Strategy

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.

Catching is the Cruelest Position

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By Peter O’Neil
Fantasy Baseball Canada

What branches grow/Out of this stony rubbish?
— The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot

A lot of fantasy players who made big investments in catchers are hoping that April is indeed the cruelest month, and that things will get better, because it’s certainly been a rough one for owners of studs like the disabled trio of Brian McCann, Joe Mauer and Ryan Doumit.

There’s bad news all around. Owners of Russell Martin, Chris Iannetta, Geovany Soto, Ramon Hernandez, Kelly Shoppach, Kenji Johjima and Chris Snyder all expected more. Martin is sure to bounce back, though perhaps not as much as owners expect, and his zero-for-two record in stolen base attempts appears ominous for a player who derives so much of his fantasy value from steals.

Some of the others, like Iannetta, face playing time questions if their struggles continue.

Matt Wieters owners, meanwhile, will be unimpressed with his strikeout rate so far this April in AAA, a level he was supposed to dominate en route to a call-up many expected would come as early as next week.

For those of us replacing the injured, or demoted, the pickings have been slim and grim:  Brian Scheider was struggling before he got hurt, and veterans like Jason Kendall and Greg Zaun look like they might not be able to make it through the year without facing forced retirement.  Jesus Flores and Rod Barajas have had nice little runs but they’ll come back to earth.

Are there bright spots? Absolutely.  Victor Martinez and Jorge Posada are bouncing back strong from tough years, Benjie Molina remains an RBI machine with remarkable durability considering his body type, and Brandon Inge has been a spectacular reward with owners who had the foresight to be optimistic about what he could do while being settled in a single, non-catching position for a full year.

Yes, it’s early, but first impressions are often powerful, and I’m wondering if this experience will have an impact on next year’s drafts and auctions.

Those of us who have been at this for more than a few years remember when closers went for sky-high prices, sometimes in the first round in drafts.  But in recent years it has become more and more clear that relievers often lose their jobs, or break down, which in turn means that saves can be acquired fairly cheaply. I’ll never forget the year I decided to “punt” saves by waiting until the very end of a draft to take three relievers who were merely candidates to close coming out of spring training. All three, including Eric Gagne, turned out to be 30-plus save closers. I won the category running away, and I’m pretty sure my experience had a deflationary impact on closer prices the next year.

There are experts who already have been urging fantasy players to avoid making big investments on catchers because of the injury risk and the wear-and-tear that impacts players like Martin — even if they don’t end up on the DL. I predict that the once-burned, twice-shy sentiments of owners this year, who are now looking enviously at the gleeful Inge owner in their league, will have a deflationary impact on catchers’ prices  in 2010. For those of you in keeper leagues I would suggest you assemble your team with this in mind.

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.

Panic? Or Don’t Panic? Which Is It?

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by Peter O’Neil

Many fantasy baseball experts admonish those who express nervousness over a high-priced superstar’s slow start. “Don’t panic!” they say. “Players always revert to their norm.” Others chirp in on public forums: “It’s only April, the stats are meaningless.”

And the most obnoxious will annoyingly declare:  “Gee, I wish you were in my league. I’d take you to the cleaners, offering you my red-hot Chris Duncan for your slow-starting Carlos Lee.”

It is of course true that you should never trade a slumping elite player for a hot-starting unknown.  But given all the available information and expertise out there these days, are there really players in remotely serious leagues who make those kinds of deals?  Even if they did the scorn heaped down on them assures they will too petrified to do it  again, and the beneficiary would earn a “shark” reputation that could make future trading difficult.

To me the real question is this: Should we really be so quick to dismiss April stats? Is a star’s slow start, or an unheralded player’s heroics, really meaningless?

I have always felt that April stats are fairly significant.  And I’d like to cite some research I’ve been looking over, produced by one of fantasy’s top gurus, to back up my views.

Ron Shandler’s 2009 edition of the Forecaster reproduced his study of the 2005 season that looked at players who had surprisingly good, or bad, years, and sought to determine if these breakouts and breakdowns were identifiable by the end of April.

The study concluded that a little over 40 per cent of hitters and pitchers who earned $10 more than projected for the whole season were red-hot in April.

More than half of hitters (56 per cent) and 3/4 of pitchers (74 per cent) who earned $10 less than projected were also identifiable in April.

Shandler’s conclusion was that, for other than pitchers about to have lousy years, “April was not a strong leading indicator.”

The study also looked at major breakouts — players earning $20-$25 more than predicted — and found these were identifiable in 45 per cent of the cases. His conclusion: “April surgers are less than a 50-50 proposition to maintain that level all season.”

I love the research, so once again the fantasy baseball community has benefited from Shandler’s great work. But I have a different perspective on the conclusion.

If everyone in fantasy agreed that 100 per cent of players off to amazing, or miserable, starts in April were going to maintain that level, then this study would poke a pin in that balloon. But we know that’s not the case.

The fact is that the vast majority of fantasy participants are inherently skeptical of players who come out of nowhere to start strongly.   They might find it interesting that Chris Duncan is hitting more than .350 right now, but how many would pay a price to have him on their teams?

