A few years ago a regular scanned all of the non player profile pages of Alex Patton’s roto ouvre. They were posted for a time at rototouts.com, but when I let that site lapse I didn’t get them reposted until this week. They’re classic, funny, smart, sometimes exciting and sometimes aggravating. I can’t think of a better place to get into the murky theoretical issues in fantasy baseball, and haul them out into the daylight. Prosit.
Roto
CREATiVESPORTS > Buster H. Esq. on Stolen Bases
CREATiVESPORTS > Baseball Articles > Outside the [Batter’s] Box > Teeners are better than O’fers
I wish he’d applied his findings a little more rigorously to the real world model, and made some effort to list this year’s guys (that team isn’t going average pick 84 this year), but this is a worthwhile strategy to prepare for.
Major League Baseball : This Week’s Ask Rotoman
Major League Baseball : Fantasy : Fantasy
The new one is up over at mlb.com, with a perhaps too-lengthy look at league differences, a survey of the big bounceback candidates, an attempt to find this year’s Jon Garland, and a little chatter about Mark Prior.
New Version of Patton $ on Disk
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.
The Thomas George–Dollar Value Calculator
Fantasy Baseball – Dollar Value Calculator
With the Rototimes.com dollar value calculator skulking into the site’s pay section, hidden away like the Rotowire price calculator, an old standby moves on. The Thomas George is a venerable roto site with its own free calculator. It allocates percentages to hitters by percentage, which is not right unless you play in a league that auctions position by position, but a quick runthrough found it to be usefully accurate nonetheless. Maybe you can hack the percentages so that they treat all production equally.
This Week’s Model: Ask Rotoman @ mlb.com
Major League Baseball : Fantasy : Fantasy
The subjects? Huff v. Wilkerson. Cabrera v. Wright. Good drafting v. bad drafting. With chatter about Matt Cain, Troy Glaus and Jeremy Hermida. Don’t miss it!
Mastersball Sold!
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.
The Amazing Fan Graphs
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.
Mendoza Baseball
A friend tells me that this is a fantastic fantasy format. As best I can tell it’s a GM game. You try to get the best results using the fewest resources. But there is no salary cap (there is a luxury tax, however). Results are computed in team wins and losses based on the Expected Runs (Xr) formula for hitters, derived from 14 measures. The site is very handsome and the basic ideas of the game are sound. My only concern is that the scoring system will make the game play too flat, but if it achieves 50 percent of it’s apparent potential it should be an excellent experience.
Todd Zola on Position Scarcity
There has been a bit of discussion about position scarcity recently, as there is every March really. Along the way I remembered this interesting series (there is a part III, which can be found at http://www.mixednutsleague.com/nuthouse3.shtml). Todd is one of the mastersball.com posse.
One of the reasons I remembered it was because it got me thinking about this issue and looking into it further. But more about that later. For now, reading Todd’s story is a good place to start.