THT Fantasy Focus

Posted by Paul Singman at 2:58am

Dominating fantasy baseball with Twitter

Today we’ve got a special guest article for you written by Kevin Orris of FantasyPros911. He and I had been talking a bit recently about the potential advantages a fantasy baseball owner can gain by using Twitter, so here he is with his thoughts on the matter. At the end, you can find some of my follow-up thoughts.

Kevin Orris

With the development of new technologies, the way fantasy baseball owners manage their teams has changed a great deal in recent years. For example, we now have live scoring rather than doing it by hand once a week, but my focus today is on Twitter.

For those uninformed, Twitter is a social networking site similar to Facebook and MySpace, but what’s special about Twitter is that it only allows people to post 140 character messages that are broadcast to all of your “followers.” In the changing fantasy baseball world, where people are scrounging for the quickest news, Twitter is a fantastic resource.

Not only is it free to sign up, but there are not any costs involved. How great is free entertainment in a time when the world is in a recession? The reason that I’m writing about Twitter today, though, has nothing to do with cost. It’s all about dominating your fantasy baseball league.

As most fantasy owners know, during the season, navigating the waiver wire is vital to success. Sure, drafting is a big part of it, but once you draft a team, you can’t expect it to manage itself. You've got to pick up and drop players and make trades along the way as well.

Anyone that has played fantasy baseball before knows that it’s fun to make transactions, especially when they pay off for you in a big way. It’s a simple fact that injuries happen in baseball, and in order to adjust to this in fantasy, you've got to stay on top of things.

By using Twitter as a fantasy owner, not only are you able to chat about your feelings and learn about those of actual baseball players, you’re able to find out the latest news in no time. I’m not sure about you, but being able to see what Nick Swisher, CC Sabathia, Coco Crisp, Brian Wilson, etc. have to say on a regular basis is entertaining.

Now, they are never going to tell you about their latest injury, but from a fantasy perspective, there are hundreds of fantasy baseball owners and writers on Twitter that regularly “tweet” about their teams, statistics of hot and cold players, and anything else on their mind. (For all of the Twitter “lingo” go here: http://whyfacebook.com/2008/09/11/twitter-lingo-demystified/)

This is where Twitter comes in handy; anyone is able to follow any public profile (very few profiles are set to private). Therefore, you can follow anyone from ESPN personality Tony Kornheiser (@PTIshow) to Fanball.com writer Jason Collette (@jasoncollette) or even myself (@kevinorris). By doing this, you are able to see what hundreds, thousands, or in Ashton Kutcher’s case, millions of people have to say. If you follow the right people, this can be used to your advantage to dominate your fantasy league.

For example, according to RotoWorld.com, a popular site for the latest player news, at 4:53 PM ET on April 21, they reported that Boston Red Sox outfielder Rocco Baldelli was headed to the DL. On Twitter, I found out about that about 15-20 minutes before hand.

This past Saturday, news broke that pitcher Nelson Figueroa was headed back to the Mets, when original reports stated that he would become a free agent. @TheRopolitans broke the news at 9:34 AM, and almost an hour later (10:27 AM to be exact) RotoWorld.com broke the news. MLB.com reported the news a whopping three hours later at 12:49 PM.

There are a few possible reasons behind this that I’m going to take a stab at:

1) Many Twitter members can tweet from their phones, which means while listening to the radio if they hear some breaking news, they can tweet it to everyone.

2) The people at RotoWorld don’t find their info from direct sources too often; rather it’s typically from other sources reporting it first.

3) There are people on Twitter, like myself, who are connected to people in professional baseball and they sometimes find out news bits before some news sources. I do have a few connections, and just this past week I was one of the first to find out that Brian McCann would not require a second Lasik surgery after talking to his agent on my live radio show.

4) There are live tweets from multiple sports media outlets, including ESPN, which get out pretty quickly. Although Twitter members have some connections, more often than not, main media sources will be the ones breaking the news. Twitter however, allows the news to spread faster, and more often than not, local newspapers and radio stations break stories about their teams before national outlets. The passing of Harry Kalas was first brought up by Philly.com, and was posted on Twitter within minutes.

Now that you’re excited to start an account of your own, I would recommend “following” a number of people which include: @espn, @vegasman2000, @fp911, @babeslovebaseball, @rotoadvice, @joelhenard, @dsportsdaily, @rotoinfo, @JoseCanseco, @MarkBradleyAJC, @rotoprofessor, @theropolitans, @jintman, @glundeen, @JerseyHitman, @bigjonwilliams, @invisibleman79, @johnnyarchive, @FriedBaseballATL, @coryh64, @robertreed, @FBTM_Chris, @crookedpitch, @stanhayes, @troypatterson, @seanroto, and @rhettoldham.

Be sure to sign up for an account today and let me know what you think in the comments section below.

Derek Carty

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m very behind on Twitter. I’ve just recently created an account, and I’ve yet to use it. Still, I recognize the power Twitter can have for fantasy owners.

Thirty to 40 percent of closers lose their jobs every year, meaning there can be as many as 12 new closers wracking up saves. Anyone who has played in a league with daily transactions knows what it’s like to dash to the waiver wire upon hearing of a changing of the guard. How often, though, have you made that dash only to realize that someone beat you to the punch? With Twitter, you could find out this news as much as two hours earlier. And this doesn't just go for closers. Great for injuries, minor league call-ups, playing time changes, or really anything else of note.

I remember Kevin telling me a couple of weeks ago that Lastings Milledge had been demoted. I had yet to hear of it, and he said that he heard on Twitter. Sure enough, a half-hour later it appeared at MLB.com or ESPN (or one of the major sites), and what seemed like an hour or two later, it appeared as RotoWorld headline (this isn't an exact time-frame, just my recollection of it).

While the tone of this article might seem to be anti-RotoWorld, RotoWire, RotoTimes, etc, let me assure you it's not. I actually think RotoWorld is a fantastic resource. RotoWorld is great to catch up on the day's news in a short amount of time, but for news that needs to be acted upon immediately after it breaks, Twitter seems like the ticket. In a game where seconds and minutes matter, it would be foolish not to grab any advantage we can.

Why is Twitter so much faster? I have a couple suspicions. When news breaks and the first beat writer gets a hold of it, it probably takes 10 or 20 minutes to pump an article out. Then, unless you've got an immediate RSS feed to every single newspaper and website on the internet, you're going to have to wait until a major site like ESPN runs with it or until a site like RotoWorld picks it up. Then, you'll still have to be in the right place to read about it at one of these sites before your opponents do. Whatever the case, we're often getting news third-hand and dealing with the associated lag time.

With Twitter, you can get instant updates sent to your computer or phone, sometimes by the people breaking the news in the first place. At the very least, you're receiving access to the omnipresence of thousands of people surfing the web, and all it takes is one to be in the right place at the right time.

People on Twitter don't need to take the time to write a full article. They can shoot off a Tweet in five seconds and from anywhere since it can be done via cell phone. I can easily foresee every last beat writer in the country jumping on the Twitter bandwagon in the near future. They're in an extremely competitive business themselves, and Twitter seems like the quickest way of getting the news out.

Again, I'm behind on this stuff, so I could wrong, but to me this makes sense.

Readers turn

Any of you guys using Twitter? Have you found reliable news sources? Have we missed an advantage of it? Disagree completely? Whatever the case, drop us a comment.

Posted by Kevin Orris and Derek Carty at 2:53am (12) Comments

Yahoo standings and category averages

This is going to be a fairly short entry, but I hope it will still be informative. A couple Fantasy Focus articles over the last few weeks have referenced Yahoo leagues and this article, which provides the category averages for teams that finished in the top three of 12-team, standard 5x5 leagues in 2008. As I mentioned in my last Roster Doctor article, at the beginning of each season, I like to compare my current teams to the standings of previous leagues to see how they might do. I’ll take the average line of the project systems (i.e. Marcel, CHONE, Bill James, etc.) for each starter, add those numbers up by category and then check those past standings to help gauge the number of points my current team might accumulate in each category. While not an exact science, this method gives me a rough estimate of how I might fare in a particular league.

While the aforementioned Yahoo article provides averages for the top three places for each category, I haven’t seen an article that provides averages across all places. Yahoo allows fantasy sports participants to check standings of the past leagues they have taken part in, so I have compiled category averages for all positions for every 12-team, 5x5, Roto-style leagues I have ever participated through Yahoo. Dating back to 2001, I have apparently played in 27 of said leagues (this sort of makes me wonder what I’ve been doing with my life over the last near-decade, but whatever). Here’s the data, separated by category and sorted in descending order:

 Points   Runs     HR     RBI      SB     Avg      W       SV      K      ERA     WHIP   Points
   12    861.2   241.8   849.9   163.5   0.298    85.1   139.5   1059.9   3.35    1.18     12
   11    832.6   227.1   811.8   138.6   0.294    80.6   121.1   1012.8   3.57    1.22     11
   10    815.4   218.6   791.1   124.6   0.291    78.1   106.7   976.5    3.65    1.24     10
   9     794.9   209.9   771.1   111.3   0.289    75.9    97.3   947.8    3.75    1.26     9
   8     778.2   203.1   754.4   106.8   0.286    74.7    86.9   926.5    3.82    1.27     8
   7     764.6   197.9   741.1    99.3   0.285    72.8    77.2   900.9    3.89    1.28     7
   6     753.4   193.0   724.0    93.9   0.282    69.7    68.9   887.7    3.96    1.29     6
   5     739.7   189.3   711.4    88.1   0.280    67.0    62.4   856.6    4.03    1.30     5
   4     728.5   180.9   693.1    79.4   0.277    64.4    57.1   826.8    4.10    1.32     4
   3     710.8   176.3   673.6    68.8   0.275    61.4    48.8   771.2    4.17    1.33     3
   2     691.3   166.9   655.7    61.5   0.272    56.1    37.6   713.4    4.33    1.36     2
   1     624.9   150.0   595.3    50.5   0.267    48.3    19.2   643.7    4.52    1.39     1

Obviously, the sample size isn’t very large and I'm not sure taking averages across so many years is the best way to handle things, but I also don't think these numbers are too far off from what the averages will be for all Yahoo leagues this year. Hopefully, this table will give you a general idea of where your team may finish at the end of the year, and also give you an idea as to categories in which you could use improvement.

Posted by Marco Fujimoto at 2:51am

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

An introduction to daily fantasy baseball contests

When I started writing for The Hardball Times, the plan was for me to write about Rotohog, since that was the game where I had experienced the most success and to which was devoting the most time. That plan went out the window when Rotohog eliminated most of the prizes for its contests. Fantasy baseball is always fun, but it’s a lot more fun when there’s some money on the line, and without substantial prizes, I wasn’t as interested in Rotohog. Since then I’ve been writing on topics related to a wide variety formats using daily transactions. However, I’ve been looking to introduce a more consistent focus to my articles. It’s been decided that going forward I’ll be writing about the fantasy baseball topic nearest and dearest to my heart—daily contests.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with them, here’s how daily fantasy baseball contests work. You pick a team today. You win (or lose) tonight. That’s it, more or less. Most sites run the contests as "salary cap" games, where each player has an assigned cost, and you have to pick a full lineup without exceeding the salary cap. Scoring is based on a points system. In addition, some sites offer "live draft" format contests, where you actually do a quick draft with one or more opponents. Games are run with anywhere from 2 up to 100 (or more) contestants, and for stakes ranging from play money to $200 or more per contest.

Close to a dozen sites offer these contests, including Draftbug (which is my site), Snapdraft (the most heavily marketed site so far), and Fantasysportslive (the earliest site to offer these games). While they share many features, there are some differences in the sites' look and feel, contests, scoring, roster configurations, and other features. However, they have enough in common that the strategic issues players face will be similar on all of them, and most of what I talk about should be relevant no matter which you play on.

So why do I think these games are so great? There are two reasons.

Daily fantasy baseball contests allow a lot more room for use of Sabermetrics to gain an edge over your opponents. In a traditional league, the most important skills include performance projection for the season, player valuation for your format, and ongoing game strategy. For the first two, commercially available forecasts and ratings have made it very hard to gain any kind of substantial edge over opponents. Game strategy can provide an edge but isn’t especially dependent on understanding or using sabermetrics. By contrast, success at daily fantasy contests is almost entirely about who has the best “sabermetric-fu.” While the results of any one contest can appear to be almost entirely luck, the cumulative results of multiple contests per day over the course of the season have an extremely high degree of skill. And that skill encompasses forecasting player performance each day based on a host of factors including skill, park factors, home field advantage, opposing starting pitcher, opposing bullpen, health, weather, opposing lineup and more. Each of those offers the opportunity for a wide range of approaches, which will impact your success or failure. For numbers geeks, these games are like a sabermetric playground, where we can profit based on the success of our ideas.

On the other hand, as obsessed as I am (and many of you are) with baseball in general, and fantasy baseball in particular, one of the drawbacks of traditional (full season) leagues is that they’re a grind. Particularly the daily transaction leagues can feel like a chore after a while. If you take a day off it can really hurt your team, and a summer vacation can ruin your entire fantasy baseball season. Daily contests solve that problem. You play them when you have the time, and don’t play when you don’t have the time. For those of us with families and other responsibilities, that’s a real blessing. I may spend hours each day thinking about and working on fantasy baseball, but every once in a while there’s a day when it’s really hard to find even a few minutes for it. Daily contests eliminate the burden of having to check my lineup on those days.

I hope in the coming weeks and months I can not only show you how terrific these games are, but provide you with many of the ideas and tools that will help you succeed in them!

Posted by Alex Zelvin at 1:44am (5) Comments

Roster Doctor

Posted by Jonathan Halket at 2:04am (4) Comments

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

When the wisdom of crowds is wrong

Philosophers have been debating free will vs. predetermination for centuries. Many who subscribe to the latter point of view believe that the actions of an individual are the natural outcome of a series of fixed, historical events. In other words, free will is merely an illusion.

Anyone who participated in a fantasy baseball draft or auction before the season started may find that viewpoint surprising. After all, don’t we exercise choice when determining things like whether to ignore Alex Rodriguez’ injury and take him anyway in drafts or whether to take Nick Markakis or Matt Kemp in the 3rd round?

Maybe so.

But consider everything that seemed almost conventional thinking by the time we all showed up to draft. For example, Chris Davis was drafted anywhere between the 54th pick and the 80th pick in almost every draft, according to average draft data. Exactly who determined that Davis was this kind of value — and how?

Understanding the answer to this question helps us make decisions when subsequent, unexpected things happen.

Last October, the 2008 baseball season ended. At the time, most people who participated in fantasy baseball turned their attention to other things — like remembering their girlfriend’s name. Or football.

Meanwhile, a group of hard-core enthusiasts started to assess the previous season. Many began conducting mock drafts. Pretty soon, people like Sean Smith and Bill James and organizations like Baseball Prospectus and BaseballHQ began considering things like a player’s past performance, a player’s age, and peripheral similarities to others who have played the game in the past century, releasing projections for what we might expect in the 2009 season. (Methods vary.) More mock drafts. Soon, the big fantasy service providers like ESPN, Yahoo, and CBS Sports introduced their own rankings and projections. More mock drafts.

By the time the average person who plays fantasy baseball got into a draft or auction room, they were looking at guidebooks and rankings based on collected intelligence gathering and making “choices.”

Perhaps one individual may have decided to dismiss the hype on a certain sleeper. Perhaps another individual may have fixed himself to a player who was largely dismissed. But by and large, the fantasy baseball community arrived at a consensus valuation of every ballplayer in professional baseball.

As James Surowiecki pointed out in his book, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” group decision-making, based on an aggregation of available data, tends to be surprisingly accurate compared to the decisions of a lone individual.

For this reason, it’s very, very unwise to panic and make rash decisions on slumping or surging ballplayers based on what’s happened to date in the 2009 season. Three weeks of baseball represents a small statistical sampling of less than 10 percent of the 2009 season. In most cases, the collected preseason wisdom of millions, who based their decisions on data collected and produced by a handful of experts, will still be the best oracle to what will happen in the final five months of the season.

However, there are some flaws in this group-sourced valuation process.

The first flaw concerns players without a great deal of experience in major league baseball. With a smaller body of work, young prospects are tough to project. Expert forecasters have tried to solve this by making use of “minor league equivalencies,” but these numbers are still not as reliable as actual major league. In mock drafts, deviation on young, inexperienced players tends to be high. In other words, the consensus is less tight.

The second flaw concerns injuries. Nobody can predict them. Of course, some players are injury-prone (and the fantasy world adjusts valuations based on the tag), but any player dealing with a new, unexpected injury becomes less likely to hit a projection target.

The third and last flaw —at least that we can think of at the moment — concerns opportunity. Unfortunately, the fantasy baseball world holds no sway over the decisions of a real-life major league baseball manager. We may see a player as a good bet to reach 100 runs based on a high ability to get on base, but if a fickle manager disagrees and puts the batter last in his lineup, he’ll also become more likely to disappoint. Conversely, a pitcher or batter who we’ve figured had little opportunity and then figures into a promotion, will surpass our expectations.

Consider these three things when deciding to veer off from the masses and make decisions based on a new "reality."

Posted by Eriq Gardner at 1:00pm (8) Comments

Big-name closers dealing with injuries

Carlos Marmol suffered a mild left knee sprain last Friday night after delivering a pitch to Albert Pujols. He then felt more pronounced pain on a 1-1 offering to Ryan Ludwick, coming up limping after apparently twisting awkwardly on his follow-through on the planting leg. The Cubs training staff did a great job here by not allowing Marmol to continue, as this is the type of injury that could easily go from a mild, grade I strain to a more serious injury in no time.

The MRI came back showing only a grade I sprain, and nothing more. More importantly, Marmol is feeling fine now, and he was able to throw a pain-free bullpen session today. He is going to be available to pitch on Tuesday. This is nothing for fantasy owners to worry about going forward. With Kevin Gregg currently in the doghouse, Marmol seems to be entrenched as the closer for the Cubs. It was ridiculous for Lou Piniella to tab Gregg as the closer at the beginning of the season, when Marmol was clearly the better pitcher. Place Marmol back in your lineup with confidence.

Trevor Hoffman was activated on Sunday, after spending time on the DL since March 30 with an oblique strain. When I think of Hoffman, I can't help but think of Troy Percival. Other than their proximity in age, these are two guys who are going to be injury prone for the rest of their careers. With Hoffman back in the closer's seat, Carlos Villanueva shifts back to a setup role, and makes for a fine addition in leagues that count holds. In Yahoo leagues, Villanueva has dual eligibility (SP/RP). Hoffman owners may want to keep him on speed dial, if not on their roster.

Jose Valverde's strained right calf is going to keep him out at least through mid-week, as he aggravated the injury on Sunday after pushing off to run towards first base on a grounder. He had already been out of action from last Wednesday through Friday. The fact that his injury was aggravated without much activity, and that he has what is called "pitting edema" in his lower leg (i.e. moderate swelling that leaves an indentation in the skin when pressed) indicates that it was probably a grade 2 strain. He is still limping quite noticeably, so the prospects of having him ready by Friday are poor. The Astros are trying to avoid placing him on the DL, but I wouldn't bet on a return this week, so I would say he is probably 70 percent likely to hit the DL. Latroy Hakwins is the de facto closer in his absence. You've got to be pretty desperate for saves if you want to add Hawkins.

Joakim Soria is going to be treated with kid gloves, so if there is any hint that he isn't right by the end of the week, he probably will be sent to the DL. He is clearly the most valuable pitcher in their bullpen, if not their entire staff, so don't be surprised if he doesn't return this week. He has been dealing with a sore, stiff right shoulder. As we have learned, this type of nomenclature can be misleading. This phrase has been used in situations where the injury ended up being a rotator cuff tear, labrum tear, tendonitis, and more, so you never know.

