Resources

The Amazing Fan Graphs

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Baseball Stats, Graphs, Analysis | Fan Graphs

Have a month or two to do nothing but click on links on a website? Visit Fan Graphs. You’ll find stats here, but you’ll also find 70 charts for every player tracking daily and seasonal trends. Most immediately interesting to me were the daily graphs tracking AVG, OBP, SLG, K/9, BB/9, and on and on. Stats are compared to a ML average, so you can visually judge relative improvement or decline. Plus righty/lefty and home/away splits are also graphed. Simply awesome.

Make your own team stats lists

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Statmaster : A Baseball Team Statistics Tool

Another way to make lists is this bit of webware from Baseball Almanac. As the site points out, every major site has player stat pages organized by teams, but it can be hard to find the particular stat you’re looking for. Statmaster has a long list of available stats, and you click off which ones you want to see. It doesn’t allow you to pull leaguewide lists, which is a shortcoming, but it does offer what could be a faster way to do research than sites where you have to scroll across multiple pages to find the more esoteric numbers. Worth checking out, and it will certainly be bookmarked by some.

The Best Projections in the Universe

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Baseball HQ: HQ Today

I received a copy of John Burnson’s Graphical Pitcher 2006 today from Amazon. No time yet to delve deeply into charts, which present a cognitive problem, at least at first. How to absorb a ton of information until you speak fluently the local dialect? I did read all the text, which is informative and entertaining (as the ultra-bright and engergetic Burnson always, in my experience, is). But the real wow is a study he (they?) published at baseball HQ last year after randomly drafting gazzilions of virtual fantasy teams, calculating virtual standings, and tracking which players appeared more often on winning teams.

This is a brilliant way to solve so many player valuation problems, one that was hinted at when roto stat service pioneer Jerry Heath published which players appeared most often on the last place and first place roto teams in the leagues he served. But taken to this level I believe it qualifies as original rotisserie research, which is a rare thing and about the highest praise I can give.

Which got me to go to baseballhq.com looking for the original article. I didn’t get to WOW before stumbling over this article Ron published in his free weekly newsletter last week. It doesn’t say much more than last year’s “Player Projections are a Crock” article did, but he says it more vehemently. I agree with him, as you know if you’ve been coming here regularly over the past few years, but I think he’s giving short shrift to the key role of the fantasy tout, which is to identify not only which players are going to get worse or better but which are going to get the most better or worse relative to public expectations.

The most important number to know, if you could, would be what price a guy is going to go for in your league.
The second most important is to know how to maximize each player’s contribution by putting together a solid roster. Ron has long focused on this in very constructive ways, but Burnson’s article in The Graphical Pitcher 2006 (and presumably archived somewhere at baseballhq.com) makes you say, “Wow.”

The Short of It

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Fantasy: Top 20 Shortstops For 2006 — The Hardball Times

The laudable Hardball Times has a Top 5, and I have a Top 5.

Theirs: Jeter, Young, Reyes, Rollins, Lugo.

Mine: Young, Furcal, Tejada, Jeter, Rollins

Not huge differences, except I have Rollins at $30 and the next guy, Reyes, at $24. I’m sure Lugo doesn’t belong in the Top 5, and while I wouldn’t rule out Reyes doing it again, I wouldn’t pay for it. And I’ve loved Lugo longtime.

What does this mean? Not that much. In any roto auction Tim Dierkes would be more likely to end up with Lugo or Reyes and I’d be more likely to get Tejada or Furcal. And both of us would be scrapping for a number two.

I used to like Lugo in that role. Now, after a few years of getting burned, I’m going for Edgar Renteria, if his price has dropped enough.

A surprising resource

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Mock Draft Central Fantasy Baseball Mock Drafts

When I first visited Mock Draft Central a couple of years ago it was to do the mock draft for the Fantasy Baseball Guide. Looking over the site, noting that is a pay site, I thought that a site devoted to mock drafts was plain goofy. Not that I said that to Jason Pliml, whose baby this is. To him I said, Thank you for having us.
But then we did our draft, the software was quite helpful, and I began to see the appeal of a drafting site that works. And I continue to meet people for whom practice drafting is one of their most important prep practices going into the fantasy season. And this year the software is even better.
So, consider me converted. If you’re interested in mock drafting and want to learn more about how mockdraftcentral.com can help you improve your fantasy game, check out the sales pitch at the site and sign up for the free trial.