Similarly, while owners might be a little worried right now that David Ortiz is well under the Mendoza line, it’s going to be a while before they give up on the idea that their star asset will come back with a vengeance. Of course, experts constantly urging them to be patient and assuring them that players revert to the mean reinforces this view.

So I doubt very much if fantasy players realize there is at least a 40 per cent chance the player performing well above expectations will remain that way, and that more than half of the league’s slumping hitters, and three-quarters of struggling pitchers, won’t recover.

A second study, also by Shandler, reinforced my view.

Last May he proposed a theoretical trade of hot April starters (including Fred Lewis, Ryan Doumit, Kyle Lohse, Chipper Jones, Cliff Lee among them) for strugglers (like Robinson Cano, Justin Verlander, Kenji Johjima, Austin Kearns, Adam Laroche, and Roy Oswalt). He suggested tongue somewhat in cheek that the buyer of the slow starters would have to be nuts to accept such a group of struggling bums as Oswalt and Cano.

Of course, his point was that the former group of overachievers were obvious sell-high candidates, while the underachievers were ideal buy-low opportunities. He said the goal of this column was to “prove that early season mass hysteria” about hot or cold starters “is really tiresome.” He stated as fact that his underachievers would out-earn the overachievers, and made a joking reference to the absurdity of anyone who would rather have Lohse over Verlander.

But the result was a shocker, to me and I assume to Shandler. The 10 so-called overachievers actually performed better the rest of the way, with Lohse playing a key role by clearly pitching better than Verlander.

I think these results open our eyes to changing realities. Shandler deliberately chose the overachieving Doumit among the group of players he wanted to trade away, and cited the underachieving Johjima as an ideal target. The message here was obvious: the smart money should be betting on Johjima, since he had a longer track record and the projected stats were so much better.

Yet here we are a year later and Doumit is an elite catching option and Johjima is unrosterable in numerous formats.

Things change, and sometimes the signs are obvious in April.

So what can we do as fantasy players with this information? Well, that’s a tough one. Ideally, fantasy experts should be doing a version of the 2005 study every year to give us more information on the springtime genesis of breakouts and breakdowns.

But until then? I’m not advocating panic trades, of course. It’s still going to be tough figuring out which of your hot starters is headed for a career year. And it will always be hard to try to sell struggling players, particularly if you have a reputation of being one of the smarter cookies in your league. People will assume you know there’s an underlying problem.

But if there’s a shark in your league trolling for slow-starters, and offering some flash-in-the-pan who’s leading the league in RBIs, don’t necessarily assume you’re about to be duped.  There’s a not-unreasonable chance that you could be getting a stud for a dud.

(Peter O’Neil is the Paris-based Europe correspondent for a Canadian news agency. He writes for www.canada.com/fantasybaseball)

Game Simulations Answer Baseball’s What-Ifs

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Alan Schwarz – NYTimes.com

I think the most integral bit of sabermetric revelation is Bill James’s Pythagorean Theorum, which converts team runs scored and team runs allowed into estimated won loss records. From this single metric one can seemingly assess how much success in the game is tactical and how much is brute force.

But it turns out that this inspired bit of arithmetic may conceal all the interesting parts of the game. The Theorum describes the average results of all the players, and how they convert to a won loss record. It’s all a little mechanical, even though the math is pretty irrefutable.

The interesting part arrives in somewhat recent James backtracking about Clutch hitting, and what Tom Tippett says in this story about baseball simulations. It’s possible for the numbers to add up to no effect, but that doesn’t mean there is no effect.

After a bad beat at the poker table, I used to go home and run a million iterations of the hand in Turbo Texas Hold ‘Em. What I found out, was that I usually had table stakes, but I no longer had the money.

For individual players, performance matters. It’s impossible for me not to imagine that some players are more clutch, some might be less so. But I once directed a commercial video that starred Michael Jordan, and the point he made was the clutch players made the big plays because they were the best players. They got more chances, and their successes were remembered.

I’ve always used that as the example of how a clutch player denigrates clutch performance, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that.

For managers, the sacrifice bunt, the stolen base, the batting order (as Schwarz explores here) are their tools. Do they matter? Absolutely, sometimes. Sometimes, not.

So, while it’s possible to flatten the landscape using the historical data, for someone like Tony LaRussa, who is in the game, the job is all about getting his players into a winning frame of mind, to make sure the pitcher bats eighth, and to suggest that the game is all human. For him, it’s all about the individuals, because we know the best team, as defined by the numbers, doesn’t always win.

The biggest point about Schwarz’s story is that Game Simulations Don’t Answer Baseball’s What-Ifs.

Target Percentages in Action

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Fantasy Baseball Trade Market

I’ve never seen anyone use this method for draft tracking. The basic idea: Set target goals to finish third in each category. Then rate players on your draft sheet by the percentage of the total you need in each category they provide.

I’m always skeptical of these sorts of strategies, because assuming that everyone knows what they’re doing, the value they pull out of the draft or auction is going to be roughly equivalent. Which means you should not be able to walk away from the draft board with a winning team. The proof of this is that in the example the writer uses seven of his first nine picks on hitters and just barely picks up 50 percent of the totals he needs in Runs, RBI and HR. You have to assume he’s not going to do better than that with his last seven picks.

