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
Killing two birds with one stone (1)
Top 10 prospects for 2010: Toronto Blue Jays and Kansas City Royals (8) Top 10 prospects for 2010: Chicago White Sox and Detroit Tigers (4) Waiver Wire Offseason: NL (2) Acey-deucey (1) 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
Tuesday, January 08, 2008More on value and the “learned minority”Posted by Patrick DiCaprio at 7:13amIn response to my last column, the most frequent question I have been asked is whether I am merely saying that we cannot judge whether we have gotten value at the time of the auction. Yes I am saying that, but on a deeper level what I am saying is that the basic paradigm by which players are obtained is flawed especially at the top of the auction pyramid where players are not fungible. At the top of the auction pyramid where the top talent lies the concept of value has to basically go out the window in keeper leagues where inflation is often rampant. If you are hoping to get a Jose Reyes or Jimmy Rollins type player for under $30 so that they have value then you have little chance of getting the top talent necessary to win in tough leagues. Anyone who has been in an auction has experienced this common scenario: you have a guy projected at $20. Bidding starts and reaches $20. You drop out and someone gets him for $24. That player goes on to produce a $35 season. Every year there are a few of these guys. Often owners who don't think about such things consider that the successfully bidding owner was just lucky. Perhaps he was but perhaps he knows a lot more than he is given credit for. Evaluation of your adversary is always to be considered. Question: (and I apologize for channeling Dwight Schrute for a second) why did you drop out of the bidding? Invariably the answer is that the player wasn't a good value at that price. Most times that may be true and in the long run it will be true; namely if I take a group of 100 players all of whom are valued at $20 and pay $24 I will probably show a loss, assuming my projections are good. But every so often you feel like you have inside information or see something that others do not. Often this might be using a regression to the mean approach for BABIP or hit rate or some other solid information that you have. In this regard you may be a "learned minority." I have discussed at length my trade of Stephen Drew or the fact that two expert owners went head-to-head in a bidding war for Tom Gorzelanny this year, with the other owners denouncing them as crazy (and these two owners finished one-two this year). Every year there are a whole host of such players that I target at the auction, maybe 5-7 each year. Every year I invariably get almost all of them. Why? Because value is not the proper way to acquire players in every instance and I am willing to go beyond it for these players when other owners are not. I am happy to acquire players I love and feel like I have great info on if they go for anywhere close to my projections. A few examples aside from Gorzelanny: two years ago I acquired Brian McCann in my high stakes league for $12. I had him projected at $10, and would have gone to $15 (he produced $25). Last year I had Jake Peavy projected at $23. I bought him for $30. I also had Jimmy Rollins at $30 and got him for $33. I got James Shields at $9 but would have gone to at least $13 for him. All outproduced their projections and my purchase price. If I considered value for these guys I would have gotten none of them. As Wittgenstein might have said if he played fantasy baseball, value is just a symbol. Our goal is not to maximize value but to maximize production and statistics. Value is a shorthand symbolic way to maximize your teams production but it is no substitute for actual evaluation of points to be gained and statistics to be accrued and dollars to be earned. I am not saying that you should not chase value. What I am saying is that the pursuit of value is a mirage that can cloud your view of the overall goal to be achieved, the maximizing of production. My personal view is that a "go get them" approach with regard to the players you really want will often do better than a value based approach, especially if you are particularly astute and have excellent judgment about players. This advice is not license to go overboard however! We are talking here about non-fungible players at or near the top of the auction pyramid. The fact is that a value based approach is correct when you are dealing with fungible commodities. But at the top where the big money is spent you will usually do better to target specific players that you desire if (and that is a big if) you really do see aspects of that player that others in your league do not. That means not only must you consider your own values but you must consider what your opponents know and what they will do with that knowledge. One final anecdote that is somewhat reflective of the same principle: in my days as a horseplayer, I found a particular public handicapper who was very astute at picking longshots. I considered him to be a "learned minority." What I would do is look for situations where he picked a horse to win that no other public handicapper even put in the top three. This yielded tremendous profits. It was a good lesson in thinking outside the box and in realizing that sometimes you must act on knowledge that you have that others don't regardless of other factors. Patrick is a member of SABR's Statistical Analysis and Science of Baseball Committees and writes about fantasy baseball at The Fantasy Baseball Generals blog. He has achieved the dream of all of his MIT classmates. No, not making millions in the tech markets, but writing about baseball for free. Feel free to send along all insults and comments here. CommentsNext Post: The probabilistic concept of value>> <<Previous Post: Mitchell Report fallout: Fantasy ramificiations (Part 2) |
