A question for discussion on rankings

I’m generally one of those guys more in the middle, which works out fine with players who have a few seasons under their belt because I look at their stats season to season over their entire career and how it compares to the last season.  This usually gives me a fairly close projection on what the player will do for the upcoming season.

However for those young players who have little major league experience I tend to look at their minor league stats.  My projections on these guys are generally hit or miss, while I was proud to say it did lead me to take Mark Reynolds last year, it also had me extremely over-rate guys like Alex Gordon, Jay Bruce, and Chris Davis.  So much so that I’m contemplating taking only proven guys in the first 10 or so rounds of the draft next year.

I hide the names until the final pass.  This is where I bump a player up/down based on what i know about his various risk factors (playing time, injury history, possible trade, etc) and how others in my league value him (players on certain teams often get overvalued…).

I totally agree.

When I play the Yahoo Fantasy League, I start out with their ranking, then I start removing players that I either don’t care to own or think they had an outlier plus season the year before or think that they are headed for a downslide (particularly for players I think are injury prone).

That automatically moves up the players I do like, a la what you noted in your article, and it has worked for the most part.

Also, for the Giants players I particularly want, I jump them up a little bit more, and I ended up with Lincecum, Sandoval, and Wilson this last season (missed out on Matt Cain, unfortunately).

Looking only at the numbers excludes tons of extra information.  Ignoring that information puts you at a disadvantage.  So long as the criteria you’re using to evaluate a player is rational, any extra information you can garner is an advantage over only looking at the numbers.

The best evaluators are able to sift through both the statistical and the nonstatistical information to more accurately gauge a player’s expected production than their opponents.

Let’s put a hypothetical example out there.

Player A hit around .250 last year with 15 HRs in around 350 ABs.  The player in question didn’t offer much in the way of speed.  Let’s pretend that the underlying stats say that player A wasn’t particularly lucky or unlucky, and that the numbers accurately reflect the skill level that player A performed at during the previous season.

Knowing nothing else… how can we deviate from last year’s stats in coming up with projections for next year?  Looking purely at the numbers, we can’t.

Now let’s add in some more information.  Player A will most likely get more ABs in the coming season, as he is expected to be a full-time player.  This piece of non-statistical information obviously helps player A’s value.  Though not a completely reliable method of projection, we can quite easily extrapolate player A’s stats to how much we expect him to play.

Now let’s add some more information.  Player A put up the aforementioned numbers in his age 21 season.  This small piece of information might suddenly be the more important than anything else that’s been mentioned.  After all, the only 21-year olds on major league ballclubs are typically the most elite prospects.  If player A is already in the majors, it’s highly likely that he was an elite prospect.  A little more information- namely that player A is a former #1 overall pick and scouts say that he’s got physical tools overflowing out of his ass- gives us reason to believe that he’s got a significantly higher ceiling than what he put up in the previous year.

If you haven’t figure out by now, player A is Justin Upton.

Going only by stats, we can’t expect anything other than what the numbers have told us.  If we attach the name Justin Upton to the numbers, though, we suddenly have an incredible wealth of new knowledge.

Even intuition that we are unable to rationalize shouldn’t be wholly discarded, since intuition is pretty much our subconscious at work.  I wouldn’t too much stock into it, but I wouldn’t discard it wholly, either.

Even our “CONSCIOUS” thoughts are typically a matter of heuristics that occur before we are even aware of them.  Our brains reach their conclusions before we can even articulate what those conclusions are.

@Derek

In the Davis/Dunn case, I guess people just expected Davis to be a .285 hitter, while Dunn would hit near his career average (.249 after this year).

In a more general sense, I guess people prefer shiny new toys to their old ones.