SubscribeIt’s a new year, and that means a new fantasy baseball season is on the way!
Here at Last Player Picked, the wheels are beginning to turn again after a quiet and restful offseason. That means that the Price Guide will start being updated with 2010 projections very soon.
The regular schedule of posts will return next Monday and continue on through the start of the baseball season.
I’m looking forward to having some excellent discussions on draft strategy and player valuation.
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Hey, it’s great that you’re back! I might as well start off with a request. I would guess you know this, but FanGraphs is creating Fan Projections using the “Wisdom of Crowds” idea. When these are fleshed out, I think they would be a projection great option for the Price Guide. The wisdom of the masses might be better than any individual “expert.”
I’m glad to see your site will be going again this year.
Hey Bobby,
Glad you’re back. :-)
I’ve been following the Fan Projections and think they’re a great idea. One thing I’m especially interested in is to use the fans’ playing time and save projections with the computerized systems, since those two things are usually the hardest things for the computers to project.
People are only gradually starting to think about 2010 baseball, so I’m going to give the projections some more time to mature before I try anything, though.
Thanks for an amazing and useful free site.
I have a question, though. For the last month or so, I have been tinkering with projections, using the extremely valuable “Let Me Customize These Projections” tool. Today, however, I notice that the site will no longer “hold” on to my statistical adjustments. That is, it lets me edit, but when the page reloads, the player’s line retains the old stats.
I am assuming something changed yesterday when you came on and started preparing for the new slate of projections. Will this customizing feature remain available to us? And if so, is there an estimate on when we can play with it again?
Thanks again.
Great! I am eager to get the season started as well. I’m glad to see you’re back and ready to get going too.
Great have you back, Mays. I was wondering if you had ever given any thought to the idea of correlations between stat categories (HR & RBI, for example, or Steals and Runs) or, more generally, the ability to predict production in a certain category from those in others (i.e. regression analysis). Do you think any drafting strategy could potentially emerge from recognizing that certain stats tend to ‘come along’ even if you don’t focus on them?
@LittlePanda,
Yep, I broke the edit feature yesterday. :-)
It should be fixed now, but, unfortunately, any changes that were saved before are gone.
I’ve been shifting around lots of stuff on the backend, so it’s possible there are still a few bugs to work out. Please let me know if you notice anything.
@DaBulls: I hadn’t thought of that, but it is an interesting question.
As far as predicting production, my first impression would be that other categories would have some predicative value on a certain category, but would not be as useful as historical data for that stat. Basically, if you want to know how many HR a player will hit, it is better to know how many he hit last year than how many RBI he will have.
I think correlation is especially interesting in dealing with saves, since it’s quite possible to build a team that performs well in four pitching categories but not in that one (top-of-the-line starters with cheap middle-relievers). With such a seemingly low correlation with the other stats, how valuable is it to chase saves?
That’s one approach to take. The other potential strategy is to ignore stats that have the highest explained variation. For example, I believe that historically, variation in Runs is predicted by variation in the other 4 classical offensive categories more so than any other category is by its others. If this is the case, perhaps I don’t want to draft a player who is above average primarily in runs scored, because I can pick up enough runs by focusing my draft on the other categories.
Yay! Glad you’re back.
Welcome back!! I love this site but do have one thing I’d love to see added.
Is there any chance to have an “upload custom projections” feature this year? I love that you can customize individual stats, but it would be great if I could upload those customizations instead of doing them one by one via the web interface. That means I can do a large number of customizations outside of the site.
Either that or an excel spreadsheet version of the tool would be a great!
I think we talked about this last year in some posts, and I tried to send you some email a few weeks ago, not sure if it got through.
Again, welcome back, this is a great site!
Mays,
Welcome back! I unfortunately didn’t find this site until later in the year last season but I really am looking forward to using this pricing model.
I have a suggestion: Many people have keeper leagues and would be there a way to remove players from the draft pool in a future pricing guide version? I imagine if Fielder, Pujols, and Tex are removed from 1B, it would really skew the price of the others.
@TheAddict:
I think there is already a solution for this.
When you put in the settings for your league, check the box that says: “Let Me Customize These Projections”.
Then, you can edit individual players. One of the inputs you can make is for “Kept At.” For each keeper, type in the value that they have been kept at, and you will get new values for the other players adjusted for inflation.
FWIW, I don’t think this tends to affect the other players at their position too drastically, because for each keeper there is now one less team that needs a player at that position.
If you want to see what the values of, say, the other 1B would be without say, Fielder and Pujols, then I suppose you could also just edit those two players’ statistics to make them worthless, although I assume this would have other effects on the price guide since it would probably screw up the baseline or something.