Order Now The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2010 is now in development and will ship in mid November! This year's book will feature articles by THT's staff as well as Bill James, Rob Neyer, Tom Tango and Craig Wright. If you use this link to purchase the Annual, you will be in the first group to receive it and you'll be supporting THT.  Derek Ambrosino
John Burnson Derek Carty Marco Fujimoto Eriq Gardner Matt Hagen Jonathan Halket Rob McQuown Troy Patterson Mike Silver Paul Singman Michael Street And here's the full roster. Got a question for our fantasy baseball experts? Email us:
Heater MagazineAdd 10 MPH to your fantasy team — see for yourself
HEATER MAGAZINE Winner, 2008 CBS Sportsline Fantasy League of Experts  Plus our Statistical Definitions Most Recent Comments
Top 10 prospects for 2010: Chicago White Sox and Detroit Tigers (4)
Waiver Wire Offseason: NL (2) Acey-deucey (1) Waiver Wire Offseason: NL (12) Clone Wars: Jonathan Sanchez and Clayton Kershaw (11) Monthly Archives
November, 2009
October, 2009 September, 2009 August, 2009 July, 2009 June, 2009 May, 2009 April, 2009 March, 2009 February, 2009 January, 2009 December, 2008 November, 2008 October, 2008 September, 2008 August, 2008 July, 2008 June, 2008 May, 2008 April, 2008 March, 2008 February, 2008 January, 2008 December, 2007 November, 2007 October, 2007 September, 2007 August, 2007 July, 2007 June, 2007 May, 2007 Gear up for baseball season with Chicago White Sox tickets and New York Yankees tickets. LA Angels tickets, Houston Astros tickets, and Atlanta Braves tickets are hot sellers! You can get Boston Red Sox tickets, San Diego Padres tickets or Chicago Cubs tickets for your favorite baseball fan. Coast to Coast Tickets has the best MLB tickets like Minnesota Twins tickets, LA Dodgers tickets, Milwaukee Brewers tickets, New York Met tickets and St. Louis Cardinals tickets. Find premium Chicago Cubs tickets and other Chicago tickets at JustGreatTickets.com. Chicago Cubs Tickets Chicago Tickets  All content on this site (including text, graphs, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
Most Recent Posts
Monday, November 02, 2009Approaching unconscious competencePosted by Derek Ambrosino at 2:18amHow do you prepare for auctions/drafts? Do you refer to rankings or projections during the draft? Do you spend hours and hours copiously reviewing rankings for weeks or months in advance? Personally, I think if you prepare correctly, by learning the concepts of fantasy baseball, doing incredible amounts of legwork reaches the point of diminishing returns pretty quickly. For the most part, I just make sure I’m briefed on players who changed teams in the offseason and those who have experienced injuries. I keep a list of rankings (from anywhere, really, it’s just to have a list of names, not for the rankings themselves), and a list of each team’s closer. For repeat roto leagues, I also take the standings from the past year and mark off what the 50th and 75th percentiles and the winning totals were for each category. I don’t really use formal projections (mainly, but not entirely, because I’m too cheap to pay for them), but do try to keep a rough running tally as I select players, using a conservative estimate of what I can expect from each, by category. I aim to be competitive in each category, measured against the benchmarks of the previous season. But, in terms of preparation, it is much more important to learn strategies, theories, trends and concepts than to spend time tweaking rankings. Many people spend way too much time deliberating about individual decisions regarding high ranked players. Those are not the decisions that sway leagues. You don’t win or lose a league on the basis of deciding between Mark Teixeira and Ryan Howard. You lose a league because you only have one viable source of stolen bases, or maybe because your top picks were all power-hitting corners and you have no plus middle infielders. Let’s take a step back and consider one of the most popular models to explain how people develop skills. In psychology, the “four stages of competence” refers to a model explaining the psychological states one goes through in the process of developing a skill. The four stages are as follows. Unconscious incompetence: You don’t know how to do something, and are unaware of your deficiencies. This attitude is expressed by many who do not play fantasy baseball and demean the whole endeavor, and people who repeatedly play poorly and dismiss the repeated success of others (and their own failures) as entirely due to luck. Conscious incompetence: You are still inept, but you recognize that you don’t really know what you are doing. This is often the stage where players realize that fantasy baseball has its own distinct strategies and dynamics, and that the relationship between knowledge of the real, corresponding sport and the fantasy sport are not apples to apples, but more like a Venn diagram. Conscious competence: You know what you are doing, but executing requires a great deal of concentration and premeditation. These are the guys who pour over rankings, have extremely rigid, but well-crafted draft strategies. Preparation is key in this stage. As one progresses through this stage, players begin to learn how to adapt to trends in drafts/auctions as they develop and how to exploit any inefficiency in how a league is set up. Unconscious competence: Executing the skill at a high level is second nature to you. You can join a league of strangers a half-hour before the