Archive for February, 2009

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Standings Gain Points, Part I (Introduction)

12 Comments
February 17th, 2009 by Mays
Categories: Theory

Since the start of fantasy baseball, the constant challenge that participants have faced is trying to determine players’ values. What do you pay for a guy who can get you 30 SB? Is he worth more or less than someone who hits 30 HR? Would you trade him for someone with a 3.65 ERA?

Really, it’s a problem that boils down to this: How do you measuring a player’s contribution, when the contributions are based on 8 or 10 different scales (i.e. the 4×4 or 5×5 stat categories)? The solution is to convert all of the categories to use a common scale.

One way to do this is to use Standings Gain Points. Standings Gain Points are a system developed by Alex Patton and popularized by the recent re-release of Art McGee’s How To Value Players For Rotisserie Baseball. Derek Carty praises SGP as “the greatest, most logical way of valuing players I’ve ever heard of.”

How do SGPs work?
The basic idea behind SGP is to look at the final standings from your league in previous years and determine how much of each stat it takes to pick up an extra point in the standings. How many homeruns would it take to move up one spot in the homerun standings? How many strikeouts separate each team?

If you notice that there are 10 HR separating each team, then you know that, on average, it will take an additional 10 HR to move up one point in the standings. So 10 HR are equal to 1 SGP. Do the same thing for all of the other stats, and all of a sudden you have reduced a player’s contributions from across four or five categories down to one, simple number. Sort players by that magic number and you will have rankings customized for your draft. Convert that number into a dollar value and you are ready for an auction.

To be honest, I think Standings Gain Points is overall a pretty sound methodology. However, I do think it has some flaws that keep it from being “the greatest, most logical way of valuing players” ever.

This week I’ll be taking a look at some of the problems I see with SGP, and also explain why I decided to take a different approach when building my own valuation system, the Price Guide.

More Pitchers in the First Round

11 Comments
February 16th, 2009 by Mays
Categories: Theory

Another advocate of drafting pitchers in the first round: Baseball Prospectus’s Player Forecast Manager. Here’s an excerpt from an article I came across:

Q: It looks like the overvaluation of pitchers is back again. After the first day, the valuations were normal, but the PFM is currently showing pitchers as the second, third, fourth, and 6th-8th most valuable players in the game for fantasy purposes.

BP’s Ben Murphy explains that, although it might look like a bug, the high pitcher values are correct based on their methodology.

So why does everyone who runs the numbers come to the conclusion that the top-tier starters are worth taking in the first round? Is everyone overlooking the unpredictability factor?

The Forecasters Challenge 2009

5 Comments
February 12th, 2009 by Mays
Categories: Other Sites

In case you missed it, Tango is running a competition to see which forecaster can do the best at projecting stats for fantasy.

The competitors include all of the systems you see on the Price Guide: CHONE, CAIRO, and Marcel. Past evaluations have focused on “real” baseball accuracy using OPS and ERA, but this contest is geared specifically towards fantasy categories and the fantasy draft pool.

I’m especially interested to see how the fantasy-focused projectors (Rotoworld, Ask Rotoman, Fantasy Scope, Razzball, Derek Carty) do against the general competition.

It’s too bad we have to wait until October to see how things turn out.

Three More Fantasy Baseball Magazines

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February 11th, 2009 by Mays
Categories: Reviews

I took a trip to the local bookstore today to check out some more magazines. (You may remember I previously reviewed the three magazines that I found in January.)

This time I came across three more publications:

Fantasy Sports ($5.99)
Beckett/Rotoworld ($6.99)
RotoWire ($7.99)

You’ll remember I found these on my first trip:

The Fantasy Baseball Guide ($6.99)
Fanball ($7.99)
Lindy’s Fantasy Baseball ($7.99)

I’ll spare you the detailed comparison; if you have spent any time flipping through various magazines you will realize that the differences between them are pretty minor.

I will say this though: If I were only buying one magazine, it would probably be the Rotoworld one. It’s got the full set of features (articles, drafts, auctions, projections), and I thought each of those elements was done well. The price is right, too: The $7.99 publications form the rest of my top-tier, so for $6.99 Rotoworld seems like an easy decision. (Yeah, I like saving a buck.)

So how would I summarize the magazines I’ve looked at this year? Well…

Magazines all have the same basic content.
Every fantasy publication that I looked at featured player projections, a list of prospects, and a mock draft. Some went beyond that to include mock auctions, various dollar values, sleepers, etc. If there’s a feature that you consider a deal-breaker to not have (e.g. 5×5 dollar values), then make sure you get a magazine that has that feature.

