Archive for the ‘Price Guide’ Category

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New Price Guide Categories: K and L

5 Comments
February 9th, 2009 by
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.

More Thoughts on ADP

9 Comments
February 4th, 2009 by
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?

Diverging from ADP

8 Comments
February 3rd, 2009 by
Categories: Price Guide, Theory

Let’s take a look at the players with the largest difference in ADP compared to the rankings given by the Price Guide.

I took the Yahoo League ADP rankings from Mock Draft Central and compared them to the rankings from the Price Guide, using the Marcel projections for a Yahoo league. Here are the 15 players that biggest gap between the Price Guide and ADP rankings:

  1. Dan Haren
  2. Roy Halladay
  3. Magglio Ordonez
  4. Joe Mauer
  5. CC Sabathia
  6. Joe Nathan
  7. Cole Hamels
  8. Brandon Webb
  9. Jake Peavy
  10. Bobby Abreu
  11. Chipper Jones
  12. Brian McCann
  13. Russell Martin
  14. Jonathan Papelbon
  15. Francisco Rodriguez

Notice a trend there? 9 P, 3 C, and 3 others.

First off, I’m not sure what drafters don’t like about Ordonez, Abreu, and Jones. Maybe they expect Abreu to continue to decline, maybe they expect Chipper to get hurt. I’m not sure exactly, but those players make up the minority of the difference.

The catchers are a slightly bigger group. I continue to maintain that people undervalue the top-tier catchers. I think that they get tied up on the absolute stats and forget that what really matters are the stats relative to the replacement level. Factor in the baseline, and a catcher who can hit 20 HR is worth more than a lot of guys who can hit 35. (And this is a one-catcher Yahoo-style league.)

I’ll keep preaching that and keep taking catchers in the 2nd-3rd rounds until someone can convince me otherwise.

And then we have the most significant discrepancy: Pitchers. For a Yahoo league, the Price Guide puts CC Sabathia and Johan Santana as the top two overall draft choices. Clearly that doesn’t square with the ADPs, which don’t have any pitchers in the top 16.

However, the Price Guide isn’t alone in its love for pitchers: Razzball’s Player Rater puts 4-5 pitchers in the first round, including SP at #2 and #4.

And in my experience with auctions, it doesn’t seem unusual for the top pitchers to be equivalent to the top hitters. (Note that the Price Guide’s hitting/pitching split lines up with what you expect for auctions.)

I don’t think this is Price Guide vs. ADP; I think it’s auction strategy vs. draft strategy.

Which still leaves the questions: Why don’t drafters go after the top pitchers?

Why People Pay More For Top Players

3 Comments
February 2nd, 2009 by
Categories: Price Guide, Theory

Brilliant observation, huh? People pay more money for good players than bad ones. How long did it take me to realize that? Actually, that’s not what I’m talking about here.

It’s clear that people pay more for top-tier players than for lesser players. However, it’s not immediately obvious why the Price Guide tends to understate what people tend to pay for the top-tier players. Why do people spend more for top players than what the Price Guide recommends?

As quick as I am to defend the Price Guide’s methodology, this is one case where I think people’s behavior might be more accurate. I don’t think my methodology is flawed, I just think it’s leaving out a couple of factors that come in to play in a draft:

Sleeper Mentality
Fantasy players tend to pay less for low-end “consistency picks,” and instead target late-round high-risk/reward sleepers. By targeting sleepers late, they are able to spend more money early.

So instead of spending $6 on a veteran platoon-OF or a journeyman SP, most teams will go after a rookie player valued at -$2, knowing that he has the potential to beat that projection. If he doesn’t, that’s OK, because there’s no problem with dropping him when someone better comes along during the season.

Divergent Opinions
Fantasy players tend to have more divergent opinions about late round players, which means these players go cheaper. Guys that the Price Guide projects for $6 will often go for $2-3, because there will be some owners who have them ranked below replacement level.

The top-tier guys are more predictable–everyone has a very similar ranking for the top ten players. Owners will take their savings from the late-round players and spend the money at the top instead.

Open Positions
Related to that, owners may be willing to spend money on late-round guys, but can’t because they have already filled a certain position. Compare that to the first few bids, when every team has money and open positions. The opening bids are also where the top-tier players are usually brought up.

