THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I did a league like this once and I was able to start a first basemen who still had 3B eligibility, and that alone was enough to dominate the putout category.

It’s really limited.  You can’t do what you want, since you’ve only got the 6 counting stats.

I just used outfield assists, mostly, with a token value for errors.  Anything else just ended up weird.

I thought the whole reason stolen bases were their own category was to serve as a halfway decent proxy for fielding.  They would seem to do at least as good a job of that as the roster of choices listed by ESPN.

I would like to see team defense added as an option.  I would picture it like team defense in football where your points add up or get subtracted based on how well the team defense does in certain categories.  You could then draft the “Mariners” or “Rays” as your team defense.  I think it would be a good and simple way of introducing defense into fantasy baseball.  Of course it wouldn’t be for everyone.  But I’d like it as an option.
vr, Xei

I’ve been wondering lately why in this day and age fantasy leagues don’t just use WAR. (Choose whatever type of WAR is the most convenient for the league to track).  That is, you set it up where you have to fill out your team by position and then you just count WAR for each player over the time period you own each player. No more proxies like HR, RBI, OBP, SLG, K, K/BB ratios, etc. Just WAR. Just make the best baseball team that you can.

Geri: that sounds supremely boring.

The idea is to track your team in real-time, to know that what happens ultimately impacts your team.  I would be totally against a WAR-based league.

For the same reason that WAR is boring, a pure points-based league is rather boring.  You lose the management side of balancing things (that in real life really do matter… a little bit at least!) Having to juggle in roto makes it more interesting.

WAR is deathly boring.  A points-based is somewhat boring.  With WAR, you have to look at how someone else compiled the data.  With points-based, you know how many points you got in real-time.

Agreed that categories is more challenging.

I’ve discovered I really like points-based head-to-head leagues. No, H2H is not a good choice for determining the “best team”, but it has two advantages. One, you have one opponent each week. In a league with college buddies, that’s one guy to focus on keeping in touch with/harassing. Two, even if you can’t make the playoffs, you have something to win each week. Points are great in that anyone can follow them, but you can also make them mean something uber-saber-y.

Thanks for posting that TT, your post got me to go off and start from scratch again, from a simpler route, just focusing on the infield to start.

Starting with assists which mimics the positional value order of 1B,3B,2B,SS but hurts C hard. Then used FC which pulls C up, but 1B as well. Used DP as a negative to reduce 1B influence and boost C.

Then had to give outfield assists a high value, but after all that I’ve actually got the fielding points in the order of their positional rankings.

What is even better is that there is some semblance now of the better fielders toward the top at their positions which wasn’t happening before I e-mailed you.

Re fantasy, the closer I find the fantasy leagues I’m in mimic the actual run values and reality of baseball, the more intently I watch games, the more I read up about sabermetrics, and that also leads to more “scouting” of players. The more realistic those leagues are the more that is all enhanced. The great thing about linear weights is that it’s fairly easy to score categories for batting, same for pitching, which was why I’m so keen to get some fielding in there too.

For the trickier dual eligible players who can distort positions I’m looking at increasing position eligibility rules, but at least getting the positional order right now cuts out a lot of that, even if the scaling of the positional values isn’t right, at least the order is now. got it right yet.

I think the Bill James fantasy game had something like double plays for infielders, assists for outfielders, steals and caught stealing for catchers, and errors for everyone. That’s a good start. There’d have to be some sort of team adjustment, like hits allowed, like docking each of the seven fielders with one-sixth of hits allowed (this odd fraction compensates infielders on good teams for missing double play chances).

This is Keep It Simple Stupid stuff. You go into chances, you’re playing with fire. Outfield Assists, Double Plays and Caught Stealing are all positives; Hits Allowed, Errors and Stolen Bases are negatives.

When I was in college, I remember being bothered by the existence of large discrepancies between “fantasy value” and “actual value.” A guy like Alfonso Soriano (circa early-mid 2000s) was among the elite of the elite in fantasy despite a chronic case of walkophobia that kept him from being a top 3 actual player.  I also would look at a points-based league and notice that obviously a HR was not exactly 4 times as valuable as a single, etc.  I liked the approach of giving every offensive event a value, but I felt the standard fantasy values were wrong.  As such, I had the idea to create an offensive stat that used the “correct” value for each offensive event.  I thought this could then be used as the basis for a fantasy league where actual value and fantasy value were one and the same.

I didn’t get around to creating this stat while I was in college.  Some time after I finished school, I heard about some baseball book that called itself “The Book.” It turns out that the “perfect offensive stat” that I had in mind was basically linear weights or wOBA.  On the one hand I felt vindicated that I was on the right track, but on the other hand I was kind of disappointed to learn that I wasn’t the first to think of those ideas.

Playing around ... I came up with this:

Hitters: H+TB+BB+SB+R+RBI-CS-AB/2
Catchers: A+OCS-E-PB-OSB/10
First Basemen: A/2-E-(H-HR)/30
Second Basemen: A/20-E+DP/2-(H-HR)/30
Third Basemen and Shortstops: A/5-E+DP/2-(H-HR)/30
Outfielders: PO/7+A-E-(H-HR)/30

I used last year’s aggregate leagye numbers and fiddled with the weights so that we’d get reasonable numbers. Per team, this is what I have for combined batting and fielding:

C: 354
1B: 390
2B: 329
3B: 344
SS: 358
LF: 366
CF: 360
RF: 380
DH: 343

Second basemen didn’t hit well as an aggregate last year; catchers batted far less often than the other positions. But the results seem reasonable enough; I didn’t test individual players. H-HR would have to be extrapolated or someone would have to break down the PBP for counting, which kind of defeats the purpose of these fantasy games.

This reminds me of an idea I had for fantasy baseball wherein you could start any hitter at any defensive position, but you would incur a penalty (proportional to the positional adjustment used in WAR) for starting a player at a more difficult position.

I guess it would have to be a points league, because I don’t know how it would work in roto.
I just liked the idea because it’s something that is technically possible in baseball (starting an average 1B at 2B, consequences be damned) and I have no idea the optimum strategy in it.