Answers to fantasy baseball questions (and much more) since 1996
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I’ve been traveling some of Appalachia’s blue highways this week, which has brought the blog to a complete stop, though Ask Rotoman appeared Wednesday as usual. Will Travis Hafner sit again during interleague play? How much difference does it make having Roy Oswalt rather than Mark Buehrle? How do you sort our oddball categories and pick players who suit them? Clemens? Podsednick? Betemit?
John Hunt, who should need no introduction, Deric McKamey, the minor league expert at BaseballHQ.com, and Dave Studeman, of HardballTimes.com, have joined Graphical Pitcher author John Burnson to create Heater, an online magazine about baseball. While in the first issue Hunt and Studeman write fine “early season roto” columns, the heart of the Heater are the 30 pages of team statistical profiles and charts, and the umpteen more pages of position breakouts (as well as a page tracking minor leaguers).
Heater will be coming out each week, and for the fantasy player or the hard core baseball fan the wealth of charts, graphs, timelines and other details about this week, last week and next week, as well as a whole lot more stuff (I’m really just scratching the surface) is organized in an exacting and pleasing way. It’s like the back stats pages of Sports Weekly were totally rethought and reorganized to actually present the data in a way that made it easy to find trends and nuggets about players and teams. Radical.
In a word, all of it is useful, all of it is easy to understand, none of it is presented anywhere else in so fine and complete a manner. Don’t take my word for it. There is a sample copy at the link above. You’ll then have to decide if your money is well spent for this sort of thing. I’m hoping it is, because as long as they keep putting this stuff out my job is going to be a lot easier (and I’m going to look a lot smarter).
Ron Shandler did the heavy lifting. He collected a bunch of player projections (but not mine) and commented on them.
I copped his charts of other people’s projections and added mine.
The lesson, I think, is that all of our projections could be wrong, but we mostly agree on what they are. That qualifies as information.
I didn’t anticipate that with Ian Kinsler going down with a bum finger that Gary Matthews would be called up right away. Knowing what I know now, especially given Matthews’ three-run triple tonight, take him over the recommended Kevin Millar. . . Wait! I recommended Millar instead of Matthews and Millar hit two homers, drove in four runs. Sweet! As usual, you should sort it all out for your league.
Elsewhere in this week’s model, frank discussion about Jeff Francoeur, the breakout (break down?) of a trade of big players (for educational purposes only), and some chatter about some Hots and Nots.
Be there! As some of us used to say in college.
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.
Rotoworld.com – Eric Munson Biography
The notion that Eric Munson is going to be a suitable reserve for the aging Brad Ausmus seems, on the face of it, to be crazy.
The notion that Munson will hit enough to hold the job, much less play the position well enough, is absurd. We have plenty of history to back that up.
Which is why Humberto Quintero is an interesting reserve play. With Raul Chavez out of the way (waived, then claimed by Baltimore) Quintero is the only real option the Astros have if (when!) Munson is discarded.
Quintero hasn’t developed as a hitter the way we (meaning, I) expected, so there are reasons for the Astros’ reluctance to promote him. But as a late in the game reserve pick sleeper, he’s golden.
Oh, boy. In leagues that drafted over the weekend Reed suddenly becomes a 2007 keeper, if he takes the extra month he’s suddenly gotten and proves he can play in the bigs. I think he will.
In Tout Wars NL Rolen went for $20, which made him either the most underpriced star or the most overpriced hurt guy. No one knows at this point, as this story makes clear, especially Rolen and the Cardinals. That makes Rolen a great pick up if you have bad freezes and may be playing for 2007, but a very risky play in a startup league. It’s tough to drop $20 on a guy, hoping to get $25 out of him, when you might get nothing.
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.)
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.