An encouraging sign was that Soria threw 30-35 easy throws yesterday in a bullpen session on flat ground, without pain, but it was well under maximal effort. If the Royals were overly concerned, or if there was something more serious going on, he would not have been allowed to even pick up a ball. This tells me that there is probably no rotator cuff or labral tear to worry about here. This could be a situation similar to what Matt Lindstrom dealt with earlier this spring. With Soria likely to be out until the weekend at the earliest, Juan Cruz and Kyle Farnsworth are the options to close out games. Cruz is the one I would target, and the better pitcher overall for the job.

Posted by Chris Neault at 12:42am (3) Comments

Monday, April 27, 2009

Roster Doctor: 4/27/09

Posted by Eriq Gardner at 1:43am (5) Comments

Confessions of fantasy baseball addict: Who is really the back-up closer in Kansas City

Single league format fantasy baseball leagues, henceforth known as AL-only and NL-only leagues, have proven to be less popular than their younger, more prolific mixed league cousins. Whether this is good or bad is a question of personal taste, as each has its pluses and minuses.

When playing in an AL- or NL-only leagues, one is compelled to know more about every team than one does playing in a mixed league. Exactly who cares about Darin Erstad (anymore) or the necessity of rostering Angel Berroa? How you answer that question is a good predictor of whether you prefer mixed leagues or AL- and NL-only ones.

I want to know about both players and make roster decisions based on each. That is why I prefer AL- and NL-only leagues. The rationale behind adding, reserving, waiving and keeping players of Erstad’s and Berroa’s ilk will be the weekly focus of Confessions of a Fantasy Baseball Expert.

For what it's worth, Erstad’s value derives from the possibility of Michael Bourn repeating as the hitting version of Shawn Chacon (a one-category player whose additional category contributions are complete negatives) and the Astros proclivity for veteran players regardless of on-the-field production.

2004 Shawn Chacon: 35 Saves, 7.11 ERA, 1.87 WHIP, 1 W, 52 K
2008 Michael Bourn: 41 SBs, .229 AVG, 5 HR, 29 RBI, 57 Runs

Friday afternoon brought the announcement, signalled by the previous eight day’s of non-use, that Kansas City Royals’ closer Joakim Soria will miss at the next three to five days to rest shoulder discomfort. While this sent mixed leaguers looking to add Juan Cruz, the AL-only player had to dig deeper as Cruz was taken at the draft as was everyother likely back-up closer.

The challenge presented to the AL-only player is finding the next next in-line closer. This is difficult because most peripheral statistical analysis has already identified the reliever most likely to succeed and become the closer at the first opportunity. Hence, Juan Cruz and his 12.8 K/9 is typically enough. Missed by most fantasy leaguers was Cruz’ declining GB%. The complement, in the geometric sense, of a declining GB% is an increasing LD%/FB%, neither of which are positives for any pitcher much less one who is supposed to preserve wins in the 9th inning.

As one can see, 2009 has continued the trend with early concerns in an increased HR/G and HR/F.

   Year     Tm     LD%     GB%     IF/F    K/G     BB/G    HR/G   *HR/F    P/PA    LOB%
  2004    ATL    20.20%  44.60%  10.30%    9      3.9     0.9    11.60%    4     82.50%
  2005    OAK    19.20%  45.50%  17.10%   8.2     5.3     1.2    17.20%   3.8    54.40%
  2006    ARI    22.90%  39.90%  9.40%    8.3     4.4     0.66   7.90%     4     72.50%
  2007    ARI    18.50%  34.80%  7.90%    12.9    4.8     1.04   11.30%   4.3    74.80%
  2008    ARI    15.70%  26.90%  6.50%    12.8    5.6     0.9    8.10%    4.6    83.60%
  2009     KC    28.60%  28.60%  22.20%   6.5     5.2     1.3    15.40%   4.4    89.30%

So the question is who is next in line? I know this is unanalytical, but Kyle Farnsworth is dismissed out of hand. As a Yankees fan, I know he is reliable for just one thing: a home run at the wrong time. As a matter of fact, the two taters Farnsworth has served this season both resulted in Royals losses.

There exist two additional options that playing in an AL-only league would force one to explore. Both are failed starting pitchers who arrived in Kansas City via horrible environments for starting pitchers. RHP Jamey Wright arrived via free agency after being converted to relief pitching by the Rangers last season, while Robinson Tejada came to Kansas City after Texas gave-up on the then-26 year-old when couldn’t strikeout enough batters to overcome some atrocious control (5.9 K/9 versus 5.1 BB/9).

Tejeda offers the the one peripheral skill most fantasy leaguers desire in a potential closing find: a high K/9. For Tejeda, the move from the rotation to the bullpen had a gamma rays exposure-like effect on his strikeout rate. As a starter, he struck out a fewer than six per nine innings. Once he went to the bullpen, that rate skyrocketed to more than 10 per nine innings with the early 2009 results showing an astronomical 16.3 per nine innings!

That would typically be enough to tilt the typical owner into deciding to add Robinson Tejeda from the free agent pool in a saves gamble. But hold on! Tejeda has not managed to get any control of his walk rate in his move to the bullpen. Apparently, that gamma rays exposure had the same effect on Tejeda as it did on Bruce Banner: incredible strength with minimal control! Nevermind the distressing GB%.

  Year     Tm      Lg     LD%     GB%     IF/F    K/G     BB/G    HR/G   *HR/F    P/PA    LOB%
  2005    PHI      NL    20.90%  35.70%  13.70%   7.4     5.3     0.52   5.10%     4     75.60%
  2006    TEX      AL    17.50%  37.10%  10.50%   4.7     3.7     1.17   9.10%    3.8    75.00%
  2007    TEX      AL    14.30%  35.00%  13.80%   5.9     5.1     1.45   12.30%   3.9    64.40%
  2008    TEX      AL    30.00%  25.00%  11.10%   5.3     6.6     1.33   12.00%   4.7    46.50%
  2008     KC      AL    17.70%  34.40%  19.60%   10.1    4.7     0.74   8.70%    4.1    66.10%
  2009     KC      AL    0.00%   16.70%   N/A     16.3    9.8      0     0.00%    4.4    88.90%

This leaves Jamey Wright as the logical free agent saves gamble from the Kansas City bullpen. Jamey Wright has one particular skill that makes him the attractive option to close in the event Joakim Soria’s shoulder is more serious than the team is currently letting on. Wright has a GB% in excess of 60 percent.

In addition, his K/9 was an acceptable 6.1 in 2007. So far in 2009, Wright has upped that to 7.1 and decreased his BB/9 from last season’s 3.6 to 1.2. This is the kind of statistical discovery that makes fantasy owners’ days!

  Year     Tm     LD%     GB%     IF/F    K/G     BB/G    HR/G   *HR/F    P/PA    LOB%
  2004    COL    22.30%  49.80%  17.60%   4.4     4.8     0.86   11.40%   3.8    77.20%
  2005    COL    20.30%  52.70%  7.10%     5       4      1.08   13.30%   3.5    66.90%
  2006     SF    18.40%  58.10%  8.30%    4.5     3.7     0.92   15.30%   3.5    66.80%
  2007    TEX    17.20%  54.80%  11.90%   4.6     4.8     0.7    10.00%   3.8    75.70%
  2008    TEX    19.60%  61.90%   N/A     6.1     3.6     0.51   9.60%    3.8    61.20%
  2009     KC    13.00%  65.20%  20.00%   7.3     1.2     1.22   26.90%   3.2   107.10%

Right now, you’ve got one of two reactions depending on your fantasy format preference. Either you feel you have lost 10 minutes of your life that you can never recover or you are readying to click over to your fantasy league website(s) to add Jamey Wright.

Posted by Eric Hinz at 1:05am (6) Comments

Friday, April 24, 2009

Roster Doctor - 4/24/09

Welcome to THT Fantasy's Roster Doctor. If you'd like your team to be analyzed by one of our fantasy baseball experts, please send your full roster to this address. Also be sure to include your league's player pool (mixed, AL-only, NL-only), number of teams, scoring format (roto, head-to-head, points, etc.), categories, whether or not it's a keeper league, and any other pertinent information. If your roster is selected it will be analyzed in a future Roster Doctor column.

In my last few "Roster Doctor" articles I chose relatively standard leagues so I could better establish a context for the team and also so more people could relate to the discussion. Today, however, I decided to veer from that path and have chosen a more quirky team to doctor. Check out these settings:

Player Pool: Mixed
No. of Teams: 10
Categories: 9x9 - R, 2B, 3B, HR, RBI, SB, BB, E, AVG, W, L, CG, SHO, SV, K, HLD, ERA, WHIP
Scoring Type: Head-to-Head
Roster:

C: Geovany Soto
1B: Albert Pujols
2B: Brandon Phillips
SS: Troy Tulowitzki
3B: Ryan Zimmerman
LF: Andre Ethier
CF: B.J. Upton
RF: Jason Bay
UTIL: Hunter Pence
UTIL: Shane Victorino
Bench:
Travis Hafner
Felipe Lopez
Vladimir Guerrero (Hurt)

SP: Zack Greinke
SP: John Danks
SP: Erik Bedard
SP: James Shields
SP: Scott Baker
RP: Heath Bell
RP: Francisco Cordero
RP: Matt Capps
Bench:
Brad Ziegler
Grant Balfour
Octavio Dotel

First thing to notice is the roster positions. With only three outfield spots and no middle or corner infield spots, the hitting on every team should be very deep, especially considering this is a 10-team mixed league. I like your hitting—how could one not?—but my feeling is that many other teams have a lineup equally as impressive as yours.

I can see your team hitting for a high average, getting a decent amount of home runs, and racking up the doubles so it should do well in most weeks, as I am sure it did in the first two. Even the two hitters you took fliers on—Hafner and Lopez—are performing well, so you have depth to complement the talent.

If you are willing to invest the time, check to see who is pitching against some of your weaker starting hitters. For example, if Victorino is playing against Johan Santana, I would probably bench him in favor of Hafner. Victorino will of course hit a home run off Santana that night, but little things like that accumulate over the season and make a difference.

In head-to-head leagues I cannot stress enough how important it is to be aware of your matchup. Again, most people will not do this because of the time, but know how many starts the opposing and your team's pitchers will make at the beginning of each week. Know if they are playing mostly strong or weak teams. And know beforehand how many of your starters you will start that week, although glancing at your pitching now it seems all of your pitchers are startable.

One thing to not pay attention to—and I am sure you already know this—is batter to pitcher or pitcher vs. team histories. Ignore them. They are almost always so small they are insignificant. Knowing that Victorino has a .231 lifetime batting average against Josh Johnson in 13 at-bats means nothing.

There is no reason to try to make a move to alter your hitting. Look at your hitters: Soto, Pujols, Phillips, Tulo ... who are you actually going to upgrade? Be open to trading, but it is not imperative that you make a move.

Transitioning to your pitching, it is surprisingly good despite its lack of a brand-name ace. Obviously some of your pitchers—Greinke in particular—are pitching like aces, but the level of dominance you got from all of your starters except Baker should not be expected to continue. Shields, Greinke, Bedard, and Baker I like for the long run and Danks is someone whose value is probably at a peak right now. See what he can haul in a trade. Not necessarily a trade with just Danks, but he makes a great add-in to any trade with the power to sway the decision.

Your closers are particularly solid, all secure and racking up the saves early on. The problem is, besides maybe posting slightly better ratios, there is not much more value in having three great closers who generate saves than starting three great setup men who earn holds. I know it is hard to bench one of them, but starting two closers and one setup man such as Dotel might lead to taking both holds and saves.

My feeling is this is a weekly roster update league (as opposed to every day) so using the cheat of starting SP-eligible relievers at SP would not work. If it is a daily update league, however, then target Brandon Morrow, and consider adding Hong-Chih Kuo or even somebody like Dan Meyer. These guys can give you holds—or saves in Morrow's case—from an SP spot, which is extremely valuable.

Overall, though, your pitching seems above-average and is off to a great start, as is your whole team in fact. I would bet you are near the top of the standings right now and figure to remain near the top all season. Good work.

Posted by Paul Singman at 1:33am

Hit Rate Observer

This column is about an idea that didn’t pan out.

The imminent debut of THTF’s “Trading Post” column got me thinking. We talk a lot about a player’s “value.” And we do our best to put a dollar figure on that value, both in generating the underlying stats and in setting players against their brethren.

That’s a very artificial process, though, even apart from the vagaries of projecting human beings. One monkey wrench is the value of replacement players. We can make a good guess of replacement value from looking at recent history, but if there’s an unusually high or low number of productive call-ups, our baselines are junked. We’re also seeing early shifts in value this season from the lively baseball and from the Yankees’ new park; temporary, possibly, but unforeseen all the same.

Any property tied to reality will fluctuate unpredictably. In the real world, most investments don’t have a price that’s fixed from above. At heart, a good is worth only what someone is willing to pay for it. (This notion will be familiar to anyone trying to sell a house.)

For the “truest” player prices, then, rather than imposing a value on a player, we would deduce the player’s value by looking at the sorts of things he was exchanged for. This method would be both more elegant and more accurate. And we could generate updated values whenever we felt like it, at any point in the season.

If only we had a market for fantasy players... if only....

But, of course, we do have fantasy markets. Most online leagues permit trades between owners. And many of those leagues advertise recent trades for the player. For example, I can head to CBSSportsline right now and get a list of deals involving Jayson Werth.

There are a lot of names there. Mathematically speaking, though, a trade is just an equality: The sum of the things on the left equals the sum of the things on the right. So the idea was to record many, many of these trades. What we would end up with is a (big) set of simultaneous equations, in which each player represents a different variable. If Alfredo Amezaga, Burke Badenhop, and Chris Carter were represented by A, B, and C, then a trade of Amezaga for Badenhop would be A=B, and a trade of both for Carter would be A +B=C.

If you have many more equations than you do variables, you can run a solver to pin a value on each player that best fits the observed trades. Voila! Instant player valuation.

Sounds cool in theory. Unfortunately, reality didn’t cooperate. The main problem is that the bulk of fantasy trades are of equal numbers of players. This is a problem because, if every trade is of the form A+B=C+D, then the simplest solution is:

(1) All players have the same value; and
(2) That value is 0.

This constraint is a consequence of the structure of fantasy, where every owner must field a team of the same number and types of players and purchased for the same sum. It’s like a stock market where everybody has to be in for exactly $10,000.

One way to make trading more flexible is to allow teams to accumulate differing numbers of players. If one team wants to trade a mega-star for three B-level prospects, why must they jettison two other guys? Go on, let somebody corner the market on Double-A third basemen.

Also, in most other markets, you don’t have to buy a good with the same kind of good—you needn’t pay for a car with a car, or a house with a house. In particular, we use currency. Currency is ultra-flexible—you can dispense it in virtually any fraction.

It would be easier to equate players to dollars if we actually traded players for dollars. Maybe leagues should let owners purchase some, or even all, of a traded player with cash (the same currency, after all, with which they pay entry and transaction fees). Admittedly, this would make fantasy baseball more about trading (where you are always on the make for the good deal) and less about investing (where you’re pretty much saddled with the team that you have). But there's always a fine line between the two. And a league with more trading could be more competitive.

Perhaps the biggest difficulty with our plan, though, was the enormous variation in needs. Consider these players who have recently been dealt one-on-one for Jayson Werth:

Cristian Guzman

Aaron Hill

Trevor Hoffman

Edwin Jackson

Clayton Kershaw

Adam LaRoche

Geovany Soto

Ryan Theriot

Jose Valverde

Brandon Wood

And this is a list just from non-keeper leagues. Record enough trades, and you’ll probably find an example in which each player was traded for each other player! Forget about solving for X there.

Trying to impose some sense on this madness will be one of the aims of Trading Post. Still, there is a lesson here. Player valuation is a spongy business. It’s only a small stretch to say that no owner actually gets “sticker price” from a player—if you have too little of the resource in question, then the player is more dear to you; if you have too much, he’s less dear. The flip side is that probably every owner in your league has a player who would fit much better in your lineup than theirs.

Posted by John Burnson at 12:39am (5) Comments

There’s Something in the Water

Hi. My name is Matt Hagen, and I am a fantasy baseball addict.

(A pause so all the other fantasy baseball addicts in the room can join in unison for a halfhearted “Hi Matt.”)

Much to my girlfriend’s chagrin, the innocent-yet-painstaking science of analyzing minor league baseball is in my blood, and The Hardball Times took notice. Thank you to Derek and everyone at the Times for giving me a chance.

Before I expose you dear readers to a taste of my twisted version of minor league baseball, I thought I would inform everyone about a magical little town in central Wisconsin.

-----------------

Auburndale, Wisconsin. Population: 738.

To many central Wisconsin residents, Auburndale is best known for forcing Highway 10 motorists to slow down when traveling between Marshfield and Stevens Point. Worse reputations exist, and something tells me that the hard-working people of Auburndale love their quaint “reduced-speed” town.

It’s hard not to be a blue collar type when living in such a small town. The people are friendly, the families are caring, and the children are born with a strong backbone and a bottle of fresh Wisconsin milk in their mouths.

The Auburndale High School basketball team is a perennial powerhouse at the Division 3 level. There’s just something magical about putting five passionate, fundamentally sound Auburndale players on the floor at the same time. Neillsville, Greenwood, Spencer, Pittsville, Granton, and Stratford, among others, have a hard time competing.

At the local level, basketball is the proud sport of choice. But, on a larger stage, the basketball program doesn’t even register a blip on the radar.

That’s because Auburndale’s football and baseball bloodlines get all the attention.

Former Green Bay Packer right tackle, and current NFL free agent, Mark Tauscher grew up living and breathing sports in Auburndale. He has had an underrated career anchoring the right side of the offensive line for the green and gold for the last decade. A torn ligament in his knee may end his career, but what a career it was. Mark got to block for Brett Favre and his home-state Packers for a decade. It was grunt work, but oh so fitting for a man who grew up in Auburndale, Wisconsin. It’s just a shame that Mark never received a trip to the NFL’s annual Pro Bowl. As overrated as the Pro Bowl is, Mark deserved the recognition.

And as one Auburndale native’s sports career is drawing to a close, another is just beginning.

I grew up in Neillsville, Wisconsin, a 45-minute drive from Auburndale, and I graduated college from the University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point. I attended UWSP at the same time as a kid from Auburndale named Jordan Zimmermann. Jordan is the best pitcher the state of Wisconsin has seen in a long time.

He wasn’t anything special in high school. His mid-80s fastball was good enough to fool the overmatched kids of the Marawood League, but not good enough to earn him a college scholarship. So, Jordan stayed close to home for college, and attended UWSP. That’s where Jordan truly got serious about the game of baseball.

After a few years of hard work in the weight room and some radical refinement of his pitches, Jordan became the best pitcher that the WIAC has ever seen. After his sophomore season at UWSP, his 1.01 ERA during a stint with the Eau Claire Express of the Northwoods League secured his prospect status.

Many major league scouts didn’t know what to make of a kid who came from such a humble background. But the Washington Nationals believed in the blue collar kid from Auburndale. They took Jordan in the second round of the 2007 MLB amateur draft, and they haven’t looked back.

After a tremendous year and a half of minor league dominance, Zimmermann made his major league debut on April 20, 2009. It was anything but ordinary.

The Nationals and Braves withstood a two-hour rain delay from the outset, and by the time Zimmermann took the mound only an estimated 1,000 people were left in the stands. Seeing the strange sight of 1,000 people in a professional baseball stadium will always alleviate some pressure, and it’s safe to say that Zimmermann enjoyed the relief.

With a crowd approximately the same size as his hometown, Zimmermann dazzled the patient spectators by pitching six efficient innings and allowing only two runs, both resulting from a no-no pitch he threw to Matt Diaz in the fourth inning. Zimmermann is very young, and those mistake pitches will happen less and less. Another indication that Zimmermann is still young; he only threw 72 pitches. Washington wants to protect their prized investment.