But in leagues that don’t have much trading, especially, this seems like it would be an effective way to make sure you draft a balanced team.

Ask Rotoman :: The Season is Done

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Ask Rotoman :: My drafting is done.

The link is to my preseason post auction look at my American Dream League team. Rereading it now I have to say that if you’d told me that Josh Hamilton would be great, that Gavin Floyd would be very good and that Edwin Jackson wouldn’t suck, that Justin Duchscherer would almost lead the league in ERA, that K-Rod would set a saves record, that Joe Mauer would lead the AL in batting average, that Milton Bradley would lead the AL in OBP, I would have been very happy.

If you’d told me that I was able to trade Richie Sexson for Asdrubal Cabrera (who was awfully good from mid-August on), that I’d be able to trade both my closers for a hitter and a pitcher (though neither was great) and still finish tied for third in saves, that Glen Perkins came off my reserve list and did a very creditable job until mid-September, I’d have been ecstatic.

How did I finish 8th? Two black holes: I spent $28 on Travis Hafner and he earned -$4. I spent $33 on Justin Verlander and he earned -$4, too. That’s -$67 I needed to make up just to get to even, from my two most expensive players.

Josh Hamilton earned a profit of $18. Duchscherer earned a profit of $12. Gavin Floyd earned a profit of $15. Francisco Rodriguez earned a proft of $22. That gets us to $67. It took my four best buys to wipe out the misery of my two worst buys.

After that things reverse. Milton Bradley earned a profit of $18. Joe Mauer earned a profit of $6. Torii Hunter earned a profit of $7. Okay, up $31. But… Juan Uribe lost $8, Brad Wilkerson lost $11, Reggie Willets lost $8, and some costly pitching stints from Andy Pettitte, Livan Hernandez and Jason Jennings wiped out the rest.

In a winning season not all the pieces click, but you just can’t have your best picks be offset by disasters. In this case I blame my opponents, who drove up the price of power hitting to such a level that I had almost no choice but to spend ridiculously on Hafner, though he came with risk. I can only blame myself for Verlander. He looked like the best available starter to me then, and he still does now. But clearly I was wrong.

The irony was that in 2007 I picked the right stud pitcher in this league, Johan Santana, and the wrong cheap guys, Cliff Lee and John Danks, who this year earned $40 and $16 respectively.

(For the record, ADL was won by Steven Levy, who had good freezes but then made great choices all draft long. Others in the money, in order, were Alex Patton/Bruce Berensmann, Michael Walsh and Walter Shapiro.)

In the other leagues:

Tout Wars was a disaster. An impressive run of injuries early, some savvy rejiggering in the middle kept me in the middle, but the pitching staff fell apart in August and September. The bad finish is in part a tribute to a Go for it trade in June that didn’t work out all the way, but this was a doomed season healthwise for this team. (First place went to Mike Lombardo for the third time in four years. He’s a great player. Second went to Glenn Colton.)

Rotoman’s Regulars is a format (20 team Yahoo) that bewilders me. I finished third three years ago but the last two years have been a disaster, mostly because I don’t know how to churn good guys off my roster to pick up guys who are playing better. Some of this is about attention, some of it is about temperment. Some of it is about a bad draft (did I really take Andruw Jones and Kelvim Escobar?) I think for 2009 I will be hosting the league, maybe I’ll even be the commish, but I’m not going to play in it again. Too painful, but a great game and an excellent format. (The winner was frequent Guide contributor JD Bolick. Runner up was Eun Park, who won the league in its first year.)

XFL is a 15 team mixed league with an auction in November and a 17 round reserve draft in March. We were in a rebuilding year (it’s a keeper league) but I had an awesome auction and not a bad draft, and we finished fourth. My partner, Alex, thought this was a bottom of the standings team, but he didn’t see the blooming of Youkilis and Jose Lopez and the continued excellence of Bobby Abreu and Randy Winn (this league uses OBP rather than BA). (Steve Moyer finished first, going away, with Doug Dennis and Trace Wood somewhat behind after swapping places daily until a week ago.)

All in all a dismal season for me. Not the other guys.

For those who’ve asked, I’m working very hard on a video about butterflies that will be done very soon. Work on the magazine is underway. There will eventually be real content on this page again. This year, with no weekly gig, I spent less time writing and way more time managing my teams, which I thought would be good. Fail! We’ll see how it works out next year.

Thanks for reading.

All about the little people

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Sam Walker at Sportsline.com

Sam Walker wrote a very good book about fantasy baseball called Fantasy Land, which covered his first year in Tout Wars, which was also his first year playing fantasy baseball. As a Wall Street Journal reporter and with the estimable Nando del Fino as a partner, Sam finished in the middle of the pack his first year, but won Tout his second year.

He’s got a big lead this year, as filmmakers are using Tout AL and another newcomer to make a movie of Sam’s book. In this column at Sportsline he explains what he did to make that lead happen. Names like Duchscherer, Hamilton, and Ervin Santana go part of the way, but Sam thinks he did some smart things, too.

Yes, he did.