Add all of those factors up, and I think it enough to maybe skew the values to give an extra 10-15% to the top players. And while that may work as a rule of thumb, I’d really like to be able to quantify some of these factors into the Price Guide.

Examining the 70/30 Split

7 Comments
January 22nd, 2009 by
Categories: Price Guide, Theory

A long-standing rule of thumb for fantasy baseball auctions is that a team should optimally spend 70% of their money on hitters and the remaining 30% on pitchers.

Actually, it’s not always described as a 70/30 split. Some people think it’s closer to 67/33, some say 65/35. But I think everyone recognizes the line is somewhere around there.

Let’s examine this rule with regard to the Price Guide:

When the Price Guide assigns dollar values, it does so without respect to whether a player is a hitter or a pitcher. There is no set allocation between hitters and pitchers. All it does is look at the player’s value as a percentage of the total amount of value among all drafted players, and assigns that player the same percentage of the total draft dollars. It doesn’t matter if that player is a hitter or a pitcher.

So, using a method that doesn’t differentiate between hitters and pitchers, what does the split end up being? Fortunately, when the Price Guide displays its dollar values, it also displays how the money was distributed between hitters and pitchers. Based on the 2008 final stats, it will come up with these splits for standard rotisserie leagues:

Mixed rotisserie: 70/30
AL-only rotisserie: 72/28
NL-only rotisserie: 72/28

That looks to me like it passes the smell test. And remember, we arrived at those numbers without considering any of the other explanations for the 70/30 split (pitcher riskiness or anything else). We just distributed the dollars evenly to all players, and the numbers fall perfectly in line with what fantasy players expect.

ESPN and Yahoo
Now notice how the split ends up for 2008 Yahoo and ESPN default leagues:

Yahoo: 64/36
ESPN: 64/36

The Price Guide recommends spending more on pitchers in these leagues. Why is that? The main factor is that these leagues draft fewer hitters than a traditional rotisserie league. Whereas the traditional league drafts 1.56 hitters for every pitcher (14/9), Yahoo takes only 1.29 hitters per pitcher and ESPN 1.22. If there are relatively fewer hitters taken, it makes sense that more money should be spent on pitchers.

So keep this in mind if your fantasy auction is more like an ESPN or Yahoo league: It’s OK to allocate more money to pitchers than usual. The Price Guide should point you towards the optimal amount.

Projections
The numbers above are all based on the final stats for 2008. But for 2009, we’re more interested in what the split is for the projections. Let’s see what these splits look like with the CHONE projections:

Mixed rotisserie: 66/34
AL-only rotisserie: 65/35
NL-only rotisserie: 68/32
Yahoo: 61/39
ESPN: 60/40

Across the board, the Price Guide suggests allocating more money to pitchers. About 4% of draft dollars shifts from hitting to pitching on average.

Now this, I think, is a little surprising. Pitchers are supposed to be unpredictable, which traditionally means that you should spend less on them. But the projections factor in the risk associated with pitchers, and the Price Guide suggests that you should spend even more on them.

Here’s what I think is happening: Pitchers as a whole are less predictable, and the unpredictability leads to the pitchers being projected more conservatively than hitters.

But that is not true for all pitchers. There are a few who have consistently shown themselves to be very good. As we become less confident in their peers, these pitchers become more valuable, because we are more certain of what they can give us.

So using projections, the Price Guide recommends that you take about 4% of what hitters will earn, and instead allocate it to the top-tier pitchers. That’s not a big shift–only about $9 per team. And it isn’t spread across all pitchers, just the top 15 or so (Santana, Sabathia, Peavy, Haren, Kazmir, etc.).

Notice that the average rotisserie league split from the Price Guide is now 66/34, which is still in the ballpark of 70/30. Just keep in mind that the split for your league can vary from that quite a bit. If you are interested in what the split is for your league, just try it out on the Price Guide.

Projections Now Editable

9 Comments
January 18th, 2009 by
Categories: Price Guide, Site News

Just a note to say that I’ve updated the Price Guide with some of the enhancements I had mentioned earlier:

Keepers
Now you can mark keepers in the Price Guide. Enter the prices that players are kept at and the inflation rate is automatically calculated. All of the remaining prices are adjusted to account for inflation.

Editable stats
Do you disagree with what is projected for a player? Now you can edit the projected stats for any player. When you save your changes, the dollar values are rebuilt.

Please let me know if you notice any problems.