After another rain delay in the eighth inning, and Zimmermann watching from the dugout, an estimated 70 people were left in the crowd. It was like an Auburndale High School game all over again.

The game ended with a rare sight; a win for the Washington Nationals. Zimmermann collected the first “W” of his career. Due to the comical appearance of the crowd, the pressure wasn’t as enormous as it usually is for a pitcher making his major league debut. But the pressure will be ratcheted up as Zimmermann tries to turn the Washington Nationals franchise around. He is a promising young pitcher that any organization would love to have. With continued development he could turn into a true ace. He throws a good mix of pitches highlighted by his developed low- to mid-90s fastball. He may be the team’s very best asset. Not bad for a kid from Auburndale, Wisconsin. The cheeseheads are proud.

So, is there a lesson to be learned from Zimmermann’s journey? Maybe it’s no matter where you come from, if you work hard enough, you too can live the American dream.

Or maybe there’s just something in the water in Auburndale, Wisconsin.

Posted by Matt Hagen at 12:30am (1) Comments

Thursday, April 23, 2009

It is good to get away

On average, teams play better at home than away. Home teams won 54.26 percent of the time in 2007 (all stats here will be from 2007). Teams play better at home because their players play better at home (duh). But does playing better at home translate into better fantasy performance at home? When it comes to hitters, the answer is a (rather) unqualified yes. However, for pitchers, things are not as clear.

Home batters score 5 percent more runs and hit 5 percent more home runs. I'll assume that means that typical fantasy hitters score more at home than away.

Of course, away pitchers get scored on more too. So, why might away pitcher fare better in your fantasy league than they do in real baseball? There are two crucial reasons. First, fantasy pitchers are mostly comprised of starters and closers, and wins and saves are scoring stats. Second, batting first in any inning gives away starters and closers a better chance to score in those stats.

When I am at a Mets game, I could care less who gets the win or whether there was a save opportunity as long as the Mets win the game. When I am watching a game for fantasy purposes, once my starter can't get a decision, I couldn't care less which team wins the game.

It is easy to see why being away gives a starting pitcher a better shot at winning (everything else equal - which I will come back to in a bit). Let's say that the your starter is going to pitch only six innings. Being away gives his team seven turns at bat to take the lead while he can still figure in the decision.

Similar reasoning works for closers and saves. The home team gets "last licks"—the away team cannot win with the last at-bat. So, if the home team is trailing going into the ninth inning, then there is no save opportunity that day for the home team; home teams cannot get saves in extra innings. The home team only has eight chances to take a lead in order to give the closer an opportunity for a save, while the away team has at least nine (of course, the away team also has more chances to take a lead so large that there is no save opportunity).

What do the numbers say?

Home SP win%: 35.28
Home SP lose%: 33.61%
Away SP win%: 33.36%
Away SP lose%: 37.60%
Away SP win/decision: .4701
Home SP win/decision: .5160
Home save%: 24.31%
Away save%: 24.93%
Home save% (as % of home team wins): 44.80%
Away save% (as % of away team wins): 54.50%

The numbers tell us that starting pitchers are more likely to win at home than away and have a higher winning percentage (wins/(wins+losses)) at home. However, the difference isn't nearly as big as difference in the teams' probabilities of winning. A home team is about 19 percent more likely to win than an away team ((.5426-.4574)/.4574 = .186), but a home starting pitcher is only about 6 percent more likely to win ((.3528-.3336)/.3336 = .0575). So the extra offensive chance helps the away starting pitcher quite a bit.

For closers, the effect is much stronger: away closers are slightly more likely to get a save than home closers. (One note: I've counted any game where a team gets a save as a save for the "closer." Data-wise, this simplified things a lot).

To summarize: the home-away advantage for starting pitchers is smaller than the advantage for the home team, but still positive. When it comes to closers, though, don't bother worrying about on which side of the infield the closer's dugout lies.

Posted by Jonathan Halket at 1:06am (1) Comments

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

State of THT Fantasy

I wanted to pop in quickly to fill you guys in on a few of the changes coming for THT Fantasy.

Musical chairs

As you've surely noticed, Victor Wang hasn't penned an article in a few weeks. Victor, unfortunately, will not be writing for THT Fantasy anymore as he'll be doing some work for an MLB team. Congratulations, Victor! In addition, Michael Lerra won't be writing for a while for personal reasons.

Best of luck to you, Victor and Michael. It was great having your talents at THTF.

While it's a shame to lose these talented writers, I do have the privilege of introducing you to a few new writers that we're very excited about.

I introduced you all to John Burnson a couple of weeks ago, and you've been reading his work these past few Fridays. You may know John previously from his work at Baseball HQ, his annual Graphical Player book, or Heater Magazine.

Matt Hagen, who you may know from Minor League Notebook, will begin writing about minor league players and call-ups shortly.

Eric Hinz, who runs a blog called Fake Teams, will begin writing about AL and NL-only leagues next week as well.

New feature

With the astounding popularity of Roster Doctor, a number of readers have asked if we'll be doing anything similar for trade offers. The answer is that we most certainly will, possibly as soon as next week. Stay tuned for more information about this—I imagine what we have planned could surpass Roster Doctor in popularity. All I can tell you now is that it will be called Trading Post. Going forward, you guys should be able to look forward to Roster Doctor on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and Trading Post on Tuesday and Thursday (this, of course, will be in addition to regular, full-length columns from our writers).

Posted by Derek Carty at 4:59am (12) Comments

Buy your power now

Every fantasy team has holes, and every fantasy team is relatively weak in at least one or two categories. Usually, when we decide to fill those holes depends on how our team is playing, what the standings look like, how close we are to the trading deadline, how close we are to the end of the season, how desperate the other teams are, and other things of that nature. This year, however, there appears to be one more consideration, at least when it comes to acquiring power.

Juiced

I've been talking with HitTracker's Greg Rybarczyk for a week or two now, and I believe it was first brought up publicly at THT Live with discussion continuing at The Book Blog through this weekend. To recap, Greg has discovered that the baseball appears to be "juiced" this year. Balls are being hit farther than in past years (even after neutralizing the impacts of weather), and some balls that aren't even hit particularly well are clearing the fence. Several announcers have commented on this during games and our own Eriq Gardner made note of it at his personal blog the other day, but Greg has run some very interesting tests on this effect.

It's still early in the season, and there are some possible biases (i.e. selection bias in which parks have been played in most), but Greg's tests show that the likelihood of this being random is quite low and that home runs are going at least an extra five feet farther than they would have last season. If you're interested in the details, check out that Book Blog link, but be warned: It can get a little hairy.

Fantasy application

What does this mean for fantasy owners? Well, it means that owners who went hitter-heavy in their drafts and auctions should expect an extra boost. It also means that now is an excellent time to buy on power hitters before more people start realizing what's happening.

If a hitter who used to be a true 16 HR hitter is now a true 20 HR hitter in the 2009 playing environment, it makes far more sense to buy him now while everyone else is valuing him as a 16 HR hitter. In addition, bringing in a concept from last week's FAAB article, by acquiring him now (as opposed to in a couple months) you'll reap more of the benefits.

In my e-mail conversations with Greg, he proposed that it would be most efficient to acquire 15-20 home run hitters as opposed to the big boppers:

It's primarily a cost per HR thing—the super sluggers are very expensive, and the middle guys are more common, and thus cheaper. Not playing fantasy baseball myself, I can't say for sure, but it seems likely that you could grab an extra five homers more cheaply by upgrading a small to a medium than by upgrading a medium to a large.

As I am a fantasy player, I think Greg is pretty spot on. What's the difference to Adam Dunn's owner if he hits 40 home runs or 45? Not much, but the difference between 15 and 20 for Johnny Damon or Billy Butler would be more significant (not in terms of actual value, note, but rather in terms of perceived value).

So you know who some of my favorite targets are right now? The unlucky tHR hitters I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. The same caveats still apply, but if people view Carlos Gomez as a 7 HR hitter, yet it turns out that he's actually the 13 HR hitter that tHR thought he was last year, and now we tack on another three or four homers, you've suddenly found yourself a legitimate power source for a bargain basement price.

Greg also brought up another compelling reason to buy these moderate power hitters:

One other thing that is little more than conjecture on my part, but I think a lot of hitters who know they are not sluggers try to keep the ball down somewhat, knowing that they usually can't get the ball out. Once they figure out the ball is hot (and the players will know this very soon, and I'll bet some suspect it already), those guys will be more willing to hit for the fences, and their HR production will rise proportionally more (who knows what it might do to their OBP, though). Sluggers already just swing for the fences, so they can't make any behavioral change like this. But of course, I'm stepping away from cold analysis into subjective guessing here, so feel free to disregard.

This will be very interesting to track throughout the year to see if any players seem to be changing their approach once they realize what's going on.

New Yankee Stadium

While we're on the subject of power, the current happenings at New Yankee Stadium must also be brought up. Accuweather posted a very informative article on Monday that talks about how the new stadium's wind patterns might be increasing home runs. Definitely check out the article because it's short and there are a couple of pictures that illustrate what's going on. The article went on to say:

If the stadium seating tier shape is indeed the issue, games will only be affected during times when the winds are from a westerly direction and above 10 mph. This typically occurs during the spring and the middle to late fall. The calmer weather during the summer should lead to a smaller number of home runs. In the meantime, the home run derby may continue.

Greg said that it's possible we might also see the effects on warm night games in July and August, so I guess we'll have to see what happens. It'll be very interesting, in the short term, to see if these effects continue. (For those in daily leagues, this is especially noteworthy—Alex Zelvin, you better add this to your spreadsheet!)

So, if after a few more games this looks like it might be a legitimate trend, think about buying some Yankees.

Concluding thoughts

As always, feel free to comment or e-mail me if you have any questions.

Posted by Derek Carty at 3:30am (9) Comments

Roster Doctor: 4/22/09

Welcome to THT Fantasy's Roster Doctor. If you'd like your team to be analyzed by one of our fantasy baseball experts, please send your full roster to this address. Also be sure to include your league's player pool (mixed, AL-only, NL-only), number of teams, scoring format (roto, head-to-head, points, etc.), categories, whether or not it's a keeper league, and any other pertinent information. If your roster is selected it will be analyzed in a future Roster Doctor column.

Player Pool: Mixed
No. of Teams: 13
Categories: Traditional 5x5
Scoring Type: Roto
Roster:

C - Pablo Sandoval
1B - Adrian Gonzalez
2B - Dan Uggla
3B - Chipper Jones
SS - Jimmy Rollins
OF - Jason Bay
OF - Matt Kemp
OF - Raul Ibanez
UTIL - Elijah Dukes
BN - Chris Young (Ari)
BN - Randy Winn

SP - Tim Lincecum
SP - Edinson Volquez
SP - Justin Verlander
RP - Francisco Rodriguez
RP - Kevin Gregg
RP - Manny Corpas
RP - Carlos Villanueva
BN - Daisuke Matsuzaka
BN - Chris Carpenter
BN - John Smoltz
DL - Trevor Hoffman

This roster comes with an owner worried about the injuries to his pitching, and rightly so. Let's focus on the hitting for a moment, though. This is a very strong lineup at each position, with a number of hitters that I'd imagine came at a bargain price; Uggla, Jones, Ibanez, and Bay have all been falling in drafts to some pretty enticing positions. Additionally, Sandoval is not only a good hitter, but an everyday hitter. I think owners of him in leagues where he has catcher eligibility will be quite happy with his production this year. The weakest spot is actually the Util position, which is a great sign. This owner will be able to throw a waiver claim at any player that's dropped before he should be. In my own league, Derrek Lee has already been dropped, and I'd absolutely pick him up for the Util here if possible. He's off to a slow start, but he's in the heart of a strong lineup and that's enough to get a surprising amount of production. This isn't to say that Lee will be available in every league, but more that panic moves do happen, and having a replacement-level Util hitter that you don't mind dropping is the best way to capitalize on this.

My one complaint about the hitting is the two OF in bench spots. In Rotisserie, you need to get as close as possible to getting 162 games out of each position. To this end, I'd suggest dropping your two least favorite out of Young, Winn, and Dukes, and then keeping one at Util and picking up a true utility player like Mark DeRosa. In fact, with your lineup, you may even want two of them. If you're vigilant about knowing when Chipper will start, and when he will take a day off with whatever is bothering him lately, you can plug someone in that hole and at least assure you have a better than nil chance of getting some runs or RBIs.

As for pitching, there's definitely a lot of trouble here. Carpenter looked amazing so far but is out for a couple months. Daisuke looked like his 2008 self (high strikeouts and walks), minus the luck that got him such an outrageous ERA and W-L record, but is now on the shelf with a tired arm. Smoltz isn't due back until late May or early June, and Volquez is proving that last year was largely a fluke.

Given that this is a rotisserie, you'll want to take a look at your IP limit for the season and figure out how you might get as close to it as possible. I'd advise dropping Smoltz in favor of someone who is pitching now. Smoltz is a gamble; he's an old guy with great stuff and great NL numbers, but he's coming off major surgery and moving into the AL East. And given the depth of the Red Sox pitching staff, he may initially come back as a relief pitcher. I'd also drop two bench hitters and pick up one multi-position player in their place and one starting pitcher. If this gives you too many innings and you think you'll hit the cap, drop your worst starter in favor of a setup man with great ERA and WHIP numbers like Takashi Saito. Carpenter is a very tough call. He injured a large muscle group, which is great news as compared to injuring something like a small tendon. His strikeouts and walks so far make it look like he's not lost a step since his glory years, so when he does come back, he'll likely be pitching at an All-Star level. If you think you can hit the IP maximum with him or Hoffman on your bench until one of them comes back, then I'd say keep him. If your league has a high IP limit, however (say, 1500 or more), then I'd advise dropping him in favor of production.

In roto, it's hard to survive with weak hitting. It looks like you followed this rule with the lineup you have, so the most important thing is for you to use your managerial skills to maximize your pitching points. You're going to want to closely monitor your path to the innings pitched limit, and if you hit it you'll likely be first in strikeouts, near the top in wins, and you'll have a reasonable shot at being above-average in ERA and WHIP. Combined with what I'd guess is one of the top three or four batting lineups in your 13-team league, and I'd say you're at least a contender for your league's title. Perhaps even a favorite.

Posted by Michael Lerra at 3:23am (2) Comments

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Over or under your innings pace?

The subject of innings limits in roto leagues doesn’t typically come up until late August or September. By then, many fantasy teams are approaching their cap on innings pitched and must adjust their use of pitchers accordingly.

But even before the season’s denouement, many fantasy managers tend to glance here and there at their pitching staff’s innings pace, and a projected innings shortfall or surplus tends to invoke some sort of psychological response. When Yahoo, CBS Sports, or any other fantasy service tells you in screaming red letters that you’re on pace for 200 innings short of the maximum, do you take it as some sort of dare by the powers-that-be to pick up Tim Wakefield to catch up?

Most fantasy managers will try to roughly stay on par with the projected limit. To some extent, this makes sense, preserving the option to use a team’s best starters all the way till the end of the season, while at the same time, making sure to leverage the benefits of all the wins and strikeouts garnered when one hits maximum innings pitched.

On the other hand, no rules exist that state how exactly fantasy managers must proportion their innings pitched throughout a season, and there may be advantages to asymmetrical apportionment.

Let’s say you scoffed at all the conventional wisdom that said draft batters before pitchers, instead doing the opposite, and thus ended up with a super-strong rotation of pitching aces. Using all of these pitchers, plus any free agent acquisitions, plus any spot starters, would surely trigger red caution flags of a projected innings surplus. If the pitching is strong, does it really matter if you reach climax sooner than your league-mates?

Let’s say your pitching is as weak as Jamie Moyer’s fastball. We’re talking a pitching staff that’s anchored by the likes of (no offense) Carlos Zambrano and may include injured Daisuke Matsuzaka and injured John Lackey. Does it really make sense to trot out your league’s draft rejects just to keep pace?

The advantages for being ahead of pace on innings:

1. The sooner a team reaches its maximum innings, the easier it may become to part with a fantasy ace like Johan Santana or Tim Lincecum in the interests of improving one’s offense.

2. The sooner a team reaches its maximum innings, the easier it becomes to drop moderate-value players like middle relievers to add to hitting bench depth.

3. The avoidance of September pitcher’s fatigue.

4. No need to worry about how your pitcher’s real-life club’s dashed playoff hopes will shake up your pitcher’s psyche. Or how your pitcher’s real-life manager will preserve your pitcher’s arm after clinching the pennant. (Follow?)

The disadvantages for being ahead of pace on innings:

1. Use of roster spots on starters might mean lack of roster spots on closers. Additionally, it’s hard to chase saves on an abbreviated schedule.

2. The more innings pitched, the harder it becomes to rescue ERA and WHIP should things go bad.

3. What if you can’t trade Tim Lincecum or get fair value for him?

The advantages for being behind pace on innings:

1. Easier to spot the good match-ups with a few good weeks or months of data on the league’s poorer offenses.

2. As teams approach their maximums, they might get more conservative on their use of pitchers. Some teams may drop decent starting pitchers to address other holes. Other teams may stop paying attention as they fall out of competition. In other words, the waiver wire options may be better as the season enters its late stages.

3. Relatedly, it typically becomes easier to trade for good starting pitchers—and pay less—as the season enters its late stages.

4. The less innings pitched, the easier it becomes to move ERA and WHIP.

The disadvantages for being behind pace:

1. You really sure you're going to hit your maximum?

All in all, we tend to see more of an advantage for being under count in the early going. Especially this year. Of course, hindsight is hindsight, but did you know that pitching has so far been terrible this year, compared to year’s past? Batters are on their best pace since 2004.

If you haven't used a lot of pitching thus far, congratulations. You probably made the right move.

Posted by Eriq Gardner at 1:49am

Player profile: Cody Ross

Ross generating lots of power on this home run swing. (Icon/SMI)

Let's talk about cheap sources of power. No, I am not talking about finding alternative fuel sources to solve the world's energy problems, but rather about finding legitimate home run threats to solve your fantasy baseball team's power crisis. It is clear which is the more pressing issue, right?

Anyway, Cody Ross is one such player who can provide power cheaply, with past seasons that look like this:

+------+-----+---------+-----+-------+----+-----+----+----+
| YEAR | AGE | TEAM    | AB  | BA    | HR | RBI | R  | SB |
+------+-----+---------+-----+-------+----+-----+----+----+
| 2006 |  25 | Marlins | 250 | 0.212 | 11 |  37 | 30 |  0 |
| 2007 |  26 | Marlins | 173 | 0.335 | 12 |  39 | 35 |  2 |
| 2008 |  27 | Marlins | 461 | 0.260 | 22 |  73 | 59 |  6 |
+------+-----+---------+-----+-------+----+-----+----+----+

Ross flew under most people's radar probably because he has never played in a full season, making his season totals appear less impressive. On a per-plate-appearance basis, however, Ross has hit home runs at rates similar to those of perennial sluggers Lance Berkman and Aramis Ramirez. As impressive as that sounds, Ross' skills are largely unproven, so it is important to evaluate his underlying ability before making any unwarranted assumptions. We will start with his power.

Power

Ross will be 28 years old all throughout the 2009 season, so he is now playing in his prime power years. Keeping that in mind, let's now take a look at his True Home Run (tHR) numbers:

If you're new to THT Fantasy Focus and are unfamiliar with True Home Runs (tHR) or any of the other stats I'm using, check out our quick reference guide. These stats provide a much clearer picture of a player's talent, so it's well worth taking a couple of minutes to learn them.

