at 6th Ave and 42nd Street. See you there.)

Enth.com

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a baseball stats database and search engine

I received a press release today about enth.com, another database of baseball stats since 1871. The interesting things they’ve got going:

They’ll have daily updates with inseason stats from Stats Inc., and

They have developed a natural language query to get at the data.

Which means you can ask Which player hit the most Home Runs in 2006 and played more than 20 games at shortstop, and get a list of the top 10. The problem right now is if you ask the same question but substitute 2003 in the query you get no answer.

But that’s what beta software is for. Will this prove to be a better approach than those used at baseball-reference.com and baseballmusings.com? I think I’m always going to prefer a forms based system, but I’m not ruling out the possibility. And it’s always great to see smart people giving us a chance to explore new systems.

Good luck, enth.com.

Bleed Cubbie Blue

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Watching Mark Prior

I was tipped to this post by baseballmusings.com. BCB watched Mark Prior pitch in a scrimmage Friday morning, and has many interesting things to say about his condition, his apparent confidence, and his stuff (not as impressive as Jason Marquis’s).

He also posts some pictures of Prior on the mound that make him look wan, to say the least.

This is good stuff, but it doesn’t knock me off my main point about Prior this spring. He’s working his way back. It may take a few weeks, it could take a lot longer. But he doesn’t have to be the same pitcher he was before to win again in the major leagues.

As his price plummets he’s the sort of guy to grab late in the day. This report makes me a little less confident that things are going to work out this year, but despite the good intentions I know that a lot of what looks like one thing in March becomes something different in May. That’s a reason to dog talent, even when it looks this crippled.

A Fantasy Sports Stock Market Done Right?

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PROTRADE: Home

I’ve only spent 15 minutes on the site, where I learned that my immediate “friend” Derrek Lee lists all the members of the Chicago Cubs as his “friend”s (where am I?), but I get the distinct feeling that someone has gotten the virtual stock market right. How it works out will depend on how free they let the shorts roam, and how real money plays a part (I’m not clear about this).

The “analysis” offered that I’ve seen mimics broader cable TV analysis, but it seems at Protrade everyone gets their own blog, so in time reliable reporters and analysts might prevail (if there’s a reason for them to persist, it doesn’t look like there is a meritocratic payment system for analysts yet).

But most importantly the scoring system is clear, so if they can convert their virtual financial system into a real one there is a gambling game here that might warrant some real attention. Stay tuned.

Patton $ on Disk 2007 is now available

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www.askrotoman.com

For those who swear by it, the release of POD07 is a big day. We’ve been squashing some bugs the past week, as it were, and everything seems to be working okay now. So, if you want the software that has my projections, Alex Patton’s and my 4×4 bid prices (actually mine aren’t in yet, but they will be by the March 1 update at the latest) and Mike Fenger’s 5×5 bids, lightning fast operation and a myriad of ways to incorporate your own ideas into the mix with ours, now is the time.

There will be updates on March 1, 15, 22, 29 and April 5. Getting all the projections and bids balanced to league budgets and up to date is a constant project for us, and the data develops as spring training progresses.

I encourage you to visit the discussion board over at alexpatton.com, to ask users about the software and your expected uses of it.