Magazines have good writers.
In recent years, magazines have wisely begun including some of the internet’s best fantasy writers and thinkers. As some one who respects the work of Matthew Pouliot, Jason Collette, Peter Kreutzer, Andy Behrens, Aaron Gleeman, and others, I think the days of magazine bashing are over. Sure, they’re out of date, but they are still written by smart people. If there’s an online writer that you are particularly impressed with, maybe consider their publication.

Magazines have their limits.
Magazines are pretty good at what they do, but there’s still a lot that can’t be fit into a hundred of so pages. For example, a magazine might list a couple of different dollar values (AL, NL, and mixed), but that can hardly compare to the endless possibilities of customized dollar values that the Price Guide can give you. A magazine might have a couple of useful articles, but that’s nothing compared to the hundreds that are available for free on the internet.

Even so, I still can’t help but buy a magazine each year.

Playing with Marcel’s Reliability Ratings

3 Comments
February 10th, 2009 by Mays
Categories: Theory

In last week’s discussions on why the Price Guide’s values differ from what you see in average draft position (ADP), Nick made the following comment:

Regarding risk and projections, I know that Marcel contains reliability scores and PECOTA has a beta score, but I’m not sure exactly how they are incorporated into the projection numbers themselves.

He references a comment from Tango on Razzball:

I would say that you MUST use the “reliability” column provided with Marcels. And, the playing time forecast is the most important thing in fantasy sports, so you have to get that right first.

If you are familiar with the Marcel projections, you may have noticed that each player’s stats have a reliability rating. This doesn’t indicate injury chances or anything like that, but measures the confidence level of the projection. Since the Marcel’s are based on a player’s performance from the past three years, a player who has been in the majors since 2006 will be projected with a higher reliability than, say, Evan Longoria.

So what happens if we adjust our Price Guide values using Marcel’s reliability factor? Will that fix the discrepancy we see in pitcher values?

Here’s an illustration of what changes with the Price Guide’s fantasy dollar values for pitchers when reliability is considered:

Pitcher Values, With and Without Reliability Scores

Notice what happens when the reliability ratings were added: The values for the top nine pitchers were practically unchanged, because these are the pitchers that have shown themselves to be consistent performers over the past few years (Santana, Sabathia, Webb, Haren, etc.). After those nine, the prices for the rest of the pitchers dropped by about $3-4 each, all the way down to the bottom. Those are the players that have not put up consistent numbers over a large number of innings.

It’s not a drastic change, but it does fit a little bit better with what we see happening in average drafts.

You may remember from a previous post that three of the ten players that the Price Guide diverged from ADP most widely on were RP. Here’s how the draft rankings on those three look with reliability factored in:

Player Without Reliability With Reliability ADP
Jonathan Papelbon 31st 53rd 54.1
Joe Nathan 41st 63rd 72.93
Francisco Rodriguez 51st 72nd 72.05

Wow! Considering reliability, we practically eliminated a gap of about 20 spots. Papelbon and K-Rod are both eerily close to what ADP suggests now. The change in reliever rankings is easily the biggest effect we see after adding reliability.

I’m hoping to have an option added within the next day or two to use reliability factors when building fantasy values on the Price Guide (at least for Marcel, which are the only projections that include a reliability ranking). Reliability doesn’t make a huge difference, but I think it does help a little. The top talent is pushed up while the lower tiers are flattened out a bit. Due to low IP totals, relievers are discounted especially.

We still haven’t explained all of the SP in the first round. Even after we account for reliability, the Price Guide still thinks top-tier pitchers are worth paying for. But I think this gets us a step closer to the most accurate values.

New Price Guide Categories: K and L

4 Comments
February 9th, 2009 by Mays
Categories: Price Guide, Site News

By request, I’ve added a couple of new categories to the Price Guide: hitter strikeouts and pitcher losses.

Note that these work such that a low number is good; not like you would use in some bizarro league that rewards losing. These are the first “counting” stats in the Price Guide that work that way, so let me know if you notice anything unusual.

For those who aren’t familiar with it: The Fantasy Baseball Price Guide is an online tool that builds auction dollar values or draft rankings customized for you league. It handles any number of teams, any number of starting positions, and most stat categories. You can also edit the projected stats for any player to fit your own expectations.

Auction or Draft?

