Resources

Study Reveals Baseball’s Great Clutch Hitters

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LiveScience.com

This site cites a study by Elan Fuld that uses some interesting and valuable methods to determine whether clutch hitters exist. While Fuld is able to identify a few hitters who exhibited reliable clutch tendencies throughout their careers, their numbers are so small that his ambitious study really seems to support the idea that clutch hitters don’t exist. To the extent Bill Buckner, Eddie Murray and Leo Gomez were clutch, maybe they were just a little luckier than the vast majority of players during the 30 years he looked at who weren’t clutch.

The role of psychological difference in baseball is an important one, and Fuld’s study apparently demonstrates just how narrow a swath the elite of baseball players are drawn from. That this purported science website could so misread the conclusion of this study should be an embarrassment.

Plus, they don’t even link to Fuld’s study, which you can find here.

You can also find a set of other clutch hitting studies compiled by Cyril Morong here.

Alex Patton’s American Dream League Draft Sheet

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Patton $ on Disk Page

Alex has posted his bid prices for the AL only 4×4 American Dream League as and Excel workbook, as a way to show how he distributes draft inflation in clumps rather than in proportion. Of perhaps even greater interest are his quicknotes about players and how things went in the draft. Alex is leading the ADL in the still nascent season by close to 30 points, so there may be something to all this. And they’re free.

While you’re there, if you’re looking for software to help organize and sort your upcoming draft, you’ll get a chance to buy Patton $ on Disk 2006.

Roll Your Own

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Steve’s Lineup Toy

Steve has written a script that takes any group of nine players and suggests the best lineup. In this year’s first Ask Rotoman column this year I took a look at the Mets lineup mainly to argue that they’d better off with Carlos Beltran leading off. Steve, based on 2005 stats, says Paul Lo Duca should be the choice. At least he explains his methodology, which for a mechanical process sure makes a good deal of sense.

Tout Wars – Battle of the So-Called Experts

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Tout Wars – Battle of the Experts

Tout Wars is big this year, in large part because of Sam Walker’s book Fantasyland. Sam’s outsider caricatures of his Tout Wars opponents seemed to ruffle some feathers, but these birds all liked the attention, which is why the draft was held in a conference room at a Times Square hotel, a huge step away from the year we drafted in Steve Moyer’s baseball shrine of a basement in Pennsylvania.
I drafted in the NL section Sunday, along with reps from Creative Sports, Mock Draft Central, Wise Guy Baseball, TQ Stats, Ultimate Fantasy Sports, Roto Junkie, RotoTimes, FantasyGuru, RotoWorld, BaseballHQ, Rotowire, and Fantasybaseball.com.

The only interesting thing that happened, as far as I’m concerned, is that I spent $11 on Colorado minor league DL candidate Ryan Shealy. This was one of those auction moments. I blame the NL. It’s really a sucky league. I kept not bidding on such talents as Jose Cruz and Jacque Jones beyond their projected value because, well, I really didn’t want those guys.

But there is such pervasive mediocrity in the NL that once you get beyond the top couple of stars at each position, it’s a wide sargasso sea of interchangeable pieces, some of whom are bound to pay off—but how can you tell?

You can’t. The teams that went Stars and Scrubs have an advantage, I think.

You can follow the link to see what we did. But back to Shealy. At the moment Shealy was nominated (by me) Lombardo, Zaleski and I had far more money than any of the other teams, and there wasn’t much talent left. I decided that Shealy, even if he only played a few months, was by far the most differentiated and valuable player. So, I went and got him. I was appalled that Lombardo kept raising me, but at that point in the draft it seemed like the time to commit, or end up with money at the end.
I subsequently got all the players I targetted, so from a strategic point of view I did the right thing. But I’m not sure my judgment that Shealy was the guy I wanted/needed was sound.

Auction is a great way to play this game because it opens up all these various pathways to success and failure. I look at the teams and I think the teams that went Stars and Scrubs (notably John Hoyos’s RotoJunkie squad and Jason Pliml’s Mock Draft Central) did best. That’s because the NL is so devoid of talent.