draft, take a quick look at the settings and draft a competitive team. You can determine pretty quickly what other players’ strategies are and make reads on which types of players are over- and under-drafted. When I embark on learning a new skill, I try to do so in a way that promotes the development of unconscious competence. I don’t want to focus on isolated tasks; I want to understand underlying themes. I’ve helped a number of people throughout the years prepare for standardized tests, particularly the SATs, and I always told them they should spend most of their time (especially if they don’t have much) on learning things that are guaranteed to benefit them no matter what the actual questions on the test are. How is the test scored? When is it in your advantage to guess? What are the question archetypes? What can you learn by analyzing the potential answers to a question without even considering the question? How should you budget your time? Those who spend an exorbitant amount of time going over long vocabulary lists are making highly inefficient use of their time. (At the very least, study roots, suffixes and prefixes instead.) This information is only of use if the test happens to ask about a specific word, and the whole exercise is only applicable to one portion of the test. Spending time considering Miguel Cabrera vs. Evan Longoria in next year’s draft is akin to studying vocabulary lists for the SATs. It’s very limited in scope, and chances are you won’t even be in a situation where you have to make that decision. So what should you spend your time thinking about? Here are a couple of more broadly applicable exercises one might want to do in preparation for next year: Monitor trends in positional scarcity. Most THT readers are pretty savvy about the importance of considering the depth of high-level options at each position when determining value. While corners are usually more plentiful than middle-infielders, the overall trends tend to ebb and flow. It seems that third base is thinner today than it was just a few years ago. Additionally, in deeper leagues that use more than three outfielders, outfield isn’t as deep a position as many people seem to think it is. Look at past year’s draft results for patterns. Even if your league provider does not index previous year’s leagues, you should print out the draft results of each league so you can refer to them in the future. In one of my regular leagues, the group just tends to value closers very highly. What you do with this information is up to you. You may decide that you have to take closers earlier than you planned to counteract this trend, or you may decide that you want to try to take advantage of this trend by stocking up on extra bats or loading your starting rotation. Regardless, being aware of the trend will inform your decisions. Looking at past draft results is like estimating a customized version ADP. Make a list of one-trick ponies. Though it is best to avoid having to draft a player who only contributes in one or two categories, sometimes the best laid plans don’t work out. So, make sure you have contingency plans in the case you realize you’re late in the draft and have a categorically imbalanced roster. You may need a Jack Cust, or a Luis Castillo even if that player isn’t the overall best option on the board. Benchmark a winning season. Think about your team as a unit, not a collection of individual players. Figure out what you need to average from each of your active roster spots to finish in the 75th percentile of each category. This will help you draft players whose skill sets compliment each other. How do you budget your time when preparing for an upcoming season? What tools do you use? What activities do you feel are indispensable and which are inefficient uses of your time and resources? Derek Ambrosino aspires to one day, like Dan Quisenberry, find a delivery in his flaw, you can send him questions, comments, or suggestions at digglahhh AT yahoo DOT com.
Michael said...
I chose David Wright, Lance Berkman and Alfonso Soriano #1-3 in my NL-only keeper league. I finished 2nd simply because of this… Posted 11/02 at 09:00 AM
Jules said...
I am a repeat champion of my 10x10 league (thank you, THT) but i’m only in the conscious competence category. This is the best article i’ve seen in a while and provides lots to think about. We can all continue to improve. Thank you, Derek. Posted 11/02 at 09:59 AM
Brian M said...
I’d be willing to argue that the closer you get to UC, the more you realize you’re closer to CI in any realm of life. It seems that the more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know anything, no? I try not to take any unconcious competence for granted. Other owners tend to learn and catch up quickly if you’re in a competitive league. Always looking for new strategies and innovation within the rules is the strategy I take. Don’t ever let your guard down into an unconcious realm of thinking…it can only hurt you. However, learn tricks to make evaluations quickly and efficiently. That’s not to say participating in mind-numbing, time wasting tasks is the thing to do either. I agree with Derek on this one. There’s a point at which these things don’t have much marginal benefit. But don’t be afraid to find new bold ways around rules and strategies of others. These DO require a relatively large amount of thinking and preparation. Otherwise, you may end up like General Managers in the era of Billy Beane’s innovative approach. Posted 11/02 at 11:10 AM
Adam W. said...