No Comments
February 9th, 2009 by Mays
Categories: Fantasy Basics, Strategy

There are two principal ways that fantasy leagues select players: auctions and drafts. The basic strategy for either of these leagues is the same. You want to acquire the greatest value of players (relative to replacement levels) on your team. However, there are some finer points of strategy that do differ between auctions and drafts.

Auctions

Auctions are the original method for picking fantasy teams. The idea is simple: Each owner is given a certain amount of imaginary money. Since the money isn’t real, the amount could be $5000 or $5 million, but typically it’s around $260 per team. Owners then bid on players in $1 increments, with player values usually ranging from about $50 to $1.

Team Construction
The main concern at an auction is how to construct a team. Do you spend all of your money on three or four top players, and then fill in with $1 sleeper picks? Do you take a more balanced approach, refusing to spend more than $25-30 on any one player? Or do you just take whatever players you feel are being undervalued by the other teams?

All of these strategies can work, and there could be owners at your auction employing all of them.

Nominations
With an auction, teams take turn nominating players for bidding. Often, teams will choose to nominate a player they don’t really want, hoping that other teams will be willing to spend money and a roster spot on that player. Sometimes you want to nominate a player that you do want early, just to make sure that you have the money to spend on them.

Running Up the Bid
In an auction, it’s to your advantage for other teams to overplay for players. While sometimes this will happen naturally, there are times where you might want to get involved yourself. If you suspect that an owner who currently has the high bid on a player would be willing to go higher, maybe you choose to raise the bid.

Obviously, there’s risk involved, since you could win a player that you didn’t really want. But there’s also some reward if you can empty out an opponent’s bank account and fill a spot on his team.

Drafts

The draft is a bit simpler than the auction, which might be the reason for its rising popularity. With a draft, teams take turns picking players. The order that teams choose reverses each round, so that whichever team picks last in the first round then picks first in the next.

Timing
The main strategy that I see when drafting is trying to time when to pick someone. “If I don’t take that player now, will he still be available in the next round?” This can be an especially hard decision for teams that pick first (and last) in a round, because they will have to wait for 22 picks before they get another selection.

Teams might be waiting to draft a player because they think no one else will take him at that point in the draft. Even if you think that player is the best pick, you can maximize your value by taking someone else now (provided you still get the first player later).

Team Balance
We noted that the auction format gives you the flexibility to take whichever players you want, provided you are willing to pay for them. Given the option some teams will spend most of their money on a few top players and then grab the leftovers at the end of the process.

However, the draft requires that every team takes a balanced approach. Everyone gets one first round player, one second round player, etc. While this is a restriction that eliminates some of the strategies you have in an auction, it also requires some additional thinking.

Conclusion
Given the choice, I will always pick an auction over a draft. I realize it’s a little easier and faster to do drafts (especially online), but I still don’t think they can match an auction’s flexibility.

Worth Reading: ADP, SGP, and Other Fun Acronyms

1 Comment
February 6th, 2009 by Mays
Categories: Worth Reading

It’s Friday, which means it’s time to look at an assortment of sites and articles that caught my eye this week:

  • RotoAuthority posted some reader-submitted SGPs for Pitching. SGP stands for Standings Gained Points, an idea developed by Alex Patton about two decades ago, and recently popularized by the re-release of Art McGee’s How to Value Players For Rotisserie Baseball. I should probably write a critique of the SGP method at some point, by I can summarize here: If you take the time to customize them for your league, they work pretty well (i.e. about as well as the Price Guide). For anything else, my evaluation shows the Price Guide giving much more accurate rankings/dollar values.

  • I have been quite caught up with AGP this week, so of course it was interesting to see Crooked Pitch’s analysis of risers and fallers in the ADP Report. I think that some of the movement might just be noise, but it’s also amazing at how quickly drafters react to various bits of news.

  • In the last couple of years, fantasy players have been watching for a dramatic increase in IP as a warning sign for pitcher injuries (i.e. the Verducci Effect). Razzball has examined several different factors to come up with 20 Risky Pitchers for 2009. A rise in workload is considered, but Rudy also finds risk in pitchers who throw a high ratio of curves to sliders. (Yesterday’s topic of discussion, Javier Vazquez, is featured on the list.)

  • Last but not least was THT’s look at designing a perfect keeper league. Michael does an excellent job discussing how a keeper system should reward good decisions, but avoid being frustrating for others.

