Players

Evil and Boras

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Joe Posnanski

The always excellent Posnanski looks at an incident in the A-Rod book having to do with Scott Boras, and shows how the way our mindsets predispose us to play Boras as the villain, even though author Selena Roberts (maybe inadvertantly) sprinkles the stories with clues that suggest the Mariners were behaving the way Boras claimed they were. That is badly.

At the start of the piece Posnanski says he isn’t commenting on the main aspects of the book because he’s friends with Roberts, and anyway there is plenty of discussion out there, which stirs up a hornet nest in the comments that is interesting in its own right.

And, among other things, there is also a discussion about whether rising ticket prices are the result of higher salaries. One poster suggests, though he admits he can’t prove it, that if all salaries were cut in half, surely ticket prices would be cut, too. Why?

If prices are set by supply (x number of tickets) and demand (how much people are willing to pay), you would have to prove that cutting salaries would either increase the supply of tickets or decrease the demand. I don’t see how either happens.

One factor, if the players make less maybe the owners would make so much that they would be shamed into reducing prices. Except we only know how much the players make. We don’t know how much the owners make, so how can they be shamed?

Eriq Gardner Looks at Player Raters

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THT Fantasy Focus

My April prices will finally get posted here, later today. They are like a primitive version of a player rater like those found at ESPN, Yahoo, CBS and Rototimes, the kind Eriq Gardner writes about at Hardball Times today. Primitive in the sense that the sophisticated big-media versions calculate their values automatically, plugging the stats into a formula and spitting it forth, while I cut and paste stats into a rather elaborate spreadsheet, make some adjustments because of the number of samples, and then generate a report.

Gardner’s point about what the player raters are actually measuring is a good one. Head to head values are a lot less useful to a classic Rotisserie player than straight 4×4 values. And vice versa. And, it doesn’t need to be repeated, values generated from current stats measure what has happened, not what will happen. But I think Eriq misses the main point with the raters and why they’re of value: they synthesize (or should synthesize) the fantasy categories into one score.

Looking at the stats of two players with different profiles, it can be hard to judge which is more valuable. A player rater that properly reflects the values of your league (or at least lets you know what it is measuring) let’s you assess the aggregated value of a player in all the categories. That Jason Frasor is more valuable than Felix Hernandez thus far tells us something about the teams these guys are on, and it tells us something about their stability in the standings.

The player rater also tells us which players are running ahead of pace, and which are running behind. If we know that Ian Kinsler is currently earning $52, we can judge that he is likely to earn relatively less for his team the rest of the way than he has thus far. If we know that Big Papi is earning $2 right now, we can hope that his contribution is going to increase dramatically the rest of the way (though, if we expected him to earn $20 on the year, and he’s earning $2 now, he needs to earn about $23 each of the remaining five months to get back on par). 

I don’t think you could tell the difference between a set of $20 and $23 stats, unless they were side by side.

Player Raters are overrated and underrated, too, it seems. Like most tools, it depends on what you do with them.

Catching is the Cruelest Position

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By Peter O’Neil
Fantasy Baseball Canada

What branches grow/Out of this stony rubbish?
— The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot

A lot of fantasy players who made big investments in catchers are hoping that April is indeed the cruelest month, and that things will get better, because it’s certainly been a rough one for owners of studs like the disabled trio of Brian McCann, Joe Mauer and Ryan Doumit.

There’s bad news all around. Owners of Russell Martin, Chris Iannetta, Geovany Soto, Ramon Hernandez, Kelly Shoppach, Kenji Johjima and Chris Snyder all expected more. Martin is sure to bounce back, though perhaps not as much as owners expect, and his zero-for-two record in stolen base attempts appears ominous for a player who derives so much of his fantasy value from steals.

Some of the others, like Iannetta, face playing time questions if their struggles continue.

Matt Wieters owners, meanwhile, will be unimpressed with his strikeout rate so far this April in AAA, a level he was supposed to dominate en route to a call-up many expected would come as early as next week.

For those of us replacing the injured, or demoted, the pickings have been slim and grim:  Brian Scheider was struggling before he got hurt, and veterans like Jason Kendall and Greg Zaun look like they might not be able to make it through the year without facing forced retirement.  Jesus Flores and Rod Barajas have had nice little runs but they’ll come back to earth.

Are there bright spots? Absolutely.  Victor Martinez and Jorge Posada are bouncing back strong from tough years, Benjie Molina remains an RBI machine with remarkable durability considering his body type, and Brandon Inge has been a spectacular reward with owners who had the foresight to be optimistic about what he could do while being settled in a single, non-catching position for a full year.

Yes, it’s early, but first impressions are often powerful, and I’m wondering if this experience will have an impact on next year’s drafts and auctions.