@ Scott - The disparity is going to be relatively small between first round picks, because stability is part of the reason they’re first round picks (injuries notwithstanding). Leagues are won and lost on your value picks in the mid-rounds. Here is an extreme example: I had the fantasy year of my life in one league, winning the title by a huge margin. The reason why is because I drafted Javier Vazquez in rd. 7, Zach Grienke in rd. 9, Justin Upton in rd. 10, Nelson Cruz in rd. 11, and Mark Reynolds in rd. 13. My #1 pick? Jimmy Rollins. The disparity in talent between these picks and the rounds in which they were selected is WAY bigger than the disparity between Fielder and Holliday. Posted 11/02 at 11:25 AM
Andrew said...
The idea that we should not target specific players is simply wrong. While I agree with you that nobody REALLY knows whether, for instance, Teixeira or Howard will perform better next year, we’re talking about costly players. In the early rounds (or with high auction purchases), we must return fair value. In the middle rounds we must aim for most relative value. And in the late rounds, we must chase upside. I’d add that Teixeira and Howard are not identical skill sets, not in the least. I’m VERY surprised to read that a writer at THT doesn’t really analyze the good players. I actually try to analyze EVERY player that will be taken in my draft/auction. Spend a week on each position and come up with a list of the players that you will be targeting at each. I think you’re making too much of time being a factor in our preparation. I’d think most THT readers begin preparing in December or January, and this again allows one to go through all of the various skill sets in the MLB player pool - in addition to any reading up on the theories and concepts to which you refer. Posted 11/02 at 11:32 AM
Brian M said...
Andrew, Are you suggesting that beginning to analyze things for fantasy baseball in December isn’t using a LOT of time? What’s the marginal benefit of that over someone that starts in February? I think that’s the point here, not that you shouldn’t pay attention to who’s a better player. Once you have an idea of what players are worth, there’s more marginal benefit from doing these other strategical tasks, rather than putting together stringent lists of players. It’s a ‘best use of your time and energy’ suggestion, not that knowing the better players isn’t useful. Spending too much time on evaluation can make you forget about these other important things. But I guess that hypothesis can only be tested in the field of fantasy play. With the information available out there about projections, it seems silly to me to spend significant time on these issues. Get a list, go by it, but focus your strategy on other things. Posted 11/02 at 11:51 AM
Andrew said...
“Are you suggesting that beginning to analyze things for fantasy baseball in December isn’t using a LOT of time? What’s the marginal benefit of that over someone that starts in February?” OK, I get your point. I see that the benefit is only marginal. I guess I just feel like there’s plenty of time to analyze both the players and the theories behind the game. I’m sure most THT readers are fantasy junkies like myself and, as such, probably risk a fair amount of money on their various leagues, so the time devoted toward preparing for the following season isn’t a hassle but rather enjoyable and lucrative. Posted 11/02 at 12:19 PM
Brian M said...
I agree with you there. I love getting ready for the season. The auction preseason is my favorite part. Once everyone starts playing, I get more frustration than enjoyment out of it, haha. Despite that, I spend more time than I probaly should on my fantasy team. It at least paid off this year. Posted 11/02 at 12:22 PM
Andrew said...
On that note, any way we can get a THT fantasy writer to open a post starting a league (or leagues) on here? When I started my keeper league, it took several months to find owners who were knowledgeable, committed, and willing to put up a decent amount of money. Perhaps there are other readers that would be interested in taking part in another league, and we’d all save a lot of time and hassle by letting one of the THT writers be in the league and handle the finances. (I believe LeagueSafe.com is still free.) This would not only be fun but ensure the money is in good hands. Any THT writers willing to do this? Does this interest any readers? Posted 11/02 at 12:47 PM
5150bosox said...
I’d be interested in a traditional 4x4 NL only! Posted 11/02 at 03:17 PM
Andrew P said...
I thought this was a very well-reasoned article. I’ve only got one small quibble with your preparations, and that was with what you wrote about one-trick ponies. I’m generalizing my experience, but I feel if there’s a significant enough difference in player values, you should draft the better player that doesn’t fit your team needs. I find that you’re more likely to be able to trade for needs at or closer to even value than by taking a lower-valued player in the draft. Other things I do include trying to identify over- and undervalued players. Generally, most of these players will be hit upon by the various fantasy pundits, but there is still great opportunity for value. Also important is to monitor the statistical scarcity of the different categories. It’s not a perfect example, but a H2H league that I play in uses triples as a category. People don’t realize how valuable guys are that consistently hit a high number of triples. Understanding scarcity in the categories is another area you can exploit inefficiencies. Posted 11/02 at 09:48 PM
Derek Ambrosino said...
