Roto

Top 200 Fantasy Team Names

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CBSsports hosts more than 100,000 fantasy leagues and have compiled a list of the Top 200 team names, which is heavily studded with references to movie teams (Chico’s Bail Bonds, Kobra Kai) and, disappointingly, real team names (Yankees? Red Sox? I thought we played to make up our own teams.). In the public so-called experts leagues I play in I go under my own name, which is its own kind of boring, but in my home leagues I have made up names:

American Dream League: Bad Kreuznachs, a nod to my ancestral home town across the water and, I guess, either George Thoroughgood or Jim Croce.

Rotoman’s Regulars: Jorge Regulas, a pun off the Regulars league name and nod to the old Moldy Peaches song.

Neither of these names made the Top 200 this year.

Forecaster and Handbook are out!

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I got my copy of the Baseball Forecaster about 10 days ago, but closing the magazine meant not cracking it, even though I’ve got a short bit in it (which happened to run here first, about WHIP v. WH/9), until now.

Ron’s lead essay is very smart. It’s about how wrong we are about players, year after year, and he wonders why we pursue exacting but nearly always wrong projections. Then he comes up with something new, called the Mayberry Method.

There’s a lot to like about the way the MM summarizes a player’s skills in a descriptive way. Yet despite it’s simplicity, I’m not convinced it is going to catch on. New stuff often doesn’t, even when it has real merit. On the other hand, the benchmarks MM describes so succinctly are becoming increasingly entrenched as leading indicators, making me wonder why–if we’re getting better at defining leading indicators–we’re not getting better predicting breakouts.

As Ron says in the piece, we may be smarter now than we were 20 years ago, but that may not be such a good thing.

Steve Moyer always gives us so-called experts a copy of the hot-off-the-press Bill James Handbook at First Pitch Arizona, for which I am very grateful. Not that I wouldn’t buy it, I have many times, but this way it ends up in my hands even sooner.

The book continues to grow, with increased focus on the defense awards and rankings, focus on baserunning skills, and the ever useful park factors. I’m a great fan of baseball-reference.com and fangraphs.com, both of which I use all day long, but I sit and read the Bill James Handbook, poring over its pages as if it were a ripping good yarn, which in many ways it is.

I’m glad for both these books and recommend them highly.

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.

Is it too late to win?

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KFFL – Baseball HQ

There is something weird going on at KFFL. Old stories from BaseballHQ are showing up, which is fine, but with new dates. This story is from 2003, I think, but the data is important. I’m not so sure about the conclusion.

It is good to know when you can count on the overall volatility of the standings to have “setttled.” I’m not sure I wouldn’t have guessed mid May, but I like some evidence.

I’m also sure that the volatility by category indexes, showing that stolen bases and saves change the least, is counterintuitive and correct. Alas, I’m pretty sure that the article’s conclusion, that this means buy steals and saves on draft day and trade for power later, is wrong, for all the reasons the article points out these categories are the most stable.

Still, despite its date of birth, this and probably other baseballHQ goldies are well worth checking out at KFFL.

It May Be Time to Acquire Power

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Derek Carty–THT Fantasy Focus

The Hit Tracker reports that home runs are flying about five feet farther than they were last year and there is little chance this is random, which may mean the ball is juiced. Derek Carty explains how you can turn this into an advantage, maybe.

I’m not sure what to make of The Hit Tracker, Greg Rybarczyk’s trajectory simulator software. It is certainly impressive and I feel comfortable relying on it’s individual stats for the fun business of characterizing blasts, but is it really accurate enough to get granular over an average of five feet per homer? Is it accurate enough to say that the ball is juiced based on the Hit Tracker reports? 

I’m not saying I know it isn’t, but I’m skeptical. Still, it isn’t a bad idea to look at guys who had just barely enough power last year (Jack Cust leads that list, along with Ryan Braun and Mark Reynolds in the AL) and think that they just might benefit. 

Also, to clear up an issue in Carty’s story: If there is m ore hitting in the year, the value of the best pitchers generally goes up. And if there is more pitching, the value of the best hitters usually goes up.