But if Shealy’s shoulder heals and he gets 350 AB in the OF, or if Helton’s back crumbles and he gets plenty of AB at 1B, I’m not surrendering.

(This story is a warning that expert league drafts are good fun to follow, and may give you an idea of what might happen in your league, but the exigencies of the situation are way more important than anything as pedestrian as projected values. Which is how Hector Luna ended up going for $8. But that’s the same story, just a different verse.)

Major League Baseball : Rotoman’s Projections

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Major League Baseball

MLB.com has been running my player projections for the past five years, usually a set at the end of February and an update just before the start of the season. This year they asked for more categories (doubles, caught stealing, among others) and for a set at the end of January, which I delivered. And then nothing. I was scheduled to deliver an update the first week of March, but in all the busy-ness of things didn’t get to it until last week, when I also finally asked my editor what happened to the first set of projections.

It turns out they’re being used in a game. And now for the first time the MLB.com Rotoman projections are posted at mlb.com, along with bid values for 4×4, 5×5, and mixed leagues. There will be an update March 29, for posterity’s (and late drafters’) sake.

Baseball Prospectus

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I was just the other day wondering why Kevin Goldstein had stopped writing the minor league player daily email for Baseball America (and how I noticed because it wasn’t quite so charming), and I didn’t notice until today that he’s been writing for Baseball Prospectus. It turns out he’s going to be writing 4-5 times a week for them. This is disturbing because his stuff is good, but I had pretty much decided not to renew BP (which they tell me expires in two days).

In today’s story he looked back at the Top 30 prospect lists from 2001 in BA and evaluated how many of the 900 included made the bigs and in what capacity. This isn’t a groundbreaking bit of news, but it’s an average of eight, most of the them not regulars. Goldstein, as usual, is judicious in his judgments and fair in his pronouncements.

I’ve been finding BP less than essential, but not worthless. Worth the dough they’re charging (I don’t know what that is)? We’ll see.

New Version of Patton $ on Disk

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Support Ask Rotoman Page

A weekend of bug squishing led to the release of an updated and improved Patton $ on Disk.

The program includes updated projections, bid prices from me and Alex Patton for 4×4 and Mike Fenger for 5×5. It is a great program for sorting lists and pricing players in the traditional 4×4 and 5×5 formats. The ease of updating projections and prices, the auction manager with bid values and all that make it useful for smaller mixed formats, too, but the pricing is not adjustable.

There is also an Excel worksheet with all the data available, and text and Word files will be out tonight.

The price: $25.

Reviewing The Fielding Bible

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The Crucible of Competition — The Hardball Times

I seem to have waded into the Hardball Times and I may never get out.

John Dewan is Bill James’ somewhat more pragmatic partner, and his attempt to harness the great cache of information that Baseball Info Solutions has harnessed the last three years in service of identifying what qualities make a good fielder have to be respected.

Dan Fox, in his review, gets pretty excited about some of the minutia, like whether Alfonso Soriano is better going to his right or left, or on balls in the air or on the ground. It would be so great to have confidence in these numbers, but even with all the safeguards and adjusters in place in TFB, the small samples and differing conditions for all players make it really really really hard to be definitive about objective defensive measures.

But this sytematic approach may teach us something we need to move to the next level. I’m not a naysayer at all. As Dan points out, the data is the thing here. How we massage it and to what ends is going to determine its value. My copy hasn’t come yet. I can’t wait.

Mastersball Sold!

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FantasyBaseball.com – The Official Website of the Masters of Fantasy Baseball

Jason Grey, Todd Zola, and Rob Leibowitz, the former Masters of Fantasy Baseball, have sold themselves to become the content providers at www.fantasybaseball.com. You have to admire the URL. The Masters have been frequent contributors to the Guide, and one hopes they’ll make tons of money and win even more experts league championships. Best of luck, guys.