+------+-----+---------+-----+----+-----+-------+--------+--------+--------+
| YEAR | AGE | TEAM    | AB  | HR | tHR | HR/FB | tHR/FB | nHR/FB | OF FB% |
+------+-----+---------+-----+----+-----+-------+--------+--------+--------+
| 2006 |  25 | Marlins | 250 | 11 |  14 |    14 |     18 |     18 |     40 |
| 2007 |  26 | Marlins | 173 | 12 |  11 |    27 |     24 |     24 |     33 |
| 2008 |  27 | Marlins | 461 | 22 |  21 |    16 |     15 |     15 |     40 |
+------+-----+---------+-----+----+-----+-------+--------+--------+--------+

For the most part, tHRs agrees with Ross' power output, making it safe to assume he will continue to hit home runs on about 15 to 18 percent of his fly balls. Given a full season of at-bats, if Ross hits fly balls at a 38 percent rate he would hit 24 home runs.

So about 25 home runs is the standard projection for Ross' home runs, but when taking the higher end of the rate projections, (40 percent outfield fly balls, 18 percent HR/FB) it becomes plausible that Ross reaches close to 30 home runs in 2009. The low-end projection, which is important as well, is 19 home runs.

Mid-20s home run production from a player who is available on plenty of waiver wires is valuable, but not so much if he cannot hit for a decent average.

Contact

+------+-----+---------+-----+-------+-------+-----+-------+--------+-----+
| YEAR | AGE | TEAM    | AB  | BA    | tBA   | CT% | BABIP | xBABIP | LD% |
+------+-----+---------+-----+-------+-------+-----+-------+--------+-----+
| 2006 |  25 | Marlins | 250 | 0.212 | 0.254 |  76 | 0.236 |  0.278 |  21 |
| 2007 |  26 | Marlins | 173 | 0.335 | 0.285 |  78 | 0.374 |  0.312 |  21 |
| 2008 |  27 | Marlins | 461 | 0.260 | 0.270 |  75 | 0.303 |  0.320 |  21 |
+------+-----+---------+-----+-------+-------+-----+-------+--------+-----+

Ross has below-average contact skills, which puts a strict ceiling on his batting average. By maintaining a high BABIP (not as high as the outlier 2007 rate though) Ross is able to keep his batting average in the respectable mid-.260s to .270s range.

Final thoughts

Similar to Adam Lind, Ross should be mainly a home run and RBI contributor. Unlike Lind, however, Ross did not kick off the 2009 season with a similar hot start. Ross therefore is still unowned in many leagues and is mostly on the benches of the teams of which he is owned.

Outfield is relatively deep this year, so I understand that Ross' .270 average and 25 home run production is not needed on many teams. However, let's say you need middle infield help, what you can do is flip an outfielder for a middle infielder—Curtis Granderson for Robinson Cano, for example—and then add Ross from free agency. Middle infield problem solved and without too much of a hit taken by your outfield.

Just make the sure the difference in expected production between Ross and the outfielder you are giving up is less than the difference in production between the player you are getting and the player whose spot the newly acquired player is taking.

Posted by Paul Singman at 12:30am

Monday, April 20, 2009

Draft review: FSIC

Sorry this article is coming a little late. I've had it nearly completed for a few weeks and never got around to finishing it. Anyway, this year I've teamed up with Paul Singman to compete in the Fantasy Sports Invitational Challenge (FSIC). It's an NL-only league, and you can view our team and some of the thoughts I had about our draft below. Feel free to give us your take on the roster in the comments.

FSIC Roster

Hitters
C - Jason Kendall
1B - James Loney
2B - Alfredo Amezaga
3B - Garrett Atkins
SS - Jose Reyes
CI - Casey Kotchman
MI - Jack Wilson
OF - Nate McLouth
OF - Raul Ibanez
OF - Cody Ross
OF - Kosuke Fukudome
OF - Chris Dickerson
UT - Nyjer Morgan

Pitchers
P - Javier Vazquez
P - Derek Lowe
P - Kenshin Kawakami
P - Jorge De La Rosa
P - Ross Ohlendorf
P - Joel Hanrahan
P - Kevin Gregg
P - Hong-Chih Kuo
P - Kyle McClellan

Bench
3B - Pedro Feliz
P - Cha Seung Baek
P - Jason Hammel
P - Trevor Hoffman
P - Wade LeBlanc

Strategy and thoughts

We didn't have a super-elaborate strategy, mostly just drafting for value. Here are a few of the tenets we followed:

Don't worry too much about position scarcity
We of course accounted for the exact effects of position scarcity, but in an NL-only league, replacement level is virtually the same at all positions — a low-skill player who will likely get only 200 at-bats. While people overspent on Dan Uggla and Stephen Drew, we were content to take guys like Alfredo Amezaga and Jack Wilson at the end of the draft while grabbing higher-skilled hitters early.

Don't take a top catcher
In a one-catcher league, it simply isn't an efficient use of resources to take a top catcher early. Jason Kendall was one of our last picks and is a perfectly capable starter. The first catchers off the board (Brian McCann and Geovany Soto) were the 15th and 16th hitters selected, yet our rankings had the first catcher as merely an even money proposition if taken as the 40th hitter. It seemed that a few teams overestimated the impacts of position scarcity in this setup.

Consistency early
Regular readers know that I love taking consistent players early, and we managed to do this fairly effectively. Reyes (Round 1) and Ibanez (Round 4) are as consistent as they come, and Atkins (Round 2) has also been quite consistent. McLouth (Round 3) has been consistent enough for the skills he's shown and the value we got on him. Loney, as a fifth rounder, also looks like a good pick, even if he's not quite as consistent as you'd like.

There will be bargains on NL outfielders
Same approach as I took in LABR, there were some good, cheap NL outfielders this year. Fukudome and Morgan are already tearing it up, and Cody Ross has finally broke out of his slump, hitting three home runs this weekend. He's a great bet for 25 dingers. I also really like Chris Dickerson if he can ever get going and procure a little more playing time.

There are undervalued starters late
We felt it was more important to get hitters who will actually be regulars or semi-regulars rather than overextend ourselves on pitching early on. There are still quality pitchers — or at least pitchers with upside — late, but the same is not always true for hitters in NL-only leagues.

Kawakami, de la Rosa, Baek, and Ohlendorf all have a chance at a sub-4.00 ERA, and we managed to get two top starters in Vazquez and Lowe besides. Also, at the time, McClellan looked like he could wind up starting (and it's still possible he will). LeBlanc was more of a speculative pick that could turn a profit mid-season, and we recently picked up Jason Hammel, who should post an ERA in the 4.25 to 4.50 area by moving to the National League (if he gets a spot in Colorado's rotation).

Wait until the middle-tier of closers
Disappointingly, Heath Bell went off the board one pick before us, but Hanrahan is a good closer too. We kind of got stuck with Trevor Hoffman as well (thanks to a glitch in the draft room), but we were able to get Kevin Gregg late in the draft (before he was announced as the closer). Three closers in an NL-only league puts us among the elite, and it didn't cost too terribly much. We'll probably end up trading one at some point, though, once Hoffman comes back and proves he is healthy.

Posted by Derek Carty at 3:30am (5) Comments

Roster Doctor 4/20/09

                                        R       HR     RBI      SB     Avg
                Roster Doctor Team     762     181     713     137    0.282
                Yahoo 1st Place Team  849.3   224.1   832.1   161.6   0.294
                Yahoo 2nd Place Team  821.4   211.7   801.8   142.5   0.290
                Yahoo 3rd Place Team  803.1   203.7   781.3   130.8   0.287

As you can see, the only category we finish near the top in is stolen bases. Taking a quick look at my past leagues, we project to finish near the bottom third in the rest of the hitting categories. If we look at individual projections, only Morneau, Davis and Sizemore project to hit over 25 home runs and, in fact, its possible that these are the only three players to finish with over 20 home runs. So clearly we could use some more power, but this could be difficult as power tends to be the most expensive asset to acquire. You might search the waiver wire for guys like Paul Konerko (owned in 55 percent of Yahoo leagues), Jack Cust (28 percent), Adam LaRoche (33 percent) and Rick Ankiel (51 percent). They are all projected to hit over 20 home runs and you might consider picking one of them up. What you might try to do, then, is trade two-for-one, where you giving up two players for a quality power hitter. You would probably have to sacrifice some stolen bases, but in replacing the second player with a guy like Konerko (who I expect to bounce back this year), the gain in power categories would outweigh the loss in stolen bases.

Also, check the free agent pool for players who were drafted but have been dumped (and this goes for pitchers, too). Chris Iannetta is now owned in just 72 percent of Yahoo leagues, down 15 percent and, in one of my private leagues, Geovany Soto was just released. As ridiculous as it may sound, these things do happen, even in a “winners” league. Its perfectly naturally for people to look at short-term results and because of this, people tend to make rash decisions without realizing we are only a dozen games into a 162-game season. So if either of those players are available, I would replace Hernandez, and then try to take advantage of the name and trade Wieters for either power or pitching.

And speaking of pitching, let’s take a look:

                                       W       SV      K      ERA     WHIP
                Roster Doctor Team     60      65     900     3.90    1.32
                Yahoo 1st Place Team  87.4   141.0   1131.8   3.27    1.20
                Yahoo 2nd Place Team  82.4   121.4   1078.0   3.43    1.23
                Yahoo 3rd Place Team  79.0   107.5   1040.3   3.54    1.24

The strikeout numbers are probably a bit low, as the projections are estimating Scherzer to pitch only 80 innings. Assuming that is an underestimation, the strikeout total should be slightly higher, and we would probably finish higher in this category. However, in taking a glance at past Yahoo leagues, we would finish in the bottom third in all categories outside of strikeouts.

This team has a clear need for more saves, but so long as the owner participates in this league and pays attention to baseball news on a daily basis, he shouldn’t really be concerned about the current lack of closers. A couple weeks into the season, and a couple closers have already been dethroned (see Jason Motte and Huston Street), and we should expect more displacements throughout the season.

This staff does have potential to do much better than its current projections. Liriano showed improvement towards the end of last season, Greinke is a breakout candidate and Beckett might be the best pitcher in the AL this year. I honestly wouldn’t be too concerned for right now but some guys to keep an eye on as the season progresses are Jonathan Sanchez (40 percent), Kyle Davies (30 percent), Clay Buchholz (3 percent) and John Smoltz (44 percent).

Posted by Marco Fujimoto at 12:55am (1) Comments

Friday, April 17, 2009

Hit Rate Observer

Question: How long is a baseball season?

OK, OK—it’s six months. But…

How fast is a baseball season?

One of my recurring premises about fantasy is that baseball players are awful, awful investments. For one thing, they are human beings. That means that they have a will, which they can direct (or not) to outcomes worthy (or not) on a steady basis (or not). So the player you get in one year may have different priorities in the next. And there’s little or no buffering—a baseball player isn’t a group of people working in concert and tempering the fortunes of the larger entity. Milton Bradley comes with dice, but they’re not made by Hasbro.

Also, as human beings, baseball players’ work is affected by external circumstances—marriage, children, Playstation, Alyssa Milano. More to the point, your investment in a ballplayer can plunge to zero in a vast number of ways, most of which are untied to any previous warning sign. Companies do go bankrupt (and sometimes very quickly), but never in one day, and never because the guy in Big Toe crashed his forklift.

The crux is that baseball players decay very quickly. But compared to what? We need a benchmark.

Since we have already compared ballplayers to companies, and since companies are familiar investments, let’s use them. I have a database, from 1955, of all Fortune 500 companies—the “big leagues” of business. Let’s compare the decay rate of companies against that of hitters.

The Fortune 500 measures only gross revenues, not profits, so instead of trying to pick an offensive metric by which to rank hitters, we’ll go with straight PA. After all, a player with a high PA has some combination of good focus, good durability, and little competition. In whose productivity could we have greater confidence?

For each group (companies and baseball players), we’ll track the survival rate of the top 200 members. For hitters, that’s a threshold of 400 PA—a good demarcation for fantasy value. We will follow the performance of the groups from 1995 to now, tabulating at each year the number of members that remain in the top 200.

Here is the chart for the Fortune 200:

The rate of attrition is far from devastating: Even 13 years on, about half of the Fortune 200 companies from 1995 are still in the top 200. Long term, the rate of decay in the Fortune 200 is about nine companies per year.

And the rate for hitters?

The long-term attrition rate is 16 batters per year—double the rate of the Fortune 200. The 2007 reunion of the fantasy class of 1995 has only 1/8 as many invitees as does the business reunion from the same year.

Let’s do the same thing for pitchers. Again, we will look at the top 200 members (a cut-off of 65-70 innings):

The long-term attrition rate for pitchers is 17 players per year, similar to that for hitters. However, the drop-off after the first year is steeper: The average number of pitchers remaining in the Top 200 after one season is 133—a loss of 33%. For hitters, the comparable number is 143 members. The number for companies: 180.

And that’s why fantasy baseball is so frustrating. We play a game where 1/3 of the most productive players this April are gone by the next—not necessarily out of baseball, but probably out of the class of rosterables. Ballplayers decay twice as quickly as do companies in the long term, and more than three times as quickly in the short term. Predicting a ballplayer’s output next year is like forecasting Exxon’s revenues in 2012.

As fantasy players, we can adapt to this finding in two ways. The first concerns how we run our leagues. We should try to mitigate (not eliminate) the frustrations built into the game. The best way is to appeal to owners’ competitive spirit.

One idea: Grant partial pay-outs—at least by 1st and 2nd half, and maybe even by month. Owners who lose a key player in April may still be able to regroup and recover some of their entry fee by August.

Also, permit departing owners to sell their teams to incoming owners. In other words, a new owner could pay $20 for the departing team’s roster, or start from scratch for free. That creates an incentive for fed-up owners to leave their teams in creditable shape. (And they might work so hard that they decide not to leave after all.)

Our second adaptation concerns projections. Clearly, fantasy players have an interest in projections. But we need greater humility—there are just so many obstacles to our foresight between now and September. One could argue that seasonal forecasts should be stated in units no smaller than 25 PA, and maybe as large as 100 PA.

Next week, we’re going to start rolling out weekly updated projections in HEATER. However, guided by the above sentiment, we’re going to tread more modestly. We’ll offer projections in two flavors:

Point-in-time estimates of “true talent” (BA/OBP/SLG for hitters; K/9, BB/9, HR/9 for pitchers), not associated to any projected playing time. We think that people who are mulling trades are weighing numbers like these in their heads. They probably have some idea of anticipated playing time, but it’s a broad and vague range, and we doubt that we can come up with much better. What we can provide is the best estimate of the player’s talent as of this moment.

Projected hitting and pitching lines for the coming week only. After all, if we can’t predict playing time for six days ahead, we shouldn’t be predicting it for six months ahead. Curiosities to some, these forecasts are useful for owners in weekly leagues, or people looking to replace a guy on the DL.

A final lesson? If you are anywhere near the title, don’t give up. Somewhere, somebody’s caller ID is reading A MILANO. With luck, it won’t be one of your guys.

Posted by John Burnson at 12:33am (6) Comments

Roster Doctor: 4/17/09

+-----+-----+-----+----+-------+----+----+-----+------+------+
|  R  | HR  | RBI | SB | AVG   | W  | SV |  K  | ERA  | WHIP |
+-----+-----+-----+----+-------+----+----+-----+------+------+
| 778 | 186 | 705 | 96 | 0.290 | 72 | 62 | 978 | 3.77 | 1.26 |
+-----+-----+-----+----+-------+----+----+-----+------+------+

To get these numbers, I replaced Blalock with Conor Jackson since both the THT projections and our preseason rankings like Jackson more. I also reduced Volstad and Parra's contribution by a percentage because you should only spot start them against weaker teams or when you need an extra win on Sunday.

Now let's put some context to these numbers by comparing them to other Yahoo teams:

+----------------------+----+----+-----+----+--------+
|                      |  R | HR | RBI | SB |  AVG   |
+----------------------+----+----+-----+----+--------+
| Roster Doctor Team   | 86 | 21 |  78 | 12 |  0.290 |
+----------------------+----+----+-----+----+--------+
| Yahoo 1st Place Team | 94 | 25 |  92 | 18 |  0.294 |
| Yahoo 2nd Place Team | 91 | 23 |  89 | 16 |  0.290 |
| Yahoo 3rd Place Team | 89 | 22 |  87 | 15 |  0.287 |
| Average Yahoo Team   | 81 | 21 |  79 | 11 |  0.285 |
+----------------------+----+----+-----+----+--------+

Comparatively your hitting is about average. It should do well in batting average, decent in runs and stolen bases; however, it is seriously lacking in power and RBI potential. Ortiz is your one true power hitter and he has just one extra base hit so far this season. I am not suggesting you try to trade Ortiz by the way, there is no way you would get fair value. Chances are he is going to turn things around and post solid numbers, so you are better off riding out the rough stretches.

+----------------------+----+----+-----+------+-------+
|                      |  W | SV |  K  | ERA  |  WHIP |
+----------------------+----+----+-----+------+-------+
| Roster Doctor Team   | 10 |  9 | 140 | 3.77 |  1.26 |
+----------------------+----+----+-----+------+-------+
| Yahoo 1st Place Team | 10 | 16 | 126 | 3.27 |  1.20 |
| Yahoo 2nd Place Team |  9 | 13 | 120 | 3.43 |  1.23 |
| Yahoo 3rd Place Team |  9 | 12 | 116 | 3.54 |  1.24 |
+----------------------+----+----+-----+------+-------+

I know by looking strictly at the numbers this team doesn't appear to have an impressive pitching staff, but anyone looking at the starters of this team should be impressed. One reason for the high ERA compared to the average top Yahoo teams is that this league has an odd five-starter, two-reliever setup. A more traditional two SP, two RP, three P roster or simply a nine P roster would lower the team ERA down.

Another reason for the seemingly inflated ERA stems from the type of teams that won Yahoo leagues last year. Most likely a solid percentage of the top teams made great in season additions—like Cliff Lee for example—and those team's final ERA is better than any preseason projections for them. So even though my little evaluation technique does not support this conclusion, your team has a great pitching staff, especially if Josh Johnson continues to show he is fully recovered from his Tommy John surgery.

The most beneficial trade you could make would bolster your hitting, and I am looking specifically to upgrade your first base situation. I am not sure what you expect from Hank Blalock, but he is an unacceptable first baseman in a 12-team mixed league. A trade like Alex Rios and Matt Cain for someone like Adrian Gonzalez makes sense. It is tough to judge how realistic a hypothetical trade off the top of your head is, but a trade like that would leave your team in much better shape.

The new first baseman would play, of course, first base and either Jackson or Snider can fill the now empty outfield spot. With still four solid starters, your rotation should still be a force.

Overall my feeling is your team will take three to four of the pitching categories and two, possibly three of the hitting ones. So I do think your team is above average, but, in its current state I do not think it can compete with some of the teams I am imagining are stronger. At some point during the season—whether tomorrow or in July—you are going to have to make a trade or a great pickup that nets you another hitter or two if you are going to make a championship push. Keep those phone lines open.

Posted by Paul Singman at 12:29am

Thursday, April 16, 2009

What’s the big deal with Jose Arredondo?

Why is Arredondo owned in so many fantasy leagues? (Icon/SMI)

What is the big deal with Jose Arredondo? Throughout the offseason, everyone talked about how great he was and how he would be saving games in Anaheim this season, and even once Brian Fuentes signed with the team this kind of talked subsided only to a certain degree.

Arredondo is owned in 48 percent of Yahoo! leagues, 35 percent of ESPN leagues (down from 45 percent after his rough first week), and 25 percent of CBS leagues. I just don't get it.

Saves potential?

Sure, early in the off-season we weren't sure who would be closing for the Angels, but now Scot Shields seems pretty firmly entrenched as the No. 2 in that bullpen. The official team depth chart has Shields above Arredondo.