Those of us who have been at this for more than a few years remember when closers went for sky-high prices, sometimes in the first round in drafts.  But in recent years it has become more and more clear that relievers often lose their jobs, or break down, which in turn means that saves can be acquired fairly cheaply. I’ll never forget the year I decided to “punt” saves by waiting until the very end of a draft to take three relievers who were merely candidates to close coming out of spring training. All three, including Eric Gagne, turned out to be 30-plus save closers. I won the category running away, and I’m pretty sure my experience had a deflationary impact on closer prices the next year.

There are experts who already have been urging fantasy players to avoid making big investments on catchers because of the injury risk and the wear-and-tear that impacts players like Martin — even if they don’t end up on the DL. I predict that the once-burned, twice-shy sentiments of owners this year, who are now looking enviously at the gleeful Inge owner in their league, will have a deflationary impact on catchers’ prices  in 2010. For those of you in keeper leagues I would suggest you assemble your team with this in mind.

The Cutter: Magic Pitch

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Fantasy Bullpen

I liked Kyle Davies going into this year because of his age, his pedigree, his good spring, and I knew he had added a cutter. What I didn’t know was how big a weapon the cutter seems to be. 

If Alex Gershwind is right, it’s a big weapon, though there are some open questions about his study. Most pertinent is what the sample actually is. Did he only include players who threw fewer than X number of cutters in Year 1 and more than X number of cutters in Year 2? This would tend to eliminate failures from the pool, but he doesn’t say.

He also doesn’t give a demographic profile to the guys in his study. If they were mostly not Jamie Moyer, or if they were, like Jamie Moyer, all guys on the threshhold of dropping out of the league, their typical regression to their mean career stats might show a dramatic swing.

But I have Davies in one league and I need him to do well. So I’m not looking too closely.

Just 25, Greinke has traveled a long, winding road and is on cusp of stardom – Kansas City Star

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Joe Posnanski – Kansas City Star

I bought Zack Greinke in the American Dream League draft, part of a $50 pitching staff (Freezes Gavin Floyd $1 and Edwin Jackson $3, joined by Greinke, Duchscherer $4, the brilliant Kevin Millwood (today anyway) $2, breakout candidate Brandon McCarthy $1 and a relief crew of Balfour $5, Brandon Lyon $5, and George Sherrill $10.

Posnanski tells a good story or three, and teaches me an important thing or two about Greinke.

(The rest of the team: Victor Martinez $21, Zaun $2, Billy Butler $18, Figgins $23, Adrian Beltre $16, Iwamura $13, Jeter $20, Betemit $3, Josh Hamilton $26 freeze, Ryan Sweeney $3 freeze, Granderson $28, Delmon Young $19, Mark Teahen $10, and Travis Hafner $3. Yes, $3. He would have been a loser last year, but at least the risk isn’t great.)

Updates to the Update

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In the spirit of Let It All Hang Out, I’m going to keep a running commentary about changes I’m making to the April 2 update to the Patton $ Software. If you bought the software you should find it of interest. If you haven’t, maybe it will give you an insight into the thinking that goes into the projections and prices. And it sheds light on recent baseball news, too.

PROJECT RUSS OHLENDORFF

The problem with these guys is there is no way to know whether they’re going to be better than last year or not. So the projection reflects his skills but not the outcomes, because his history is so bad. But he could be better. The only solution is to split the difference:

100 IP 110H 40 BB 98K 5W 7L 13HR 4.77 ERA 13.5 Ratio 1.5 whip
PROJECT PHIL DUMATRAIT
He is unpredictable. His health isn’t good. Hasn’t been good since last June. He’s not due back until May, if all goes well, but why should it? And he’s thrown 100 awful major league innings. I’m not saying he might not put it together if he’s healthy, but a projection based on his past history would be too awful to roster, based on his health would argue against him playing, and a good projection would fly in the face of the evidence. If you like him, pick him up on reserve. I’m not suggesting that couldn’t work out (he was great last spring). But me putting numbers on  him would be meaningless.
BRANDON MORROW
I didn’t change him to Closer in the update. I guess I”m in denial. I’m sure he can do the job if healthy. I’m not sure he’ll stay healthy. I cut his IP in half, and gave him 20 saves. I think bidding $10 is fair in 5×5 AL maybe $13 in 4×4. But despite the chance of rewards I think there is a way better chance things will go wrong. I wouldn’t buy him unless his price was dirt cheap.
ROSS GLOAD
Hardly a talent to cling to, he could be disruptive in Florida. Why did they want him? This diminishes the value of Bonifacio, for sure. But it doesn’t kill it. Otherwise, lots could happen.

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.)

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.