Evaluating the Player Evaluators, Part IV (Showdown: Price Guide vs. Point Shares)

10 Comments
January 15th, 2009 by
Categories: Price Guide

I hadn’t planned on running another scenario, but Rudy left a comment on the Price Guide vs. RotoTimes vs. Razzball post:

Interesting test. Simulated draft tests are difficult to do w/o introducing bias. [...] I would argue that creating 4 800 IP teams is an artificial construct. You’re never going to see a league where 4 teams punt pitcher counting stats. I’d be interested to see how the test would go if you credited each team a realistic 5 starters and aim for a 1200 IP avg per team.

Rudy’s point is a good one, and one that I acknowledged in both Part II and Part III. Since both of us are interested in what would happen in a more typical scenario, let’s do one more trial.

This test will be a showdown between 5 Price Guide teams and 5 Point Shares teams. It will be a Retro-Draft like last time, but I’m going to change it up to give Point Shares every possible advantage.

Start One Catcher Per Team
The first time around, I drafted for a league that starts two catchers. Since Rudy mentioned that Point Shares assume one-catcher per team, let’s go with that this time. In fact, let’s use the complete league defaults from an ESPN league: 10-teams, 1 catcher, 5 OF, no CI, no MI. This is the Point Shares’s home turf.

Update: Rudy mentions that, despite what was shown on the Razzball site, the Point Shares are built based on a league with 1 CI and 1 MI. You can check the comments to see the results when I add CI/MI (and a few other modifications).

Draft More Starters
To get the Price Guide teams to draft more starters this time, I requested dollar values pretending that the league required 6 SP and 3 RP (instead of 9 P like last time). Basically, I’m forcing the Price Guide to ignore what it has already demonstrated to be the optimal strategy and instead take the typical approach (i.e. more starter focused). With this constraint in place, the Price Guide builds rankings so that each team should average 1309 IP.

So how did things turn out?

LPP C 63.5
LPP E 62
LPP B 58.5
RB C 58
LPP A 57.5
LPP D 55.5
RB B 53
RB A 52.5
RB D 48
RB E 41.5

Razzball manages to sneak one team into the upper half of the standings, but otherwise the Price Guide ends up with the clear edge.

This time, the LPP teams drafted SP like they were supposed to, averaging 1,505 IP per team.

On the other hand, it was the Razzball teams who were loading up on RP! They averaged only 3 SP per team and 1,065 IP. (Unfortunately, the draft-lots-of-relievers strategy didn’t work as well for them as it had for the Price Guide earlier.)

If anyone is interested in the details, I’ve got the full draft results. I’d also be interested if anyone has any critiques for the method I’m using to compare the systems.

Evaluating the Player Evaluators, Part III (Razzball and RotoTimes)

7 Comments
January 14th, 2009 by
Categories: Price Guide

Last time, I took a look at how the Price Guide stacked up against a couple of other valuation systems, one from ESPN and one from Baseball Monster. Now I want to see how it compares to two others: RotoTimes and Razzball.

The format is the same as before: A 2008 Retro-Draft that gives all of the systems the benefit of perfect hindsight. The starting positions and categories are standard for 5×5 rotisserie. 12 teams will be drafted, with 4 teams representing each of the 3 fantasy raters. I put the teams in this order to try to remove any bias from selecting early or late:

RotoTimes A
Razzball A
Last Player Picked A
RotoTimes B
Razzball B
Last Player Picked B
RotoTimes C
Razzball C
Last Player Picked C
RotoTimes D
Razzball D
Last Player Picked D

Each team can only draft players at positions they qualify at (20 game requirement). I did all of the drafting by hand, so there could have been mistakes (although I doubt it would affect the outcome if there were).

So how did the draft turn out? Well, the first round was pretty indicative of each team’s “strategy”:

RT A: Roy Halladay
RB A: CC Sabathia
LPP A: Albert Pujols
RT B: Tim Lincecum
RB B: Cliff Lee
LPP B: Hanley Ramirez
RT C: Francisco Rodriguez
RB C: Johan Santana
LPP C: David Wright
RT D: Jose Reyes
RB D: Mariano Rivera
LPP D: Dustin Pedroia

What do we see? All four of the Razzball teams grabbed pitchers in the first round. The RotoTimes teams drafted three pitchers. LPP’s choices, however, look more like the conventional first round picks (with a bit of an emphasis on infielders).

