SubscribeYesterday, I described a feature that lets you force the Price Guide to use any hitter/pitcher split you desire. Even if the Price Guide suggests a 67/33 split, you can make it go 70/30 instead.
Let’s try out the enter your own hitter/pitcher split feature using the Tout Wars Mixed League. Tout Wars is a competitive expert league using standard 5×5 rules, with 17 teams in the Mixed league.
At the 2009 auction, the highest paid hitter was Jose Reyes at $55. (Paying $55 for Jose Reyes was not a recipe for success last year, by the way.) The most expensive pitcher was Johan Santana ($34). The names and exact dollar amounts aren’t really important, though; we’re just trying to identify the basic scale for hitters and pitchers. In general, hitter values top out at $50+ and pitchers at $30+.
The Price Guide disagrees radically — the 2009 composite projections with the Tout Wars settings ranked the top hitter at $45 and the top pitcher at $47. Instead of the $50+ and $30+ that occurred in reality, we’re looking at basically $45+ and $45+. The top pitcher has not only closed the gap with the top hitter, but actually surpassed him.
Looking across the top prices, the Price Guide’s top hitters are all too low and the top pitchers are all too high using the default settings. The problems stem from the hitter/pitcher split that the Price Guide settles on: 63/37. In real life, Tout Wars participants are willing to spend considerably more on hitters and are quite a bit more conservative with pitchers.
What can we do to align these perspectives? Let’s start adjusting the Price Guide’s hitter/pitcher split beyond the 63/37 it start with. By the time we get to 72/28, things are looking better: The top hitter is now $51 and the top pitcher is at $35, pretty close to the $55 and $34 we started out with. More importantly, the lists are congruent when compared past the top spot. The 10th hitters ($37, $37), 20th hitters ($30, $31), and 10th pitchers ($20, $20) are all quite close in value between the Price Guide and the actual results in Tout Wars.
So now it’s pretty easy to make sure that the Price Guide’s results conform to reality when you are generating dollar values. It’s still not completely clear if this is a good thing, though. That will be what we look at tomorrow.
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The reason why I think is beacause according to projections and year end stats Pitchers ARE the most valuable. However the problem is that pitchers are also the most volatile and injury prone, if you could guarantee that the pitcher wouldn’t get injured and would perform to his ability to the same degree that hitters do year after year then I would pay for pitchers. However the injury risk factors into drafters decisions. I think the only way to account for this (other than your splits now) would be to somehow how an injury index. As you can imagine that’s impossible. Basically it comes down to projected value vs. real life value