    I play in several keeper leagues, each with different rules. Although I like the long-term strategy it adds, I have also witnessed how much luck can be involved in getting good keepers. I actually think I’m becoming a greater fan of redraft leagues.

A Look at Javier Vazquez

2 Comments
February 5th, 2009 by Mays
Categories: Sleepers

If you’ve played around with the CHONE projections in the fantasy Price Guide at all, you may have noticed that its projection for Javier Vazquez is, um, really good. And by really good, I mean the second best pitcher in baseball in 2009. That got my attention, so I think he’s worth looking at in some depth.

Here are several different projections for him:

CHONE: 14 W, 3.26 ERA, 1.15 WHIP, 200 K, 196 IP
ZiPS: 14 W, 3.70 ERA, 1.22 WHIP, 202 K, 202 IP
Marcel: 11 W, 4.35 ERA, 1.28 WHIP, 170 K, 186 IP

Now, Marcel looks at first glance to be the realistic, compared to his stats in recent years (e.g. 4.67 ERA, 1.32 WHIP last year). However, CHONE and ZiPS have managed to outperform Marcel in the past, and so I wouldn’t immediately dismiss their more optimistic projections.

Although I’m not sure of the details of how either one of those systems arrive at their numbers, I’m guessing that they are both looking at a pitcher’s peripheral stats — strikeouts, walks, homeruns allowed — when predicting earned runs. Those sorts of things have been shown to be better predictors of a pitcher’s ability than just looking at past ERA, so factoring them in is a good idea.

However, Javier Vazquez has spent most of his career as the exception to that rule. He is the rare pitcher who has consistently underperformed what you would expect based on his K/9, BB/9, and HR/9. That also means that Vazquez has a history of disappointing fantasy owners, many of whom have been waiting for five years for him to match his 2003 success.

So now we have Vazquez’s 2009 CHONE projection. Is this just another chance for fantasy owners to get burned? Maybe, but there are some reasons for hope. Vazquez is leaving the AL for what looks to be somewhat more favorable National League. That should help his stats even if he pitches exactly like he did last year.

And keep in mind that most auctions will have Vazquez going much closer to the $4 that Marcel projects than the $45 that you see from CHONE. Even if you don’t expect him to live up to the first-round potential, there is a lot of upside and not much risk if you can get him around $10.

More Thoughts on ADP

9 Comments
February 4th, 2009 by Mays
Categories: Price Guide, Theory

Let’s continue developing some of the ideas from yesterday… When we looked at things yesterday, we noticed that the Price Guide tends to rank the top-tier pitchers higher than they typically are ranked by fantasy average draft position (ADP). Why is that?

I see the following explanations as possible:

Explanation #1: The Price Guide is wrong.
Now that’s the sort of talk that gets me defensive. I’m pretty confident that the Price Guide’s fantasy values are the most accurate around. But I hope that I would still be able to admit if there were flaws in some area.

I do see a couple of problems with this explanation:

  • The Price Guide’s rankings are in line with what other fantasy player valuations systems (such as Razzball’s Point Shares) suggest. With each system using their methodology, it doesn’t seem likely that they independently all came to the wrong conclusion.
  • The Price Guide’s rankings fit my own experience in auctions. In fantasy leagues that I’ve been in, the top hitters might go for around $45, and there are usually a couple of pitchers around $40 as well. The difference appears to only show up in a straight draft, which leads me to my second theory…

Explanation #2: The drafters are wrong.
There’s no doubt that acting in large groups will not necessarily increase the intelligence of the population. Large groups of ignorant people can still be just as ignorant (e.g. mobs, Yankee fans).

However, I am impressed at how accurate and efficient the fantasy “market” can be. When I looked at the 70/30 split, it turned out that fantasy players nailed the percentages without even knowing the reasons behind it. I’m willing to give the wisdom of the crowds some benefit of the doubt here as well, although I think drafter error is probably playing some role in the discrepancy.

So what does that leave?

Explanation #3: Drafts require different rankings than auctions.
If we accept the Price Guide’s dollar values as accurate, and also accept that ADP as at least somewhat accurate, what options are left?

The idea I’m toying with is that maybe drafts require a different set of rankings than auctions. It’s an idea that I’m not convinced of, because it seems like values should be the same no matter what method is used for picking players.

However, with an auction, I can get a $45 hitter and a $45 pitcher if I so desire. But with a draft, I can only get one or the other. Should that make a difference? I honestly don’t see why it would, but it’s the only factor left that I can think of.

What do you think?

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