Gonna try to get reply to a bunch of you guys in one email. Andrew P., I actually think that one-trick ponies are easier to trade because you can match them with a team with a complimentary stas base. The marginal player whose marginal value is spread across all categories is the most difficult to trade, in my experiences. Scott, I will reiterate. You don’t lose a league because you picked either .279/105/45/141/8 or .292/103/39/122/2. That’s like saying a team lost a game because of one questionable strike call when there were two other strikes in the AB and 26 other outs in the game. Here’s the difference between Tex and Howard: 3 runs, 6 homers, 19 RBI, 6 SBs, and .013 points of BA. One nice pick in the middle rounds swallows that differential in a heartbeat. Now, if you took Adrian Beltre over Mark Reynolds in the 15th round, now we’re talking about a single pick that could have won your league… The first two rounds are not as critical as the middle rounds (provided you don’t get a huge bust or an injury risk). Tex and Howard both did, generally, what they were supposed to do. If you picked either, you are satisfied with your pick and got appropriate value. You can tell how “critical” outperforming your draft position is by how much consensus there is about rankings at the point in the draft. If you are being drafted at spot 12, your floor is more important than your ceiling, because, by how much can you outproduce your draft spot? Andrew, What do you mean, Tex and Howard are not identical skill sets in the least? They are premier slugging, run-producing firstbaseman. For the purposes of fantasy baseball, they are extremely similar, the key difference being that Howard’s HR and RBI ceiling is a bit higher, while Tex is a safe bet to be a neutral, if not slightly positive, BA contributor whereas Howard could be a full-on detriment. I am not saying that I don’t target specific players or that I don’t analyze the top ranked players. Basically, I spend more time identifying guys who I don’t want. I have no idea whether I’ll face the decision of Tex or Howard, so when I see a column entitled Ryan Howard vs. Mark Teixeira, I skip it. If I have to make that decision, I make one. The more important question is whether I want to spend my first pick on a slugging 1B, period. There are multiple ways to build a winning team. And, the difference between Tex and Howard is not substantive enough to alter one’s entire strategy, perhaps just to tweak it a bit as you fill in your complimentary players. Michael, To whammy three times in a row, in the top three rounds unfortunate. However, seeing as how you still finished in 2nd (great job, by the way), you are actually the exception that proves the rule! Posted 11/03 at 12:41 PM
John K said...
This reminds me of Rumsfeld’s “known knowns” speech that earned him so much criticism. It seems like it was actually a pretty good place to start analyzing problems to me, and was actually more elegant than people gave it credit for. In any case, I do need to take a bigger picture view sometimes but dammit player evaluation is fun in February and March Posted 11/03 at 02:19 PM
Andrew P said...
Derek- but if you’re drafting the 1-trick pony to fill your needs at the expense of value, you’re probably not going to be trading him anyways. further, it’s not as if your trades are limited only to the position in question. if you have a surplus in one category, you probably have many guys on your roster that contribute to that specific category. if you can trade one of them for near-equal value, you’ll be able to accomplish your goal of balancing out your roster, without having to sacrifice value to do so. Posted 11/03 at 02:29 PM
Andrew said...
OK, I can certainly agree with you that the question of whether you should take a 1B in the first round in the first place is more important. Anymore on possible THT Fantasy Readers Leagues? Posted 11/03 at 03:18 PM
Paul Singman said...
Andrew, I like the idea of a THT Fantasy Readers league and will make a BoTR post about it sometime today or tomorrow with more details. Posted 11/03 at 04:56 PM
5150bosox said...
“THT Fantasy Readers league” count me in. see above post… Posted 11/04 at 12:56 PM
Adam said...
I would join a new keeper money league. FWIW, my preferences are: NL only and weekly pickups. Posted 11/04 at 01:58 PM
Brett Kruschke said...
Fantastic article. Posted 11/04 at 05:07 PM
Page 1 of 2 1 2 >
Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.
Next Post: Avoid closers at your own risk>> <<Previous Post: Waiver Wire Offseason: AL |
There’s some good ideas in here, but I’m surprised by the way you ignore one of the most basic rules of fantasy baseball:
You can’t win a league with your first two draft picks, but you sure can lose with them.
Deciding between Evan Longoria, a young, toolsy but still untested player and Miguel Cabrera CAN have a difference on your team. After the recent revelations abotu the incident with his wife, what effect will that have on his performance next year.
And Texeira vs. Howard? Yikes. Howard is a strikeout machine, and Tex is usually ice-cold until the middle of May, because his swing is unusual and it takes him a while to get it going properly. If you draft Tex, you need to draft another 1B at some point, to make up for the lack of production in the first 6-8 weeks. If you draft Howard, you need to focus on additional players with high average.
The first two rounds are -critical-. The first choices, even more so. In one of my leagues, one guy had to choose between Matt Holiday and Prince Fielder for one of his picks. He chose Holiday and didn’t place. The guy who chose Fielder did. What a difference a pick makes.