Arredondo has been entering the game first with Shields coming on later to set up Fuentes. Shields was even used in the ninth inning to secure a save the other night. In 2008, Shields' leverage index (gmLI) was 1.62. Arredondo's was 1.38. Through the first week of 2009, Shields again leads 1.49 to 1.33. Mike Scioscia seems to trust Shields more in the later innings and the tighter spots.

Some will argue that Shields' age is a deterrence to becoming a closer, should Fuentes get injured. They say that at 32 years old, Shields is too old to be a closer and that the team would be better off handing the job to the younger player. Yet how often do we hear teams talk about the importance of "experience" for closers? Now, in this case, it's suddenly a bad thing?

Last year, of the 20 players who saved more than 25 games, nine of them were at least 32 years old and another three were over 30. So what makes Shields different than these guys? You could argue that he's different because some of these guys began closing before they hit 30, but Shields was behind Francisco Rodriguez. How was he supposed to close?

This isn't to say that the Angels see things this way, but it sure seems like they prefer Shields.

Good ERA and WHIP?

Maybe people are holding onto Arredondo for his ratios? It's certainly acceptable to play elite relievers to bring down your ERA and WHIP, but Arredondo doesn't fit this bill.

Of the non-Marcel projection systems (I exclude Marcels because there is not enough major league data on Arredondo for me to put much weight into it), the best projection is a 3.67 ERA from the always-optimistic Bill James system. THT's system projects a 4.67 ERA, and PECOTA comes in at 4.09. The best WHIP projection is 1.33 from ZiPS with THT and PECOTA both over 1.40.

His minor league numbers aren't even all that great. He has a K/9 in the 7.0s at both Double-A and Triple-A for his career (albeit with a near 8.0 K/9 in Double-A and a small sample size at Triple-A), and that's before converting to an MLE.

What I will give him, however, is his 1.62 ERA in the majors last season. This probably has a lot to do with everyone's expectations for him. He also has pretty good stuff with a high-rising fastball (although he only gets average velocity of around 92 MPH with it) and a biting splitter. This portends potential future success, but for now, I just can't see owning Arredondo in anything but an AL-only league or very deep mixed league.

Closing up

Arredondo is third in his team's pecking order and posts mediocre fantasy ratios. Sure, Arredondo is a good pitcher and probably belongs in the upper ranks of real-life relief pitchers, but with ERA expectations above 3.75, he won't be helping your fantasy team's ratios.

If you're looking for saves upside, go out and get Ryan Franklin, Brandon Lyon, Scott Downs, or even guys like Jensen Lewis, Leo Nunez, or Manny Corpas.

If you're looking for ratios, go get Rafael Perez, Hideki Okajima, Takashi Saito, Manny Delcarmen, or Cla Meredith. All are under 10 percent owned in ESPN leagues and 30 percent owned in Yahoo! leagues (some are under 10 percent here too). Even guys like Hong-Chih Kuo and Grant Balfour are available in more than half of all leagues.

Don't take this as me saying "Arredondo sucks and won't save any games." He has solid skills and some definite saves potential. My point is that there are better guys available in both regards.

Posted by Derek Carty at 1:18am (13) Comments

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Are you smarter than a sabermetric spreadsheet? (Part 2)

Last week I provided a points scoring system and asked readers to list the five outfielders who they expected to score the most points on Friday, April 10. Of the readers who replied, the top five picks were Grady Sizemore (six picks), Alfonso Soriano (six picks), Curtis Granderson (six picks), Matt Holliday (four picks), and Manny Ramirez (four picks). The spreadsheet that I use to evaluate hitters based on their matchups, park, and other contextual factors came up with a very different list, only agreeing with the readers on Sizemore. The other outfielders it identified in the top five were Carlos Quentin (two reader picks), Jermaine Dye (one pick), Shane Victorino (one pick), and Vladimir Guerrero (zero picks).

So what accounted for the difference?

It looks like the players on the readers' list tended to be really good and other than Ramirez are very well-rounded players. The computer put more of a focus on match-ups and contextual factors. It gave Quentin and Dye a lot of credit for playing at home, in a hitters' park, against a really bad opposing starting pitcher (Dickey). Victorino, too, benefited from playing in an excellent hitters' park against a bad pitcher (Marquis). Marquis is also very easy to steal bases against, which is a substantial advantage for a fast player like Victorino. I assume that was overlooked by most (if not all) readers. I certainly wasn’t aware of it until I looked over the results of the spreadsheet calculations. In Guerrero’s case, I suspect that the readers may have actually done a better job in their evaluation than the spreadsheet. The calculations treated Wakefield as a really awful pitcher based on his K/9, BB/9 and GB% rates. What they don't know is that he’s a knuckleball pitcher and that knuckleballers tend to do better than their component statistics would suggest.

Among the other popular readers picks, I suspect that Granderson and Soriano may be worse players in this scoring system than many readers gave them credit for, due to their lack of walks. That’s actually one of the things that's really surprised me since I started maintaining the spreadsheet and using it for multiple game formats. There's a drastic difference between the values of players in different games, and in some cases a player may rank very high in one game and far lower in another. Just knowing that a player is "good" isn't enough. You need to know what they're worth in the scoring system that your league or contest uses.

Comparing the readers' picks with the spreadsheet picks really points out the advantages and disadvantages of relying on calculations rather than intuition for your picks in daily contests. While the spreadsheet can often do a better job measuring and balancing a number of different factors related to the players and the context of the game, it can only take into account factors that have been programmed into the statistical model. If you haven’t gotten around to including them, it won’t know about things like knuckleballs, rain, injuries, defensive replacements, and other factors that may occur infrequently or be hard to quantify. On balance, I think a good statistical model can outperform the intuition of any expert, but the model will do best when monitored by a knowledgeable person.

While we all know that one game is far too small a sample size to really answer the question of who was "right," it’s still fun to take a look at how the players in question performed. Here are the point totals for each of the nine players listed above:

Sizemore: 1
Soriano: -2
Granderson: 6
Holliday: 4
Ramirez: 4

Sizemore: 1
Quentin: 8
Dye: -1
Victorino: 2
Guerrero: 4

Almost a tie, as the spreadsheet outperformed the people 14 to 13. A side benefit of the spreadsheet’s focus on matchups is that it will often identify players who are available more cheaply than the stars that most people prefer.

Posted by Alex Zelvin at 2:35am (4) Comments

When to use your FAAB budget and waiver priority

Last week, I discussed my philosophy regarding the use of the waiver wire in "first-come-first-served" type leagues. For leagues that use waiver priorities or FAAB, however, things can get a little bit trickier. Today, I'd like to give a few of my thoughts on these kinds of leagues.

Waiver priorities

The exact setup of these kinds of leagues can vary greatly, but many leagues that use waiver priorities combine it with a "first-come-first-served" approach (such as Yahoo! leagues). After the first few days of the season, all players are fair game and waiver priorities are used for players who get released or are newly added to the database. In leagues like this, I still generally recommend the approach I outlined last week. I really wouldn't worry about using up a high waiver priority quickly, with a few exceptions.

If you are playing in the kind of league where Jimmy Rollins or Prince Fielder gets dropped after a poor first week and a half, then saving the waiver priority can be important. As long as owners aren't dropping players who should be owned, though, who are you really saving it for?

The answer, in Yahoo! leagues, used to be "prospects" for many owners, but the Yahoo! database is much more complete this year. And even if you're in a league where recalled prospects automatically hit waivers, there are very few worth saving your priority for. Matt Wieters is honestly the only one this year I would save it for. David Price? Tommy Hanson? Gaby Sanchez? Mat Gamel? Nope. None of them. Use your waiver priority aggressively as per my suggestions last week.

Other leagues put every free agent on waivers each week and resets the waiver priorities based on standings. In these kinds of leagues, again, be aggressive. You'll be getting a new priority every week, so if you wind up with a good one, use it up.

FAAB

FAAB bidding adds an extra element of strategy to leagues that I, personally, love, but they also add an extra layer of complexity.

The arguments
There are three common arguments for the use of FAAB:
1) FAAB should be hoarded
2) FAAB should be used aggressively
3) FAAB should be spent cautiously and frugally

Proponents of the first strategy are generally in AL- or NL-only leagues where they plan on saving FAAB cash in case of a midseason trade of, say, Manny Ramirez or CC Sabathia. These owners are swinging for the fences.

Proponents of the second strategy can be in any type of league but generally hold the philosophy that FAAB gives you no value if you leave it on the table and that you should acquire good players as they become available without worrying too much about budgeting.

Proponents of the third strategy are somewhere in between, not overbidding on players but not necessarily hoarding cash either.

My stance
Personally, I fall more into the second camp. In AL- or NL-only leagues, I don't bother to wait on superstars switching leagues.

First, there is no guarantee that a star will actually be traded, much less to the right league. Second, you'll have a tough decision to make on what to eventually bid for him. Your whole budget? If not, you're risking losing him to someone else.

Even if a star is traded to the right league and you win him, we don't know what caliber that star will be. Is he a $25 player? $30? $35? Let's say $30 on average, but we must consider that we'll only be getting about two months worth of time. That $30 player, as good as he is, will only be worth $10 to your team—and that's if we are absolutely certain he will become available and that you'll actually win the bidding for him.

In an NL-only league, that's about as valuable as Luis Castillo or Pedro Feliz. If we discount for the uncertainty, maybe this player will only be as valuable as Jack Wilson or David Eckstein (on average), though we would need to factor in the value of whomever he'll be replacing.

For me, I'm comfortable enough where I think I can attain "Pedro Feliz" value in bits and pieces throughout the year using my FAAB budget. In LABR, I spent $5 FAAB on Ross Gload, and I imagine he would have gone for at least $4 or $5 at auction. One week and five percent of my budget used, and I'm already halfway there.

Sample budget
There was a great article posted last offseason at Fantasy Baseball Cafe by Scott Swanay about the use of FAAB. To quote the important part:

The following is a sample FAAB spending plan for a $1,000 budget that allocates weekly dollars in proportion to the amount of time left in the season. If your league uses a $100 budget instead, divide the amounts shown here by 10 and round to the nearest dollar:

* (End of) Week 1 - spend $77; $77 spent year-to-date; $923 remaining.
* Week 2 - $73; $150; $850.
* Week 3 - $71; $221; $779.
* Week 4 - $68; $289; $711.
* Week 5 - $65; $354; $646.
* Week 6 - $62; $416; $584.
* Week 7 - $59; $475; $525.
* Week 8 - $55; $530; $470.
* Week 9 - $52; $582; $418.
* Week 10 - $49; $631; $369.
* Week 11 - $46; $677; $323.
* Week 12 - $43; $720; $280.
* Week 13 - $40; $760; $240.
* Week 14 - $37; $797; $203.
* Week 15 - $34; $831; $169.
* Week 16 - $31; $862; $138.
* Week 17 - $28; $890; $110.
* Week 18 - $25; $915; $85.
* Week 19 - $22; $937; $63.
* Week 20 - $18; $955; $45.
* Week 21 - $15; $970; $30.
* Week 22 - $12; $982; $18.
* Week 23 - $9; $991; $9.
* Week 24 - $6; $997; $3.
* Week 25 - $3; $1,000; $0.

I haven't checked the math on it, but it looks pretty sound and, if nothing else, the logic is spot on. The longer you wait to acquire a player, the less impact he is going to have on your team. As obvious as that sounds, many fantasy owners don't put it together. The players you get in April are going to count more than players who you acquire in June, making it wise to spend more on them (holding all else constant).

Swanay's budget doesn't necessarily need to be followed to the letter, though, because various league conditions will undoubtedly come into play. If Rollins does get dropped this week, you can be sure I'll bid a good chunk of my budget on him. Or if there really isn't anyone appealing out there in week three, I'll sit on my money for a week or two. The underlying premise is what's important, and that is to use your FAAB budget aggressively but intelligently.

Concluding thoughts

As I've said a couple times throughout this article, rules can be vary for these kinds of leagues, so if your league doesn't fit anything I mentioned, feel free to comment or e-mail and I'd be happy to give you my take.

Posted by Derek Carty at 1:06am (2) Comments

Roster Doctor

Posted by Jonathan Halket at 1:01am (0) Comments

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Fantasy Baseball Roundtable: Next Ludwick and Lee

This week's Fantasy Baseball Roundtable was hosted by FantasyPhenoms. The question was:

Name one pitcher and one hitter that is on the waiver wire in most leagues, that is worth picking up and could become the next Cliff Lee or Ryan Ludwick. Why them?

THT Fantasy's response this week was a team effort as we all threw some names around. If you're interested, you can find all of the responses here. Also note that we took a loose interpretation of the question, mostly just looking for guys who will provide good value but who aren't necessarily anything like Ludwick or Lee.

Posted by Derek Carty at 7:35pm (2) Comments

Player profile: Adam Lind

Sit back, relax, and let Lind carry part of the load for your offense in 2009. (Icon/SMI)

Off topic note: As I am writing this, Nick Swisher has just pitched an inning for the Yankees. He got a strikeout and did not give up a run. I am now overjoyed.

Several players have gotten off to hot starts this year, few hotter than Blue Jays left fielder/designated hitter Adam Lind. Through his first eight games, he is batting .400 with three home runs and twelve RBI. When a relatively unknown like Lind does get off on one of those starts, the question on most people minds is: "Is he going to be good throughout the season, or is this a one week fling?" Fortunately, we can tell you which players to buy and which to sell by examining them with our arsenal of stats.

For Lind, his past three years in the majors looked like this:

+------+-----+-----------+-----+-------+----+-----+----+----+
| YEAR | AGE | TEAM      | AB  | BA    | HR | RBI | R  | SB |
+------+-----+-----------+-----+-------+----+-----+----+----+
| 2006 |  22 | Blue Jays |  60 | 0.367 |  2 |   8 |  8 |  0 |
| 2007 |  23 | Blue Jays | 290 | 0.238 | 11 |  46 | 34 |  1 |
| 2008 |  24 | Blue Jays | 326 | 0.282 |  9 |  40 | 48 |  2 |
+------+-----+-----------+-----+-------+----+-----+----+----+

Looking at the half-a-season he played in the majors last year, it appears Lind had decent plate discipline and power skills, but let's look closer at his skill set, starting with his power.

Power

If you're new to THT Fantasy Focus and are unfamiliar with True Home Runs (tHR) or any of the other stats I'm using, check out our quick reference guide. These stats provide a much clearer picture of a player's talent, so it's well worth taking a couple of minutes to learn them.

+------+-----+-----------+-----+----+-----+-------+--------+--------+--------+
| YEAR | AGE | TEAM      | AB  | HR | tHR | HR/FB | tHR/FB | nHR/FB | OF FB% |
+------+-----+-----------+-----+----+-----+-------+--------+--------+--------+
| 2006 |  22 | Blue Jays |  60 |  2 |   2 |    10 |     10 |     10 |     44 |
| 2007 |  23 | Blue Jays | 290 | 11 |  16 |    15 |     22 |     23 |     33 |
| 2008 |  24 | Blue Jays | 326 |  9 |  13 |    12 |     17 |     18 |     29 |
+------+-----+-----------+-----+----+-----+-------+--------+--------+--------+

Lind's unluckiness with home runs in 2007 was noted in the original article introducing True Home Runs (tHR) and it appears he was unlucky again in 2008. The point of looking at these stats, however, is not to determine whether Lind was unlucky in the past; it is to know his true skill set so we can predict what he will do in the future.

By taking a rough average of his 2007 and 2008 power numbers and also including his minor league numbers in the mix, we can expect Lind to hit outfield flyballs (OF FB%) at about a thirty percent rate, and have about eighteen percent of those flyballs go for home runs. Over a season's worth of at bats, hitting at those ratios Lind would knock about thirty home runs.

We cannot be sure exactly what his OF FB percentage and HR/FB percentage will be (especially considering that we're dealing with the equivalent of a single season of at-bats for most players), but a range of anywhere between 25 to 35 home runs really wouldn't be unexpected of Lind (it helps that he has three already). That is certainly impressive for someone who went undrafted in many leagues.

Contact

As someone who will not get stolen bases, Lind's value hinges on his ability to maintain a high average.

+------+-----+-----------+-----+-------+-------+-----+-------+--------+-----+--------+---------+
| YEAR | AGE | TEAM      | AB  | BA    | tBA   | CT% | BABIP | xBABIP | LD% | BIP/HR | BIP/tHR |
+------+-----+-----------+-----+-------+-------+-----+-------+--------+-----+--------+---------+
| 2007 |  23 | Blue Jays | 290 | 0.238 | 0.287 |  78 | 0.271 |  0.314 |  18 |     20 |      14 |
| 2008 |  24 | Blue Jays | 326 | 0.282 | 0.295 |  82 | 0.322 |  0.322 |  19 |     30 |      21 |
+------+-----+-----------+-----+-------+-------+-----+-------+--------+-----+--------+---------+

On the surface, based on his True Batting Average (tBA), Lind seems capable of posting a batting average around .290. Before that number is set in stone though, lets peer over at his plate discipline stats to see what is going on over there.

+------+-----+-----------+-----+-----+------------+------+-------------+----------+
| YEAR | AGE | TEAM      | AB  | CT% | JUDGMENT X | A/P  | BAT CONTROL | BAD BALL |
+------+-----+-----------+-----+-----+------------+------+-------------+----------+
| 2007 |  23 | Blue Jays | 290 |  78 |         94 | 0.37 |          84 |       63 |
| 2008 |  24 | Blue Jays | 326 |  82 |         95 | 0.41 |          92 |       69 |
+------+-----+-----------+-----+-----+------------+------+-------------+----------+

Lind has below-average judgment of what pitches to swing at (Judgment X) but does a good job of making contact on the ones he does swing at (Bat Control, Bad Ball). I'd say the best thing Lind has going for him is that he will turn 26 years old this year and is playing in what looks like will be his first full major league season. Therefore, maturation—instead of deterioration—of these skills is the more likely path.

Overall Lind does not have the best plate discipline but with his tendencies to hit lots of grounders and line drives, and flyballs that go over the fence, Lind is able to keep his BABIP relatively high, inflating his batting average. A batting average in the high .280s seems reasonable given his skill set, although he has the potential to push a .300 average.

Concluding thoughts

The Blue Jays do not have the greatest of lineups but Lind, batting mostly fifth, figures to come up to the plate often enough with runners on base to rack up the RBIs. Lind probably will not break 75 runs and definitely won't get more than a stolen base or two, but he figures to be a solid three-category threat nonetheless.

With his burst out of the gate, the secret is already out on Lind. If you own him (as I do in all three leagues I am in this year) good for you; I would hold onto him. If you missed out on him, talk to whoever does own him. Maybe they think he is a one-hit wonder and are looking to "sell high" on him.

Given my expectations for Lind in 2009, he is someone worth owning in what has the looking of a breakout year.

Posted by Paul Singman at 9:05am

Decision Making Based On Small Statistical Samples

If your team isn’t doing so well in the standing so far, don’t fret. The season isn’t four percent up yet. Emilio Bonifacio will not finish the season as the game’s most valuable player. Take that to the bank. Conversely, Jimmy Rollins won’t finish the season with no steals and an average that would make Mario Mendoza blush.

As any statistics guru will tell you, small sample sets are the enemy of accuracy.

In pursuing trades and hitting the waiver wire, fantasy baseball managers may think they are making rational decisions based on available data and recycled scouting reports, but rationality is often applied on a rather arbitrary basis.