Those basic trends continued throughout. The Razzball teams were the first to fill up their pitching. RotoTimes also favored pitchers but focused more on closers. They were also most likely to grab guys for SB, especially outfielders. LPP got the best catchers (starting with LPP A grabbing Mauer near the end of the 2nd round) and middle infielders, and filled in their pitching staffs with the leftovers.

Here are the final standings, which ended up much more clearly-cut than I expected:

LPP C 78
LPP B 75
LPP A 73
LPP D 72
RB B 69.5
RB D 66.5
RB C 63
RB A 62
RT B 58
RT A 58
RT D 54
RT C 51

My thoughts, once again:

1. Like last time, the Price Guide takes Gold, Silver, and Bronze (and 4th, whatever that would be). Since the methodology seems to me like the most logical way to value players, it was reassuring to see that the theory holds true in practice.

2. I actually expected RotoTimes to do better, since their site allows you to customize the number of hitters and pitchers. (Both RotoTimes and LPP’s picks were based on their rankings for 14 hitters and 9 pitchers.) Since Razzball’s Point Shares aren’t customized for the number of hitters or pitchers, they were starting with a possible disadvantage.

3. Like last time, I didn’t specify a minimum for IP or AB. With no minimum and with the other teams drafting SP like crazy, the Price Guide decided that 60 good innings from Geoff Geary or Jim Johnson were better than 180 innings from an average starter. The LPP teams ended up last in W, S, and K; and first in ERA and WHIP (in addition to being very good offensively). They also ended up with about 650 IP each.

I realize this isn’t realistic with a lot of leagues that have a minimum IP, so out of curiosity I went back and substituted some of those middle relievers on LPP teams with SP that went undrafted (Hiroki Kuroda, Tim Wakefield, Paul Maholm, A.J. Burnett, etc.) to get each of them above 800 IP. That hurt the LPP teams in ERA and WHIP, and it wasn’t enough to catch any of the teams in the other pitching categories. The results on the final standings were minor:

LPP C 73.5
LPP B 73
LPP D 70.5
RB B 70.5
LPP A 68
RB C 68
RB A 68
RB D 67.5
RT B 58
RT A 58
RT D 54
RT C 51

One Razzball team moves into a tie for third, and an LPP team slides into a three-way tie for fifth. Everything tightened between LPP and Razzball, but RotoTimes was completely unaffected.

5. I’m pretty confident that the Price Guide is the best, but can we tell how the others stack up? It’s hard to say for sure without directly comparing Razzball with ESPN or RotoTimes with Baseball Monster. I would guess that RotoTimes is actually the least accurate, judging by their uniformly poor performance this time. Competing against them may have benefited Razzball some, but I don’t think it’s clear that it did.

Someone else is welcome to do their own evaluation to see how they rank.

In the end, though, Last Player Picked’s values look to be more accurate for indicating league standings than any of the others. Since they are customizable for any fantasy league, I’d wager that they perform just as strongly for any other league configuration.

Want to Try Out the New Price Guide?

4 Comments
January 13th, 2009 by
Categories: Price Guide, Site News

I’ve mentioned that two of my goals for the Price Guide are to allow people to customize the projections and to let them enter keepers.

Well, those two things are getting close to happening.

Right now, I’m looking for some people to try out a beta version that includes these extra features:

UPDATE: These have now been included with the main Price Guide.

If you have some time, I’d appreciate if you try it out and post some feedback in the comments. Once I’m satisfied with these changes, I’ll update the regular Price Guide to include them.

Evaluating the Player Evaluators, Part II (Baseball Monster and ESPN)

8 Comments
January 13th, 2009 by
Categories: Price Guide

Yesterday, I explained that I was going to try to compare the various player valuation systems by having them pick teams in a mock Retro-Draft–a draft for the 2008 season after the season. Doing that will let us see which one does the best job of ranking players, because we can look at the final standings as soon as the draft is over.

The first league involved my own Price Guide, ESPN’s Player Rater, and BaseballMonster.com’s rankings. You can read all about the league setup in the introduction, but this was the draft order:

ESPN A
Last Player Picked A
Baseball Monster A
ESPN B
Last Player Picked B
Baseball Monster B
ESPN C
Last Player Picked C
Baseball Monster C
ESPN D
Last Player Picked D
Baseball Monster D

The ESPN A-Team started things off with Pujols as the first overall pick, although all of the systems had him ranked #1. After that, things diverged quickly: BaseballMonster and ESPN had three pitchers in the top 10 (Halladay, Sabathia, and Lincecum), while the Price Guide only had one (Halladay at #6).

