SubscribeTwenty years ago, in the spring of 1991, a guy name Hugh Sweeney tried a fantasy baseball strategy that sounds completely crazy — something so crazy no one had tried it before and few have attempted since. And for Sweeney, it was a strategy that almost worked.
The story of Sweeney’s attempt was preserved by Alex Patton in the 1992 edition of his annual fantasy book, Patton’s Player Profiles. Ask Rotoman has the full article, titled The Collapse of Russia available in PDF:
I want you to see what a no-brainer they had going for them; how bad luck and, yes, serious [mess]-ups were all that stopped Sweeney once he had devised his plan.
The plan was, quite obviously, to win in six categories, come in last in two. Had Sweeney succeeded in doing that, he would have had 74 points. He was counting on no team coming out of the auction in great shape; he figured all these old goats would punch themselves silly, and he was right. Seventy-four points would have won.
Sweeney’s simple plan was to punt HR and RBI. In a 4×4 league, he spent big on pitching and then grabbed a few hitters who could add steals and batting average.
I encourage you to read all of Alex’s essay, including his round-by-round post-mortem of the fateful auction. (I realize there’s usually nothing worse than reading about someone else’s draft, but this one is worth it.)
In the next few posts I’ll unveil a modern-day Sweeney Plan to see if it is at all feasible in today’s draft environment, twenty years after it was first attempted.
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Finally got a chance to read the whole pdf. What I took from it (and this should be no surprise to anyone who has read “Moneyball”) is that if everyone is equally knowledgeable and has the same resources, you need to exploit a market inefficiency to gain an edge. Otherwise you’re just hoping for luck.
What was also enlightening was the way he mentioned that players had different values for Sweeney than they did for other people. It makes me think that if I ignore a category (which I expect to do), then I should really not include that category in my Price Guide setup. If I resign myself to finishing last in saves, then my values are the league settings without saves as a scoring category.