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Baseball Prospectus | Articles | Fantasy Firefight

More information about the MLBAM fantasy baseball licensing program, with an emphasis on the intellectual property issues. It would have been nice to get an idea from Bill Meyers at USA Stats and Rick Wolf at All Star Stats what they intend to do. It also isn’t clear what the FSPA (the trade organization of fantasy sports) is thinking.

It seems to me that for MLBAM to license the player’s likenesses and team logos makes sense. They own that stuff and if they want to make an additional buck off it they’re entitled to. But if the stats are in the public domain, as everyone seems to agree, it’s hard to see how they can prevent stat services from doing their jobs. It’s easy, however, to see how they might try.

Patton and Co. Profiles

Alex Patton did lots of work this year compiling prospect notes for the magazine (The Fantasy Baseball Guide 2005, on sale now!). I was supposed to pay back with lots of player comments at PattonAndCo.com. I’ve chimed in when appropriate, but the generally excellent discussions there (organized by player) make it easy to say, “somebody else said what I would say.”

What I can say without equivocation is there is no better place to get some real collective analysis of a player’s chances this year. You’ll have to decide on March 1 if it’s worth the price, but consider that you also get Patton’s draft software and you may find it very cheap–all things considered.

Many do.

John Brattain: My Big Fat Steroids Column — The Hardball Times

I posted this a few days ago on the links page by mistake. If you’re outraged that players are taking steroids, John has something worthwhile reading.

My friend Bruce Buschel sent the following to our league’s Tightcircle.

Hasn’t the media fallen down on this steroid story?
Baseball writers do nothing but follow teams for six or
seven months a year. Didn’t anyone notice that Bret Boone
showed up with 25 pounds of muscle one spring training?
Roto players did. I bought him at any price. Now they are
saying LaRusso should have ratted out his players.
Nonsense. His job is to protect his players. It’s the
media’s job to expose them. After Caminiti fessed up, why
wasn’t there more investigating? Why not interview every
ex-player about drugs and drugs alone? (A Vex tome?) If
Kinsey got people to talk about sex, then why not drugs?
When the media has to wait for the government to have a
grand jury leak in order to break a story…we are all in
trouble. Be it the war or steroids, the press is asleep at
the wheel.

Don’t steroids make Pedro’s numbers even more astounding?
And if Santana’s numbers last season were comparable to
Koufax’s best, when you consider the hitters were juiced,
Santana’s season was even more amazing. The best pitching
season in the history of the game?

Looking forward to Sabremetrics next statistic: SABA
(steroid adjusted batting average).

ESPN.com – Gammons: Motown revival

Gammons’ take on the Magglio signing and the competitiveness of the AL Central doesn’t offer much that is new, though I didn’t realize the Tigers had offered more money to Edgar Renteria, Adrian Beltre and JD Drew than each accepted elsewhere.

More interesting is his nuanced assessment of the Canseco accusations, at least as they’ve been reported so far. I’m not sure why he’s so sure GW Bush didn’t know about Canseco’s steroid use in 1992, as Canseco says, but clearly there are plenty of reasons to distrust Canseco’s memory.

And motivation.

What’s really interesting is Gammons equating steroid use with past spit-balling and corking. I’ve made a similar argument about competition and cheating, though I think this exact parallel is far from perfect. What is really necessary is to decide how we’re going to talk about the things that have happened in the past.

Talk of Whitey Ford and Gaylord Perry usually reference their cheating, without disregarding all their achievements, some of which came because of it. The same happens now with Mark McGwire, and as more details surface other steroid and hormone users will be tagged. The baseball statistics we adore have never been free of taint anyway, and we’ll eventually get used to some sort of imperfect steroid translations. We have to.

Yahoo! Sports – MLB – Source: Tigers agree to $75 million deal with Ordonez

In the mock draft in The Fantasy Baseball Guide I chose Magglio Ordonez in the third round, which provoked a fair number of huzzahs from the other drafters. If he’d been healthy, for sure, Ordonez would have been a first rounder, but he’d undergone more than one surgery and some mysterious Austrian treatments, so no one knew what his health was.

I took Ordonez at that point because if he was healthy enough to play he was a great hitter to get in the third round, but it was probably too big a risk to take on a hitter who hadn’t done any running, hadn’t seen any team physicians, hadn’t done much to convince anyone that he really was ready, because he really wasn’t ready.

As best I can tell, based on Will Carroll’s somewhat cryptic report and other less graphic but more straight forward reports, Ordonez isn’t really running all that well thus far. So it seems safe to say his days as a base stealer are pretty much over. But he’s working out and running, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see him whacking the tar out of the ball come Opening Day.

So, the Detroit Tigers have apparently hopped on board, with a deal that obligates to pay Magglio a lot of money even if he busts this year, but allows them to get out of paying him even more unless he proves he can play.

Dave Dombrowski is an excellent evaluator of talent, and a fine manager of personel, so while I think this could go badly for the Tigers, it is also an investment in one of the best hitters in the game. Albeit one who is a bit older than you’d like.

Fantasy players should be wary of Ordonez this year, he’s recovering from injuries and surgeries for which we don’t have historical precedents. But he’s a really good hitter whose game wasn’t reliant on his legs before his injuries, so it would be a mistake to ignore him.

Look for fewer steals than in the past, but unless he breaks down again (not an unlikely scenario) he’s likely to be a great hitter at a very good price.

Yahoo! Sports – MLB – Sosa’s fall from Chicago’s grace was hard, fast

As best I can tell from this story Sosa’s major problem was a love for “horrible” salsa, rap and bad light rock.

What I can say for sure is that it isn’t easy making the big bucks. Sure, plenty of utilty infielders make $2M, but when you become a star your behavior, your tastes and your usefullness are constantly evaluated.

Sosa isn’t likely to be what he once was, but the general disdain for him now creates a massive buying oportunity. Sammy Sosa a sleeper? Sort of.

Major League Baseball : The Official Site

MLB has posted its 2005 Fantasy preview. I haven’t read all of it, but after scanning starting pitching (I wrote the NL Starters, which on top of the magazine and the holidays may explain why I feel so tired right now), it looks real good to me. All the writers who worked on it that I know are first rate.

And it’s free. Bravo baseball.

Masters of Fantasy Baseball Forum -> Sickels’ Top Ten Prospects: Hitters/Pitchers

John Sickels popped up at mastersball.com’s forums to post the full content of his farewell, which was very modest and really makes you wonder what ESPN is doing. There is some discussion in the forum about his plans, some of which will involve mastersball.com this year, as well as his independent projects.

If we were choosing up talent for baseball/fantasy websites, like we used to playing stickball, and I had the first pick I think I’d choose John. Good luck to him in all ventures.

ESPN.com – MLB – Sickels: Top prospects

This is John Sickels’ last column for ESPN.com. They give his ongoing projects a nice plug, but his farewell seems oddly truncated. How could ESPN not pay this guy whatever he says he needs? With Neyer behind the screen I only check in at ESPN rarely. for Gammons and Sickels primarily, until now.

His Top Prospects lists here are a little less detailed than usual, like he’s trying to get this over with. They contain most of the usual names, with the usual provisos: Dallas McPherson is a rookie of the year candidate, if his glove is good enough and he can keep his batting average in the acceptable range.

And the list suffers because he doesn’t include ETA figures. But that’s carping. Is ESPN crazy?