Here’s a couple of examples:

After hitting three home runs, knocking in 12 RBIs and stroking 12 hits in his first 30 at-bats of the season, Adam Lind’s ownership has risen from 26 percent to 81 percent in the course of a week in CBS Sportsline leagues. Adam Lind has all the makings of a “post-hype sleeper,” that term given to touted prospects who will only live up to their potential after we’ve forgotten about them — but so too does Kosuke Fukudome, who came into the league with just as much hype and is neck-and-neck with Lind as one of the most valuable players of the first week. Fukudome’s early success has only netted him a modest 41% ownership (up from 23), begging the question why fantasy baseball managers seem to strongly prefer Lind over Fukudome at the moment.

Anybody who owns Jason Motte is unlikely to be doing well in the category of ERA at the moment. Fantasy owners cursed Motte’s name after blowing a three-run lead in his first save opportunity of the year. Many have already dropped him, and even some intelligent fantasy gurus have proclaimed Motte’s era as closer a disaster and all but finished on the basis of one week of play! Call me a Motte apologist, but three strikeouts-to-no-walks in 2.1 innings following a fantastic spring training still makes him the best candidate to be the Cardinals closer. (Yes, this includes Chris Perez, who has a lot of hype but also has his fair share of control problems.)

Looking back at average draft position before the 2008 season, there were certainly high draft choices such as Carl Crawford, David Ortiz, and Erik Bedard who each turned from fantasy prince to fantasy frog last year. But the number of busts is modest compared to the number of players who came close to delivering their draft investment.

Right now is the time to be zigging while others are zagging, to take advantage of any big changes in market value. A week of baseball shouldn’t change the values we put on players. Making decisions on the basis of small sample sets is foolish. Making decisions that take advantage of the shifting perception of others can pay off.

Most teams in a fantasy league are destined to finish outside of first place. That’s a statistical fact. Transactions can certainly give teams a better chance at winning, but in the early going, the art of player assessment is overrated. Instead, focus on honestly evaluating your roster and leveraging the rash decision-making of others.

Posted by Eriq Gardner at 9:03am (2) Comments

Friday, April 10, 2009

Hit Rate Observer

Welcome to Hit Rate Observer! Each week, HRO will try to find unexplored avenues for success in fantasy. I thank Dave, David, and Derek for the opportunity.

A perennial quest in fantasy baseball is to boil players down to one number—some easily understood figure that permits quick comparisons between players. The idea has drawbacks, but it also can serve to focus the mind.

The modern sabermetric toolkit contains a wealth of candidates for our “one number”—OPS, Runs Created, BaseRuns, wOBA. Colin Wyers covered a lot of them in his column yesterday.

I’m thinking of something simpler, though. If you are in the market for one number, a case can be made for good old lineup position. Here you have a number (and single-digit at that!) that is strongly suggestive not just of a player’s overall offense but also of the split in his character between being a baserunner (OBP) and driving home other baserunners (SLG). For fantasy leaguers, lineup position also instantly insinuates the player’s contributions not only in Runs and RBI but also in HR, BA, and SB. Again, all on a 1-9 scale.

However, there’s a second aspect to lineup position of importance to fantasy players, which is that players who are higher in the order get more chances to show off their bats. Here is the average number of plate appearances per game, ordered by the position in the starting lineup (all data in this article are for 2008):

.

(We include data for both the AL and NL but excluding all pitchers. Also, we are considering only players who started in the lineup; consequently, the downward trend reflects not only the slighter PA from batting lower in the order but also the greater potential for lesser hitters to be pulled for a pinch-hitter later in the game. Both are hazards of the hinterlands.)

The graph is pretty linear from 1 and 7, and then it falls off more sharply. All in all, a starting hitter in the #1 slot averages 750 appearances in 162 games, whereas a starter in the #9 slot garners only 535 PA. Apart from their difference in make-up (which is, to be sure, large), a #1 hitter has a profound edge in plate trips.

There is a weakness in this analysis, however. In the above graph, we looked at opportunities for the majors overall. But teams don’t generate the same number of opportunities. If we truly want our “one number” to be useful, we’ll have to do better.

Consider these two AL teams in 2008:

Texas scored 210 more Runs than did Kansas City and carried 34 more points of OBP. It stands to reason, then, that the Rangers got more work from their starting nine—and they did, about 1.75 more PA per game. The starting #1 hitter on Texas logged 8% more appearances (57 more PA) than his counterpart on KC. For a typical #1 batter last year, that equates to 8 more Runs, 2.25 more SB, and 51 more at-bats of a .276 BA. (If you’re wondering why Texas got more PA from the starting #5 slot than from the starting #4, it’s because their #4 batter was more often replaced—20 more times, in fact.)

The upshot is that lineup position is relative. What we really want is effective lineup position (ELP)—a number that captures not only the batter’s position within the order but also his team’s position on the offensive spectrum.

We can derive Effective Lineup Position if, instead of using a batter’s lineup position to estimate his PA/G, we use his PA/G to estimate his lineup position. We can consult our first graph to build a suitable table:

PA/G	ELP
4.73	#0
4.62	#1
4.51	#2
4.39	#3
4.28	#4
4.17	#5
4.05	#6
3.94	#7
3.60	#8
3.30	#9

Wrap your head around that: an effective lineup position of 0. The #0 spot represents a batter who, through a combination of breathless team play and personal indispensability, gets so many plate appearances that it’s as if he's batting ahead of the typical lead-off man!

Does such an animal exist? Sure. We’ve already mentioned Texas’s #1 hitter (in truth, he was halfway to a lineup spot of -1). The Rangers actually had competition in this department from the Mets, whose #1 hitter had an identical 4.79 PA/G. The lead-off men for Boston, Cleveland, and Chicago (NL) also batted like #0.

Here the top 10 hitters in PA/G last year, among batters with sizable PA:

HITTER	TEAM	PA/G
Kinsler	TEX	4.82
Reyes Jos	NYM	4.79
Sizemore	CLE	4.74
Granderson	DET	4.70
Rollins	PHI	4.69
Soriano	CHC	4.68
Iwamura	TB	4.68
Pedroia	BOS	4.67
Ellsbury	BOS	4.66
Weeks	MIL	4.64

Note that Dustin Pedroia ranks ahead of teammate Jacoby Ellsbury even though Pedroia tended to bat #2. The reason is that Pedroia never batted lower than #4, whereas Ellsbury, on those occasions when he didn’t bat #1, never batted above #6. Drafting Pedroia—a #2 hitter—gave you more chances than from most other teams’ lead-off men.

And the upheaval isn’t limited to the top of the order. Tampa Bay’s starting #9 hitter last year averaged 3.81 PA/G; with the same rate, he could have slipped unnoticed into Seattle’s #7 spot.

Why talk of ELP rather than PA/G? Two reasons: First, ELP turns an obscure rate (PA/G) into a familiar one—most people wouldn’t know that 4.51 PA/G and 4.39 PA/G were sharply different, much less where those numbers fell in the order. Second, lineup position introduces more color to the picture; even with a fictitious spot like #0, we know the sort of skills that the hitter brings to the park (good OBP, good speed, little power).

This year, Heater is predicting big things from the offenses of Cleveland, Colorado, both Chicago teams, and (of course) Texas. Pursuing the lead-off man (or even the #2 hitter) on one of those clubs could spell the difference in a tight fantasy contest.

Lineup position—both straight and effective—will appear in Heater Magazine this year. You can subscribe to Heater, as well as Dave Studeman's Batted Ball Report, at this link.

Posted by John Burnson at 4:00am (5) Comments

Roster Doctor - 4/10/09

Welcome to THT Fantasy's Roster Doctor. If you'd like your team to be analyzed by one of our fantasy baseball experts, please send your full roster to this address. Also be sure to include your league's player pool (mixed, AL-only, NL-only), number of teams, scoring format (roto, head-to-head, points, etc.), categories, whether or not it's a keeper league, and any other pertinent information. If your roster is selected it will be analyzed in a future Roster Doctor column.

Player pool: Mixed
No. of teams: 10
Categories: Traditional 5x5
Scoring Type: Roto
Roster:

C - Victor Martinez
C - Ramon Hernandez
1B - Carlos Pena
2B - Alexei Ramirez
SS - Jimmy Rollins
3B - David Wright
CI - Adrian Beltre
MI - Robinson Cano
OF - Manny Ramirez
OF - Nick Markakis
OF - Alex Rios
OF - Adam Dunn
OF - Lastings Milledge
UT - Adam LaRoche

P - Javier Vazquez
P - Yovani Gallardo
P - Joba Chamberlain
P - Zack Greinke
P - Aaron Harang
P - Ted Lilly
P - Chad Qualls
P - Joel Hanrahan
P - Matt Lindstrom

BN - Kevin Slowey
BN - Scott Baker
BN - Jason Motte
BN - George Sherrill
BN - J.J. Putz
BN - Hong-Chih Kuo

This is a team that I like a lot. The pitching is very strong with eight very good starting pitchers and a mix of risks and safer players. The team has five closers and the two best setup men in the game.

The only real move I would recommend here would be to offer Matt Lindstrom around. If he pitches like he did last year, he's not a good bet to finish the year closing games. Heath Bell would be a great return, but I'd also trade him for Frank Francisco, Brandon Morrow, Mike Gonzalez, Huston Street, probably Brad Ziegler, and maybe even Kevin Gregg. Sherrill could be traded for any of them as well, but you'd be unlikely to get any bites. Carlos Marmol might be a good target for him, depending upon the savvyness of his owner.

On offense, you have some good players, but I definitely think you could upgrade. Wright and Rollins are a terrific foundation for your team, and you have a very good outfield. I am big on guys like Carlos Lee, Matt Kemp, and Nate McLouth, however, and I think it would be worth offering Manny, Markakis, and Dunn around. Dunn for Curtis Granderson would also be an upgrade. I could also stand trading Dunn for Raul Ibanez if it means getting a good upgrade elsewhere.

I'd also consider trading Alexei Ramirez. He's a good player, but Kelly Johnson is a very underrated second baseman this year, and you would only take a small hit at 2B while likely picking up a significant upgrade elsewhere. I like Robinson Cano a lot.

Beltre is a guy who may be in for a power decline this year, although it's possible his peripheral drop last year was injury-related. If this is the case and he is healthy this year he could be fine, but he's a little too risky for my taste when there are safer guys who are similarly valued. James Loney would be a good choice. Nelson Cruz would be nice if you moved LaRoche to CI.

I'd also offer Victor Martinez around. I'm not as big on him as some, and I'd rather have guys like Ryan Doumit, Chris Iannetta, or even Mike Napoli or Matt Wieters. Wieters would actually make a good target as he's likely undervalued, and then you could pick up someone like Kenji Johjima to start until he is called up. As Victor generally goes higher than all of these guys, you could also leverage an upgrade elsewhere. Something like Victor/Pena for catcher/Kevin Youkilis might be a solid deal. Or Victor/Milledge for catcher/Nelson Cruz. Just a few random ideas.

Adam Lind might be gone by now, but if not, I'd probably pick him up to play over LaRoche.

Posted by Derek Carty at 3:59am (0) Comments

Thursday, April 09, 2009

My Razzball team

Rudy Gamble over at razzball.com was kind enough to invite me to participate in his annual Razzball fantasy league. For those of you who haven't heard of the Razzball leagues, it is a points based fantasy league where the goal is to try and assemble the worst possible team. The scoring is:

Batting:
At Bats (AB) 2
Hits (H) -3
Home Runs (HR) -10
Runs Scored (R) -4
Runs Batted In (RBI) -4
Strikeouts (K) 2

Pitching:
Innings Pitched (IP) -1
Hits Allowed (H) 1
Walks Issued (BB) 1
Earned Runs (ER) 1.5
Home Runs Allowed (HR) 4
Strikeouts (K) -1
Losses (L) 8

Obviously, you can't just go for bad players - you have to go for bad players that get good amounts of playing time. Clearly, the point system encourages you to draft speedy players with little power. Players like Willy Taveras have a lot of value in this league. The positional requirements are fairly hefty; the five outfield slots and the three corner infield slots are tough to fill. Picking pitchers is a bit more nuanced. Obviously, innings eaters like Livan Hernandez are great. But there aren't many of those. Flyball pitchers tend to get more strikeouts than ground ball pitchers but they also give up more home runs. I had a ton of fun researching and drafting for this league. Going forward, it'll be a nice change of pace to keep an eye out for when journeymen like Freddy Garcia might get a spot start for a team struggling with injuries.

My roster for the first fantasy week is:

C Jason Kendall
1B Billy Butler
2B Emmanuel Burriss
3B Bill Hall
SS Jeff Keppinger
2B/SS Khalil Greene
1B/3B Jed Lowrie
OF Cameron Maybin
OF Fred Lewis
OF Randy Winn
OF Travis Snider
OF Kosuke Fukudome
UTIL Miguel Olivo

Bench
Kelly Johnson
Pablo Sandoval

Pitchers
Kevin Millwood
Vicente Padilla
Tim Wakefield
Matt Harrison
Jorge De La Rosa
Adam Eaton
David Purcey
Anthony Reyes
R.A. Dickey

Bench
Fausto Carmona
Trevor Cahill
Josh Outman
Jeremy Bonderman

Though Millwood burned me with his first start of the year, I am hoping for good (bad) things out of the Texas pitching staff this year. Purcey is one of my gambles and he also fried me a bit with his first start. Still, he's a fly ball pitcher on a mediocre to bad team with little depth to replace him if he goes through a rough patch. Some people have high hopes for Matt Harrison. I do too, only in the bad kind of way. Last year his ERA was 5.49, which his FIP of 5.20 and an xFIP of 5.12. His K/BB and K/9 are 1.35 and 4.51, his ground ball rate is only around 40 percent and he'll be pitching in Arlington.

My strengths in the field are my catchers. Even though catchers are often Razzball all-stars for most teams, I'm especially high on my catchers. Kendall has zero offensive capability but, with Mike Rivera backing him up, he should get a lot of playing time. Olivo has a bit of power unfortunately, but I love his 7.05 K/BB ratio.

Billy Butler hasn't yet found the power stroke that scouts were projecting years ago. I plan on riding him until he does. I actually have Burriss and Lowrie on one of my regular fantasy teams. Burriss' speed doesn't hurt me here though. Lowrie is eligible at third base in ESPN leagues, which is the system Razzball uses, so while I have Lowrie at short in my other league, I think he'll do well for me at the shallower corner infield spot here.

Maybin and, in particular, Snider could hurt me in short run as teams challenge them with fastballs. I am banking that teams will figure out how to pitch to them and I'll get to enjoy the ensuing mid-year slump.

Posted by Jonathan Halket at 1:28am (7) Comments

When to use the waiver wire

With draft season over and many owners not looking to trade yet, the waiver wire currently dominates the attention of most fantasy owners. However, there are different, conflicting philosophies regarding proper use of the waiver wire, even among intelligent fantasy players and experts. Today, I thought I'd give you my thoughts on the matter.

Different philosophies

Some feel that it is best to be aggressive on the waiver wire throughout April, taking a "shoot first, ask questions later" approach. If a player gets off to a hot start with the peripheral skills to back it up, pick him up and see if he continues. If he doesn't, drop him later.

The problem with this line of thought is that in April (and through much of the first half of the year, honestly), sample sizes are far too small to make any kind of reasonable judgment based off of them. Surely we'd be better off judging a player by the hundreds of previous at-bats he's taken as opposed to a handful in April, no?

Still, every year at least a couple of these April surgers outperform projections and turn in great fantasy seasons. Just one year ago, guys like Carlos Quentin, Ryan Ludwick, Cliff Lee, and Edinson Volquez led many owners to a fantasy championship. Had we waited until their numbers stabilized, they would be long gone from the wire and leading the charge for someone else's team.

In a recent conversation I had with an esteemed fantasy analyst, this analyst expressed the idea that many fantasy players get too caught up in small sample sizes and anecdotal evidence, stating that it is the job of the good fantasy analyst to "drive perceptions back to long-term trends." He said that he didn't understand people who claim "if he regresses, I'll drop him later," because at that point you've eaten three rotten weeks. You would never listen to a financial adviser who says, "If the stock falls after you buy it, you can sell!" Put that way, it seems a little silly that we would even consider such a notion.

My take for 'first-come-first-served' leagues

Here's why I feel differently, though. Baseball players, as much as we may treat them like stocks, are not stocks. They are different and follow a separate set of rules.

The primary cost of a stock is the acquisition cost. You pay a certain amount of money, you acquire the stock, and your return or loss is fully dependent upon its future performance.

In fantasy, however, you can hedge against (or eliminate) the risk of uncertain future performance in your waiver wire pickups. In fantasy, the primary cost is not the acquisition cost (unless you're in a FAAB league or must use a high waiver claim—these are leagues I'll discuss next time) but, rather, the activation cost.

In fantasy, the only acquisition cost is the worth of a single roster spot (most often the last spot on your bench). You can bench your pickup for three weeks to see how he does without incurring a single additional cost. Only once you activate him do you start to incur additional risk and additional costs (should he fail).

In the stock market, you can't pick a stock and say that you're going to watch it for three weeks before deciding whether or not you wanted to buy it at the original price. In fantasy, however, we can do just this by sitting the player on our bench.

In addition, the last player on your bench will often be an unspectacular veteran player worth only a couple dollars. The cost of losing this player is small because 1) there are likely similar, interchangeable players available on the wire to grab in case your high-upside pickup flops and 2) the high-upside pickup's value might not be much worse than this player's value anyway.

Potential scenario

While picking up a player for your bench sounds like a great idea, in some leagues you don't have a bench or simply don't have room on it. If, for whatever reason, you must start the pickup, it still might be worth it to take the gamble. Take a look at the following scenario.

Let's say we pick up Cameron Maybin, who THT has projected for -$7 in value over the entire season. We decide to keep him for three weeks and then drop him if he isn't tearing it up. If the player he will be replacing is valued at $3 over the entire season (a reasonable estimate for the last player on your roster), that amounts to a $1.20 net loss in value.

Now let's set up a hypothetical scenario in which Maybin has just two distinct possibilities: playing to his -$7 projection or becoming a $25 player (value dispersed evenly throughout the season). In this case, Maybin would need to play up to his $25 value five times out of 100 in order to break even on the pickup.

So the question then becomes, do 5 percent of April pickups post $25 seasons? This question would take a more in-depth study than I have time for now, but I would imagine the answer is a resounding "yes" if we only include players who are showing marked skill increases (after all, if a player isn't doing this, he's just getting lucky and shouldn't even be considered).

Caveats

The scenario I depicted above is just one possible scenario that was simplified a great deal. For your fantasy team, it isn't enough to simply use that 5 percent figure and make pickups based off of it. There are a number of factors that really need to be considered:

Projected value of pickup
Projected value of player to be replaced
Potential upside (and downside) of pickup (and this will not be a single value — it will be a numerous values, the probability of each usually forming a rough normal curve)
Potential upside (and downside) of player to be replaced
Active or bench spot
How long you will keep the player before giving up and dropping him
Availability of solid, unspectacular free agents should your pickup flop
Acquisition cost — is it a simple pickup or does your league require FAAB bidding or waiver claims? (more on this next time)
Opportunity cost of passing on other free agents (which can be ignored, assuming you're picking up the one with the highest upside)
Potential trades should the pickup post another couple good weeks

To help you decide the necessary probability for your own pickup, I've put together a (very) simplified calculator that will run you through my scenario above and give you a rough estimate of the necessary odds needed to make a pickup worthwhile. You can download it by clicking here. Keep in mind this is for leagues that would require the pickup to be active from day one. In leagues where the player can be benched, the needed odds would be much lower.

Concluding thoughts

Overall, I think it is wise to make frequent use of the waiver wire in the early portions of the year. Of course, every league is different and every team is different, and in some situations this will not be the best strategy. You should examine your own specific situation and then decide upon the best course of action.

In leagues that allow you to bench your pickups, however, it is almost always a good idea to be aggressive early if you have an easily replaceable player that can be dropped. The cost is very small and the reward is huge.

Next time, I'll talk a little about handling the waiver wire in leagues with FAAB bidding.