All of the Price Guide teams had filled both C spots by Round 13. Catchers were the last two picks for all of the other teams.

I don’t find draft write-ups to be particularly interesting, so allow me to skip the details and just show how the final standings shaped up:

LPP D 79
LPP C 77
LPP A 75
LPP B 68
ESPN D 63
BM C 63
BM B 62
ESPN B 60
BM D 60
ESPN A 59
ESPN C 58
BM A 56

Some thoughts:

1. I’m quite pleased to see Last Player Picked come away with the top four spots. The key difference that I noticed while drafting was the Price Guide’s proper adjustment for replacement level for C and middle infield. I mentioned it above, but LPP teams started grabbing catchers in the 2nd round; everyone else waited until their last two picks. In this draft and in the draft I’ll show tomorrow, an LPP team took Pedroia and Utley at the turn of the 1st and 2nd rounds.

2. On a related note, it’s pretty clear why LPP B ended up at the bottom (relative to the other LPP teams, that is). Their first five picks went like this:

David Wright – 3B
Joe Mauer – C
Brian McCann – C
Joakim Soria – P
Geovany Soto – C

So three catchers in the first five picks, which means one goes in the Utility spot.

Now, if this were a person drafting, they would probably recognize a couple of things:

a) The positional replacement levels don’t really apply to Utility–at that position you just want the best stats available.
b) Catchers only get the benefit of the catcher replacement level when they are put in a catcher slot. When they are put at Util, they are just like any other player.

I realized these things as I was drafting, but my rule was to completely auto-pick with each system’s rankings.

So a real person drafting would have (wisely) skipped over Soto and grabbed one of the next names on the list, like Jermaine Dye or Vladimir Guerrero. (That was a second issue with this team: Not only did they fill their Utility spot early with a lesser player, but they managed to not draft any OF until round 16.) If LPP B had picked Guerrero instead of Soto, they would probably have ended up with about 74 points (and a commanding lead over the 63 point teams).

3. It’s hard to tell which of ESPN and BaseballMonster did better. BaseballMonster went for more pitchers and corner infielders, ESPN tended to get the outfielders. The end result was about the same, and it’s hard to pick a 2nd place winner. (Tomorrow’s results ended up more clearly cut.)

4. In this scenario there didn’t seem to be any advantage to picking first or any disadvantage to picking last. I don’t see any pattern to how the A, B, C, and D teams finished.

5. With the other two systems placing a premium on SP, the Price Guide teams ended up missing out on a lot of the big names starters. As a result, they had the chance to draft better hitters (doing very well across the board in the offensive categories) and better relievers (dominating ERA and WHIP and doing very well in S).

The problem comes if this were a league with an IP minimums. Each of the LPP teams only drafted about 600 IP, which might not be enough depending on what the minimum is. Out of curiosity, I tried replacing the last RPs drafted by LPP teams with SPs that went undrafted (guys like Jered Weaver, Randy Wolf, and Greg Maddux) to bump them up to about 900 IP. That resulted in much tighter standings, with the Price Guide still holding on to the top spots.Dealing with IP minimums looks like it is one shortcoming of the Price Guide’s current system. In this case, though, it turned out to be a non-issue.

6. I mentioned above that the Price Guide teams all benefited from taking catchers early, which made me wonder if I was being unfair by setting the league requirement at two catchers. It kind of ended up looking that way, but it certainly wasn’t my intent. While it was my goal to pick a pretty standard league setup, in retrospect it is clear that it hurt all of the other systems.

Here’s the bottom line, though: The Price Guide’s values will adjust for any league configuration. It handles two catchers. It handles any stat category. It handles any size league. There’s probably some league configuration out there that ends up making it a close competition. But there are a whole bunch of configurations for which the Price Guide is going to do just as well as it did here.

***

With the Price Guide holding up very well against its first two competitors, it’s time to see how it does against some others. Tomorrow, I’ll run through the draft results of the second league, with teams from the Price Guide, RazzBall Point Shares, and RotoTimes.

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