Posted by Derek Carty at 1:22am

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Are you smarter than a Sabermetric spreadsheet?

I wrote a short post on my blog a few days ago about the drawbacks of relying on intuition or instinct when making picks in daily fantasy baseball leagues. I think it’s a topic that’s worthy of some elaboration. After all, if you’re knowledgeable about baseball and have a solid understanding of statistics in general and Sabermetrics in particular, shouldn’t you be able to come up with roughly the same result by looking things over carefully as you would if you actually did the calculations to take all the relevant factors into account? The answer is a resounding "no."

Using a spreadsheet or computer program is going to provide you with at least three big advantages.

The first is that once a player or a factor is incorporated into your statistical model, you’ll never overlook it. You won’t forget about the existence of a player or forget to check whether one of your hitters is facing a lefty or righty starter.

The second is that you’ll be able to work faster. Assuming all my supporting data is up to date, I can turn a schedule from MLB.com into ratings for the day and pick a lineup for almost any contest in 5-10 minutes. If I had to research the park, opponent, and other factors for each potential member of my lineup, it would likely take an hour or more.

But by far, the most important factor is that the human mind (at least most of them) simply isn’t well-equipped to evaluate a large number of contextual factor simultaneously, and is particularly badly suited to assigning the proper weight to various factors based on subtle differences of degree. As an example, are you really able to judge which is worth more in your format: a .300 hitter with 30 HR, and 5 SB, playing in a park that inflates runs and home runs by 5 percent against Johan Santana, or a .280 hitter with 35 HR and 0 SB, playing in a park that deflates runs and home runs by 5 percent against Brett Myers? Then consider all the factors I didn’t even mention—platoon advantages, bullpens, home-field advantage, and many others. It seems unlikely that anyone is capable of assessing the importance of each of them, and arriving at a reasonably accurate evaluation or projection of each player’s value for the day.

As a kind of thought experiment or game, I’m asking of each of you who reads this to take a look at the games scheduled for Friday and rank the top five outfielders. We’ll use the following points scoring system:

Single: 1 point
Double: 2 points
Triple: 3 points
Home Run: 4 points
Run: 1 point
RBI: 1 point
Walk: 1 point
Stolen Base: 2 points
Strikeout: -1 points

Post your picks in the comments section here. My own picks just based on intuition are Beltran, Rios, Sizemore, Hamilton, and Guerrero. I’m primarily looking at who the opposing pitcher is and what park the game is being played in. Sometime before Friday, I’ll put the results of my spreadsheet calculations in the comments section, and next week I’ll discuss some of the factors that influenced the calculations. It should be interesting to see how many of our picks differ from what my formulas indicate, and what factors cause the differences. While the results of one day’s games are too small a sample size to know which set of predictions are "better," hopefully we’ll still be able to learn something interesting from the exercise.

Posted by Alex Zelvin at 2:41am (15) Comments

Roster Doctor - 4/8/09

Welcome to THT Fantasy's Roster Doctor. If you'd like your team to be analyzed by one of our fantasy baseball experts, please send your full roster to this address. Also be sure to include your league's player pool (mixed, AL-only, NL-only), number of teams, scoring format (roto, head-to-head, points, etc.), categories, whether or not it's a keeper league, and any other pertinent information. If your roster is selected it will be analyzed in a future Roster Doctor column.

Player pool: Mixed
No. of teams: 10
Categories: Traditional 5x5
Scoring Type: Roto
Roster:
C - Ryan Doumit
1B - Carlos Pena
2B - Howie Kendrick
3B - Melvin Mora
SS - JJ Hardy
2B/SS - Felipe Lopez
1B/3B - Conor Jackson
OF - Ryan Braun
OF - Matt Holliday
OF - Alex Rios
OF - Torii Hunter
OF - Delmon Young
UTIL - Carlos Gomez
Bench - Paul Konerko
Bench - Edwin Encarnacion

P - Roy Halladay
P - Roy Oswalt
P - Francisco Liriano
P - Matt Garza
P - Randy Johnson
P - Huston Street
P - Mike Gonzalez
P - George Sherrill
P - Chad Cordero
Bench - Aaron Harang

Here's a very standard ESPN 10-team roto league, whose manager has been "the victim of the autopicker" due to having to miss the draft. Before we get to ideas for turning this team around, let's start off with strengths. Ryan Braun was probably your first pick, and as long as you were picking 5th or later, I think the autodraft algorithm served you well. I'm not sure who your second pick was, so I'm guessing Halladay and/or Holliday were taken too highly (actually, both likely were). But Holliday, in my eyes, was going too low in most drafts. He was an interesting case this year; very unsophisticated managers would draft him too highly due to not accounting for the Coors effect. Somewhat sophisticated managers would put him too low on their board, assuming his road stats were indicative of his new production level. And those managers who took the next step—noting the impact of the humidor on Coors HR numbers, and the fact that most ballplayers hit better at home, bumped him up on their sheets more towards his previous status as a top-10 or early teen pick. I think Holliday is somewhere between the 20th- and 25th-best player going into this year. Edwin Encarnacion, Torii Hunter, and Delmon Young are constantly underrated this year, and JJ Hardy may be as well.

Your bullpen is excellent. Street just won the closer's role, and should do fine. Sherrill has it for now, which is a sign of manager confidence given the spring he and Chris Ray have had. Mike Gonzalez has little to no competition for the role right now, and his peripherals indicate he should be a fine closer for Atlanta. On the SP side, Liriano is quite serviceable, even without his slider. Oswalt is remarkably consistent, and Harang is due for a bounceback year. Garza is overrated, in my eyes, but I could see Randy Johnson providing nice K totals, along with an ERA around 4.00 and a solid WHIP.

As for what to work on—I would say the starting and relief pitching is in a position of strength right now. I would dump two hitters on your bench in favor of a couple of starting pitchers. You should be able to get close to ESPN's max IP, and most teams will have a hard time matching the stats your pitchers will put up. I think four closers is perfect; in a 10-team league, most teams will have three or two, so you're likely looking at top three in saves.

As for hitting, you have five solid OF. The down side of this, however, is that if a free agent OF starts to perform above expectations, or gets moved into a more prime lineup spot, you've got nowhere to put him. I'd look to trade an OF for a better 1B or 1B/3B player. Could you deal Braun and one of your top SP for someone like Wright or Pujols? Or Braun for Miguel Cabrera straight-up?

I think you can absolutely do better than Howie Kendrick and Carlos Gomez. Try Kelly Johnson, if he's still around, for 2B. And for your Util, I'd look for a Francoeur, or if you need speed, perhaps the Yankee's new CF Brett Gardner. Gardner is batting ninth in the Yankees lineup, but with his speed he'll often be in scoring position for the top of the lineup when Jeter and Damon are up.

All in all, I think you ended up with an above-average autodraft. You have solid pitching, which seems to be typical of autodraft teams, but you also have a solid closing corps, lucking out with Sherrill, Gonzalez, and Street. Put Chris Ray, Rafael Perez, and Manny Corpas in their place and all of a sudden you're punting saves each week. The hitters could use some work, but in a 10-person league there's a lot of value to be had in the free agent pool. Do your best to keep your Util spot open; someone always drops a player in April that they shouldn't, due to a poor month and small sample size. Make sure you're there to pick that person up and put them in your everyday lineup. And load up on some serviceable pitchers instead of those bench spots with hitters in them; Jered Weaver and Brad Penny are likely available in your league, and are underrated right now. That'll give you the best shot at topping the board with Wins and Ks, while your aces give you a great shot at ERA and WHIP.

Posted by Michael Lerra at 12:11am

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Twenty not-so-essential players who shouldn’t be dropped

Last week, I covered toxic assets in fantasy baseball—players that fantasy managers may feel tempted to drop but resigned to keep as the baseball season gets out of the gates.

Now that spring training is over, some players owned in many leagues have failed to win starting gigs, others have been sent to the minors, and some are starting the year on the disabled list. We suspect that in the coming weeks, fantasy baseball managers may be forced to make some hard decisions as they see and read about players on the waiver wire whose hot April tease entices a rash decision.

So here's a list of 20 players with little or no immediate value who we'd recommend to hold steady. We've left off players like Alex Rodriguez, Joe Mauer, and John Lackey, who we couldn't imagine anybody would be tempted to drop.

The catchers:
1. Matt Wieters
2. Kelly Shoppach
3. Mike Napoli

The pitching prospects:
4. David Price
5. Thomas Hanson

The injured question marks:
6. Ervin Santana
7. Scott Baker
8. Kelvim Escobar
9. Troy Glaus
10. Joel Zumaya

The middle relievers:
11. Chris Ray
12. Carlos Marmol
13. Jose Arredondo
14. Grant Balfour
15. Rafael Perez
16. Manny Corpas

The players without an everyday starting gig:
17. Ian Stewart
18. Elijah Dukes
19. Denard Span
20. Travis Snider

The above players offer enough upside to hold onto in lieu of a hot April hand. Some players who are less essential and we recommend can be dropped include middle relievers who are injured or in the minors (Joey Devine, Chris Perez), Nick Swisher, Sean Gallagher, Dallas McPherson, and Justin Duchscherer.

Posted by Eriq Gardner at 1:43am (12) Comments

Honest evaluation

Two days into the regular season, hopefully you still are optimistic of your team's chances this season. Most people are, actually, and the number that are is usually too many. Sometimes all people need is a slight reality check to make them swallow their egos and put them in their proper place. I am not suggesting you are one of those guys, but why not do a fairly simple yet somewhat time consuming activity to make sure?

The basic gist of the activity: Get all of the projections for the players on your fantasy squad from a projection system (THT's projections, CHONE, Marcel—your choice) in a spreadsheet, calculate the projected totals for your team in each stat category, and then compare your team's results to the other team's results in your league.

Obviously I do not believe that whatever projected totals this process spits out are necessarily the way the league standings will look at the end of the year; injures, midseason roster adjustments, and projection systems not being 100 percent accurate are responsible for that. But this exercise should hopefully give you a fairly accurate, unbiased evaluation of your team compared to the others in your league, maybe changing your perspective on your team.

Process

In case you are not sure exactly how to go about this, I'll walk you through the process, step by step.

First, we have to pick a projection system to use. As I mentioned before, you have many choices here. You can use THT's projections (available for $10) or any of the projection systems FanGraphs features at their projection page.

Once you've got the projections in a spreadsheet, you have to manually group the players and their projections in separate sheets by team. This can take some time, so if anyone knows a better way, feel free to let us know.

Getting the team totals for stats like home runs and strikeouts should be simple enough; all that is required is simple addition. For rate stats like batting average and ERA, however, things get a bit more tricky. Simply averaging the player's projected batting averages together is not a good idea because a player with a .300 average over 600 at-bats should have a greater effect on the team's batting average than a player with the same average over 250 at-bats. Averaging the batting averages would not account for that.

What you must do instead is divide the total team hits by the total team at-bats. If you are using CHONE projections, this is not too much of a problem as hits and at-bats are given for each player. What if hits are not given? Simple. Do batting average multiplied by at-bats. What if at-bats are not given (as they are not in the THT projections)? Simple. Do hits divided by batting average.

The same process works for ERA. Instead of averaging ERAs together, take the total projected earned runs allowed divided by the total projected innings pitched for your team. To get ERA from that you have to multiply by nine, by the way. If earned runs are not given, you can get earned runs from ERA by multiplying ERA by innings pitched and dividing by nine, always.

I think most of you understand the process by now, if you did not already before, but I'll spell out WHIP as well for those who need it. Similar to the others, it is total hits allowed plus total walks allowed over total projected innings pitched.

Results

So now at this point you should have one projected number for each stat, for each team. Creating a new sheet with all of the team's projected totals stacked up so they can be sorted and compared is a smart idea. How does your team compare? Ideally the areas you are weak and strong in become evident.

It can be frustrating if your team is lower than you think it should be in, let's say, ERA because you used CHONE projections and a team ranked just ahead of you owns Javier Vazquez and his projected 3.26 ERA and 200 strikeouts. You are thinking, "No way Vazquez has a 3.26 ERA! I mean I like the guy this year, but an ERA around 3.60 to 3.70 seems more reasonable to me..."

I have no problem with making slight adjustments like that, but do not go crazy. Projections systems do pretty well for themselves and most certainly are more accurate than whatever personal rankings you developed on your own. This does not mean I think you should value players strictly based on projection system projections; I do not because there is always a group of players I develop strong opinions for and those are the players I target or avoid.

One thing to keep an eye out for—and this would be really cool if pulled off—is teams that are projected to be unusually good. What does this suggest? That whoever drafted the team might have used the same projections system you are using now to draft their team. That knowledge can help you find out what players this person might overpay for in a trade and is also something to keep in mind for next year's draft (are we already talking about those?).

Application

In my last Roster Doctor article, there was some disagreement as to whether my favorable assessment of the team's pitching staff was correct. One thing we can do is evaluate the team using the method I just described. Using the THT projections, I get the following projected totals for the team:

+-----+-----+-----+----+-------+----+-----+------+------+------+
|  R  | HR  | RBI | SB | AVG   | W  | SV  |  K   | ERA  | WHIP |
+-----+-----+-----+----+-------+----+-----+------+------+------+
| 834 | 222 | 845 | 96 | 0.292 | 71 | 120 | 1041 | 4.00 | 1.31 |
+-----+-----+-----+----+-------+----+-----+------+------+------+

Note: These pitching stats assume the team starts Vazquez, Baker, Meche, Parra, Price, and the closers.
Note 2: These pitchers project for a combined 1096 innings, which makes the K/9 an impressive 8.54.

Those numbers alone mean very little. And without knowing the rosters of the other teams in the league it is going to be difficult to establish a context. Luckily, this league is close to a standard Yahoo league, and every year Yahoo comes out with a nice article in which they give the average stats of team that finished in the top three and the average production they received from each position.

Unfortunately the league of the team I analyzed has an extra UTIL position, so the comparison will not be exactly accurate. With ten starting hitters instead of the standard nine in most Yahoo leagues, hitters are more scarce, making the average production from each hitter comparatively lower in the Roster Doctor league. Understanding this flaw, here are the hitting results:

+----------------------+----+----+-----+----+--------+
|                      |  R | HR | RBI | SB |  AVG   |
+----------------------+----+----+-----+----+--------+
| Roster Doctor Team   | 83 | 22 |  85 | 10 |  0.292 | 
+----------------------+----+----+-----+----+--------+
| Yahoo 1st Place Team | 94 | 25 |  92 | 18 |  0.294 |
| Yahoo 2nd Place Team | 91 | 23 |  89 | 16 |  0.290 |
| Yahoo 3rd Place Team | 89 | 22 |  87 | 15 |  0.287 |
| Average Yahoo Team   | 81 | 21 |  79 | 11 |  0.285 |
+----------------------+----+----+-----+----+--------+

I am not sure how much the average production of a first, second, third, and average team in a ten-team hitting league differs from the numbers above, but given slight upwards adjustments to the Roster Doctor Team it is apparent its hitting is very good. I would expect mostly 3-2 and 4-1 victories from the hitting.

Now for the same chart only for the pitching:

+----------------------+----+----+-----+------+-------+
|                      |  W | SV |  K  | ERA  |  WHIP |
+----------------------+----+----+-----+------+-------+
| Roster Doctor Team   |  8 | 13 | 116 | 4.00 |  1.31 | 
+----------------------+----+----+-----+------+-------+
| Yahoo 1st Place Team | 10 | 16 | 126 | 3.27 |  1.20 |
| Yahoo 2nd Place Team |  9 | 13 | 120 | 3.43 |  1.23 |
| Yahoo 3rd Place Team |  9 | 12 | 116 | 3.54 |  1.24 |
+----------------------+----+----+-----+------+-------+

Note: I could not determine what the average team was because while the Yahoo article gives the average production from a No.1 SP, No. 2 SP and so on, that does not mean that the average team will have one of each tier of SP. For hitters I could come up with an average because it is safe to assume every team will own at least one player at each position.

Looking at the above chart, it appears the commenters were correct; this team should be "on the wrong side of 4.00/1.30."

Remembering that this is a K/9 instead of regular strikeout league, lets think of what would happen if this person were to only start his closers, Vazquez, and Baker. The wins category would be virtually punted, but now this team figures to be more competitive in both ERA and WHIP. Let's re-run the numbers to see exactly what numbers are spit out:

+----+-----+-----+------+------+
| W  | SV  |  K  | ERA  | WHIP |
+----+-----+-----+------+------+
| 42 | 120 | 642 | 3.70 | 1.22 |
+----+-----+-----+------+------+

The ERA is still somewhat high (thanks to Baker's projected 4.41 ERA) but otherwise it looks very strong in saves, K/9, and WHIP. This group of six pitchers is projected to throw 632 innings, so the K/9 rises to an impressive 9.14. I believe there are 25 weeks in the MLB season, so that means these pitchers should total 25 innings per week, exactly this league's minimum. In weeks where both Vazquez and Baker are only starting once, this team will probably have to start a third pitcher once to make sure they do not fall short of the minimum.

I am sure the other managers in this league are looking for the same kind of deal, but any trade that consolidates your starting pitching would be helpful. A trade involving Baker and Parra or Meche or Price for one better starting pitcher would be beneficial.

Starting only six pitchers—two starters and four relievers—projects to make this team above average in both the hitting and pitching categories and so I still like this team and feel it will have a good season.

Posted by Paul Singman at 1:38am

Monday, April 06, 2009

Final off-season thoughts

Opening Day has come and gone and most all fantasy drafts are now completed. I thought I'd give a few final thoughts before the season gets into full swing for those either still drafting, exploring the trade market, or scouring the waiver wire.

Common players

First, here is an updated list of the players appearing most frequently on my teams. The same warnings apply as last time. The FOX Sports Experts League (10-team mixed) is the new addition to the list of leagues, joining LABR NL (NL-only), FSIC (NL-only), FantasyPros911 (AL-only), and KFFL (Mixed).

Hitters — 3 teams
Raul Ibanez: LABR, FSIC, KFFL

Matt Wieters: FP911, KFFL, FOX

Cody Ross: LABR, FSIC, KFFL

Nyjer Morgan: LABR, FSIC, KFFL

Hitters — 2 teams
Jose Reyes: FSIC, FOX

Matt Kemp: KFFL, FOX

Nate McLouth: FSIC, FOX

Nelson Cruz: KFFL, FOX

James Loney: LABR, FSIC, FOX

Kelly Johnson: LABR, KFFL

Chris Dickerson: FSIC, KFFL

Kosuke Fukudome: LABR, FSIC

Pitchers — 3 teams
Javier Vazquez: LABR, FSIC, KFFL

Rich Harden: LABR, KFFL, FOX

Kenshin Kawakami: LABR, FSIC, KFFL

Pitchers — 2 teams
Derek Lowe: FSIC, KFFL

Mike Gonzalez: LABR, FOX

Chad Qualls: KFFL, FOX

Joel Hanrahan: FSIC, FOX

Jorge de la Rosa: LABR, FSIC

Ross Ohlendorf: LABR, FSIC

Power bargains

Here is a list of players who could be in for a power boost in 2009. These are players who had a True Home Runs (tHR) total at least 80% higher than their actual home run outputs in 2008.

Keep in mind, however, that this does not guarantee that these players will take such a big leap forward in 2009. First, we are dealing with a single season, so this is not a reflection of a hitter's absolute talent level, only a sample of it (and some of these players didn't even get a full season of at-bats). Plus, for there to be such a big tHR/HR disparity, the actual home run total needs to be relatively small to begin with, further decreasing our sample size.

I didn't get to run nearly as many tests as I had hoped this off-season, but (very) preliminary tests on 2006-2008 data showed that a good portion of these guys do indeed see surface power spikes the following year. For some guys it might be a blip, but for others it should be legitimate. Picking out which is which is difficult, but in a few drafts this year I made it a point to grab at least two or three of these guys late, especially if they had some other valuable skill (speed, batting average, etc). Many make great AL or NL-only targets.

There is great potential upside here since the investment is small and since many of these players will justify the pick even if their power doesn't skyrocket. And the best part is that a lot of these guys can still be found on many waiver wires, so if you have drafted, it's not too late to either pick someone up (depending on league depth, of course) or at least monitor them through April and May.

Here's the list:

Akinori Iwamura
Jimmy Rollins
Coco Crisp
Bobby Crosby
Ichiro Suzuki
Carl Crawford
Carlos Gomez
Ryan Sweeney
Yuniesky Betancourt
Juan Uribe
Mark Kotsay
Brian Giles

Concluding thoughts

We at THT Fantasy are looking forward to a great season with you guys. We have some very cool stuff planned, the first of which you should be seeing this Friday as John Burnson begins writing regularly for THT Fantasy. You may recognize John's name from the work he's previously done at Baseball HQ, from his annual Graphical Player book, or from Heater Magazine. We're thrilled to have John on the team.

As always, if you guys have any questions, feel free to comment or e-mail me.

Posted by Derek Carty at 2:25pm (3) Comments

Roster Doctor 4/6/09

Welcome to THT Fantasy's Roster Doctor. If you'd like your team to be analyzed by one of our fantasy baseball experts, please send your full roster to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Also be sure to include your league's player pool (mixed, AL-only, NL-only), number of teams, scoring format (roto, head-to-head, points, etc.), categories, whether or not it's a keeper league, and any other pertinent information. If your roster is selected it will be analyzed in a future Roster Doctor column.

Today’s edition of Roster Doctor features a lineup put together by Nathan:

Player pool: Mixed
No. of teams: 16
Categories: Traditional 5x5
Scoring Type: Head-to-Head
Roster:
C: Yadier Molina
1B: Carlos Guillen
2B: Kaz Matsui
SS: Jose Reyes
3B: Felipe Lopez
OF: Carl Crawford
OF: Lastings Milledge
OF: Willy Taveras
Util: Fred Lewis
BN: Randy Winn
BN: Ronnie Belliard

SP: Brandon Webb
SP: Roy Oswalt
RP: Francisco Rodriguez
RP: Jonathan Broxton
P: Joba Chamberlain
P: Brandon Lyon
P: Manny Corpas
BN: Zach Greinke
BN: Todd Wellemeyer
BN: Jordan Zimmermann
BN: Trevor Cahill

Nathan is employing a strategy that Derek discussed here. While most managers employ a drafting strategy that focuses on power and balance throughout the roster, this strategy focuses on punting categories to "guarantee" wins in other categories.

While this lineup will almost never win the home runs and RBI categories, the trio of Jose Reyes, Carl Crawford and Willy Taveras essentially guarantees a win in stolen bases. The majority of the hitters in this lineup are projected to hit in the leadoff spot, which will help with runs. And due to the depth of this league, I think there will be plenty of weeks when this team will compete in batting average despite not having a single batter projected to hit over .300. A weekly average of .280-.285 may be good enough to win a fair share of weeks.

A couple quick suggestions would be to start Randy Winn over Fred Lewis, if only to give a slight boost to the team batting average. A decrease in stolen bases shouldn’t be a concern since Reyes, Crawford and Taveras will steal a boat load and Winn should steal about 15 himself. While Lewis may get more at-bats at the top of the order, there will be plenty of times when Winn will bat first as well, as he had 224 plate appearances batting leadoff last year. This means that any decrease in runs will most likely be very small. But the benefit in starting Winn over Lewis is that Winn projects to hit about .285 while Lewis will most likely hit closer to .270.

The other suggestion is to simply bench your catcher. Molina won’t contribute much in many categories, and his projected batting average of .270 might hurt your team more than it might help.

As I mentioned before, most managers will tend to stress hitting over pitching and we are going against the grain by punting home runs and RBIs. In doing so, this strategy dictates that we focus on pitching and make hitting somewhat secondary. So let’s check out the pitching staff.

Brandon Webb is a solid anchor in any league format, and Roy Oswalt has thrown at least 200 innings in each of the last five years, which will definitely help in accumulating strikeouts. Everyone knows about Joba Chamberlain’s potential, and he is a high strikeout pitcher. He also plays for one of the best teams in all of baseball, which ought to help with wins. While Francisco Rodriguez won’t come close to saving as many games as he did last year and, despite all of the talk regarding his declining skills, he should still provide you with good numbers for this season. Jonathan Broxton is also another good closer to have on your team.

I think its pretty clear though that you could use another closer. I would hang onto both Corpas and Lyon in case Huston Street or Fernando Rodney falters. But I wouldn’t bother starting either of them until they take over their respective closer positions. I definitely like that you were able to grab Zach Greinke, as he is a (popular) breakout candidate with legitimate potential. Hopefully, for this team’s sake, he breaks out in 2009.

The remaining few pitchers are dispensable. While Trevor Cahill and Jordan-Zimmermann both have potential, it is highly unlikely that they will reach that potential this year. This strategy places too much stress on pitching, and while they may have their moments this year, a large majority of pitchers simply need more than a year to adjust to major league hitting. So if a closer becomes available on the waiver wire, I wouldn’t hesitate to drop either Cahill or Zimmermann to get the extra saves.

Overall, I think Nathan did a pretty good job executing Derek's strategy. Adding an extra closer or two is essential for this strategy to really work but considering the depth of this league, I think this team will end up winning more categories than it will lose.

Posted by Marco Fujimoto at 1:05am (4) Comments

Saturday, April 04, 2009

Fantasy Baseball Roundtable: Undraftable players

This week's Fantasy Baseball Roundtable was hosted by Adam Ronis at Newsday. The question posed by Adam:

Do you have players that you will absolutely not draft even if they fall far in snake drafts or go cheaply in an auction and if so why? Include examples.

Check it out here. I found it interesting that some of the guys did indeed say that there were otherwise draftable players who they wouldn't draft regardless of circumstance. Obviously, as you can see by my response, I feel differently.

Posted by Derek Carty at 2:09am (11) Comments

Friday, April 03, 2009

Favorable Opening Day schedules and matchups

One of the keys to winning at fantasy baseball formats with daily transactions is to look at match-ups on a day to day basis. That holds true whether you’re in a daily contest format that allows you to turn over your entire team each day, or a more traditional daily transactions format, where you’ll be focusing on rotating some of your more marginal players between your lineup, your bench, and the waiver or free agent pool.

When evaluating the beginning of the season, matchups can be a little tricky to evaluate. While we know for sure which opposing team everyone will be facing, and which park they’ll be playing in, it can be difficult to gather complete information on starting pitching rotations. That makes it hard to fully assess how favorable the schedule will be to various hitters. I won’t even be trying to calculate daily ratings until Saturday. That said, based on what we do know, we can identify some teams and players that may be in particularly good situations on Opening Day and for the rest of the initial series of the 2009 season.

Cleveland Indians – Playing at Texas. Indians hitters will be in a good park for hitters, facing a weak pitching staff with no ace and a questionable bullpen. The only slight minus is that they’re on the road. Grady Sizemore is almost certainly the most valuable hitter for Opening Day if you play in a daily format that allows complete lineup turnover each day, and likely will be the most valuable outfielder for the entire opening series. Victor Martinez will be a clear standout at catcher as well. Players like Choo and Peralta may offer good value in salary cap leagues.

New York Yankees – Playing at Baltimore. Another situation where a road team will be facing a much weaker than average Opening Day starter. That’s going to give Yankees hitters a nice start to the season, and will also give Sabathia an excellent chance of winning his first start. Depending on the format, Teixeira may be worth just about as much as Pujols for Opening Day, at a far lower cost. Other hitters like Cano and Jeter will move way up relative to the elite players at their position, again offering potential bargains in salary cap leagues.

Arizona Diamondbacks – At home against Colorado. This is a great situation for Arizona players. At home against a team with weak hitting and weak pitching. It’s made even better for their hitters by the fact that they play in a good hitters park. Like Sabathia, Webb should have an excellent chance of picking up an Opening Day win, and also like Sabathia, Webb is efficient enough that he may pitch deeper into the game than most starters are able to at the beginning of the season. I don’t consider any of Arizona’s hitters really elite, but in salary cap games there may be one or two who offer good value given the situation they’ll be facing in their opening series, and in Yahoo leagues it’s worth taking a look at any unowned hitters on their team who might be useful for a spot start in your lineup.

Speaking of Yahoo leagues, several weeks ago I discussed the value of relief pitchers with starting pitcher eligibility. At this point, it looks like there are at least three who could have substantial value at the beginning of the season. Hong-chih Kuo I’ve already discussed. He’ll contribute wins, strikeouts, and excellent ratios, while filling a starting pitching slot on your roster that will rarely be used for an active player otherwise. With the Seattle closer job still open, and Brandon Morrow not yet able to pitch more than a few innings, I think there’s a good chance that Morrow will move back into the closer’s role for the Mariners. And the Brewers have already announced that with Trevor Hoffman out to start the season, Carlos Villanueva will get first shot at being the fill-in closer.

Posted by Alex Zelvin at 2:08am (2) Comments

Roster Doctor - 4/3/09

Welcome to THT Fantasy's Roster Doctor. If you'd like your team to be analyzed by one of our fantasy baseball experts, please send your full roster to this address. Also be sure to include your league's player pool (mixed, AL-only, NL-only), number of teams, scoring format (roto, head-to-head, points, etc.), categories, whether or not it's a keeper league, and any other pertinent information. If your roster is selected it will be analyzed in a future Roster Doctor column.

Today's roster looks like this:

Player pool: Mixed
No. of teams: 12
Categories: Traditional 5x5 except K/9 replaces K's
Scoring Type: Head-to-Head
Roster:
C - Victor Martinez
1B - Lance Berkman
2B - Robinson Cano
3B - David Wright
SS - Felipe Lopez
OF - Carlos Lee
OF - Alex Rios
OF - Torii Hunter
Util - Andre Ethier
Util - Brad Hawpe
BN - Coco Crisp

SP - Javier Vazquez
SP - Scott Baker
RP - Mariano Rivera
RP - Jonathan Broxton
P - Brian Fuentes
P - Huston Street
P - Manuel Corpas
BN - Manny Parra
BN - Gil Meche
BN - Chris Volstad
BN - David Price
BN - Anthony Reyes

This is a very good team right here. The hitting has decent power—not great, but solid power hitters with Lee, Wright, and Berkman. Alone, not one of this team's players can carry steals, but when added together their totals make the team above average in the speed department. Average is clearly a strong point of this team with Berkman, Wright, Lee, Ethier, and possibly V-Mart capable of above .300 averages.

How did this sizable investment in hitting leave the pitching staff? Not too bad actually.

What jumps out is the closing staff. Three entrenched closers with great skill sets and one unstable closer in Street, who is handcuffed nicely with Corpas, is impressive. So regardless of who the Colorado closer is, this team should have four dependable closers throughout most of the season, making it a force in saves.

A site favorite, Javier Vazquez is especially valuable in a K/9 league, as is Manny Parra. Baker and Meche, although lacking the strikeout potential of the others, will still post solid ratios and rack up enough strikeouts to make them worth starting.

Volstad and Reyes, on the other hand, probably are not even worth starting. Volstad may hold his own in the majors this year, but even if he does manage an ERA around 4.00, he does not figure to have a K/9 of over 6.0 being more of a groundball pitcher than a power one. His name has some value attached to it, so see if you can get something for him in a small trade, especially if he does well out of the gate.

Despite his strong Spring Training, I would not start Reyes right away. He does not figure to be much of a strikeout threat, so unless he is pitching well he will most likely be a detriment to your team. Bench him for a regular season start or two and depending on who he is playing and your current match up situation (are you down by only one win on Sunday?) decide if you will start him for that day.

David Price is a nice player to hang onto until he gets the call, but do not be fooled into thinking he is going to be dominant right away. An ERA around 4.00 and a 7.5 to 8.0 K/9 should be expected. If you feel somebody in your league has higher expectations of him, I would make him available in a trade.

Overall, though, I like this team a lot and I would rather see you keep it as it is than make a possibly harmful trade. I expect your team to go at least three and two in the hitting categories and if you start only Vazquez, Baker, Parra, and Meche plus your closers (and Corpas, I would keep him for now) your pitching should win Saves, ERA, WHIP, and K/9 the majority of the time.

Enjoy a successful season.

Posted by Paul Singman at 1:58am

Thursday, April 02, 2009

Quick recap of the Roto Arcade Pro-Am League draft

A week ago, I took part in the Roto Arcade Pro-Am, a 16-team rotisserie league hosted by Yahoo’s Andy Behrens. The draft was 27 rounds long, and lasted a little over three hours. Andy has already done an overview of the draft, and while it contains some thoughts from each manager, I thought I’d share some thoughts of mine that weren’t included in his summary.

Before I get blasted in the comments section, I’d like to say, as a disclaimer, that I had not joined the league until four hours before the draft. So needless to say, I was not very well-prepared to draft for a relatively deep league.

Anyway, here are the draft results, and the roster for team WillieMayesHayes:

                        Position     Player      Round  Overall Pick
                           C    Russell Martin     3        39
                           C    Jorge Posada       10      154
                           1B   Miguel Cabrera     1        7
                           2B   Dustin Pedroia     2        26
                           3B   Chris Davis        4        58
                           SS   Miguel Tejada      9       135
                           CI   Paul Konerko       12      186
                           MI   Richie Weeks       11      167
                           OF   Jay Bruce          5        71
                           OF   Ryan Ludwick       6        90
                           OF   Nelson Cruz        8       122
                           OF   Jack Cust          18      282
                           OF   Cody Ross          19      295
                          Util  Chris Getz         23      359

                           P    Javier Vazquez     7       103
                           P    John Maine         14      218
                           P    Jonathan Sanchez   15      231
                           P    Ian Snell          16      250
                           P    Manny Parra        17      263
                           P    Jeremy Bonderman   20      314
                           P    Huston Street      13      199
                           P    Leo Nunez          21      327
                           P    Fernando Rodney    22      346

                           BN   Sean Gallagher     24      378
                           BN   Felix Pie          25      391
                           BN   Wladimir Balenti   26      410
                           BN   Russ Springer      27      423

The first issue, which Andy pointed out, is that I am severely hurting for saves. In fact, if Huston Street doesn’t beat out Manny Corpas, I might not have a single closer to begin the season. I tend to wait until the later rounds to pick closers, but I might have waited a little too long. I’m sure we’re all familiar with this strategy, which is implemented because closers have somewhat limited value, and also because there are closer controversies all the time, meaning saves can be readily found on the waiver wire throughout the season. The problem here is that I simply failed to account for the depth of this league. Not only were there 15 other managers picking for 27 rounds, these 15 managers are experienced fantasy ‘veterans’ who will be scouring the waiver wire for saves throughout the year as well.

I am fairly content with the rest of my pitching staff, despite not having selected a second starting pitcher until round 14, upon which I subsequently snagged four in a row. All four of those guys, including the anchor, Javier Vazquez, are expected to bounce back this year, and all carry decent strikeout rates. John Maine, Jonathan Sanchez, Ian Snell and Manny Parra could all wind up with ERA’s in the high 3’s or low 4’s. I should note that, as of this writing, Jeremy Bonderman has been placed on the disabled list (DL). We have four DL slots in this league, and upon placing Bonderman on the DL, I have picked up Rich Hill, who I subsequently placed on the DL as well. These are another two guys who have some value, as both have good strikeout rates. So while this is not an elite staff, it is one with some potential.

The second area of concern is with stolen bases, as I’m not sure I have a single guy in my lineup who will steal more than 20. Collectively, with this particular lineup, I am projecting around 90 to 100 stolen bases, which means I will probably be in the bottom half for this category. I’ll most likely have to trade, as stolen bases aren’t as abundant on the waiver wire as saves.

I definitely like the power I have with this team. As I mentioned in Andy’s Q&A section, despite expected decreases in batting average, both Nelson Cruz and Chris Davis have legitimate power and play half of their games in Arlington. I found good value with Jack Cust in the 18th round, Jay Bruce should only get better as he matures, and Jorge Posada and Paul Konerko are both slated to bounce back as well.

This team has a fair amount of potential but it could definitely use some work. That being said, all comments, thoughts and ideas are welcome. Flame away, folks!

Posted by Marco Fujimoto at 6:53am (6) Comments

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Roster doctor

Name: Ryan B.
Player Pool: Mixed
No of Teams: 11
Categories 8x8 Roto Normal Categories + K(batter), OBP, SLG, CG, Holds, SHO

C - Ryan Doumit
1B - Ryan Howard
2B - Mike Aviles
3B - Evan Longoria
SS - Derek Jeter
OF - Curtis Granderson
OF - Bobby Abreu
OF - Daniel Murphy
Util - Justin Morneau
Util - Cameron Maybin
BN - Johnny Damon
BN - Willy Taveras
SP - Cole Hamels
SP - Rich Harden
RP - Joe Nathan
RP - Jonathan Broxton
P - Frank Francisco
P - Chris Ray
P - Taylor Buchholz
BN - Ryan Dempster
BN - Randy Johnson
BN - Jair Jurrjens
BN - Jered Weaver
BN - Chris Volstad

Ryan, you have some interesting scoring stats and a fairly good combination of players. On your pitching, I see two areas with room for improvement. You have both complete games and shutouts as scoring stats, so there is a real premium on pitchers who can go the distance. I don't see Rich Harden going the distance in games, perhaps ever again. So finding room for Randy Johnson, who actually had two complete games last year, might mean a big improvement here. Of course, if you can lay your paws on Roy Halladay, by any means, do it.

Also, you are weak in holds. The best candidates for holds are setup men. Buchholz, when healthy, is still behind Manny Corpas for the setup role. Chris Ray is on a shaky team and might even end up closing some games. Obviously, if J.J. Putz or Scot Shields is still out there, grab them. But other good holds sources are: any of the many Red Sox setup men, Brian Bruney on the Yankees, Hong Chi Kuo, and of course Carlos Marmol.

As for your batters—Ryan Howard has had declining OBPs and SLGs for the last two seasons and is murder for your Ks. He'll obviously still help you in OBP and SLG but since you have Morneau for 1B, I would see if you can upgrade your outfield a bit by trading Howard. In any case, I would also start Johnny Damon over Daniel Murphy to start off the season and see how Murphy shakes out.

Posted by Jonathan Halket at 1:01am (5) Comments

This is Page 1 of 1 THT Fantasy Focus pages

Now available

Most Recent Comments

Monthly Archives

THT's Fantasy Archives

Thursday, April 30, 2009

High Production, Lower BABIP (greater chance high production level is maintained)

Low Production, Higher BABIP (greater chance low production level is maintained)

Kevin Orris

Derek Carty

Readers turn

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Monday, April 27, 2009

Friday, April 24, 2009

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Musical chairs

New feature

Juiced

Fantasy application

New Yankee Stadium

Concluding thoughts

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Power

Contact

Final thoughts

Monday, April 20, 2009

FSIC Roster

Strategy and thoughts

Friday, April 17, 2009

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Saves potential?

Good ERA and WHIP?

Closing up

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Waiver priorities

FAAB

Concluding thoughts

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Power

Contact

Concluding thoughts

Friday, April 10, 2009

Thursday, April 09, 2009

Different philosophies

My take for 'first-come-first-served' leagues

Potential scenario

Caveats

Concluding thoughts

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Process

Results

Application

Monday, April 06, 2009

Common players

Power bargains

Concluding thoughts

Saturday, April 04, 2009

Friday, April 03, 2009

Thursday, April 02, 2009

Wednesday, April 01, 2009