THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

And most Fantasy analysts ignore OBP as valuable, since most Fantasy leagues use BA. I find that pretty ignorable much of the time.

@Devon

It’s a good point.

But I don’t think specific stats are the issue really. OBP (or better yet wOBP) is important for GMs and managers and leads to winning ballgames. Excellent.

But there are equally interesting analyses being done with a different goal in mind: helping a regular dude win his fantasy league, rather than helping a billionaire more efficiently allocate his millions.

Both are interesting. Both have merit. I just don’t see any substantial basis for the credibility gap that exists.

In fact, its far more interesting, to me at least, to use the advanced metrics to try and predict the surface ones. Fun!

To me fantasy baseball is about picking a set of statistics that are…

1. Easy to calculate
2. Give all the positions of baseball a relatively realistic share of the overall value. (ie - I don’t want to be in a league where power hitters completely rule or relief pitchers have zero value).
3. Not too many stats that it is difficult to easily determine who is worth what.

To me the fun comes from drafting and managing a team of players given the criteria from 1-3.  Many attempts to make a fantasy league too sabermetric (in the stats it uses) often gets messy with many stats being double or triple counted.  I like the quirkiness of having to worry about where I am going to get my stolen bases and saves from - all the while knowing that in “real” baseball many of the stats used in fantasy baseball are flawed.

If I wanted a true sabermetric league, I’d just use some sort of linear weights (like wOBA) in a points league format.  Points league formats are very boring to me.

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vr, Xei

Not exactly on point, but it seems fantasy players could be mobilized to better answer “real” baseball questions.

Convince ESPN or another one of the big boys to scrounge together a bunch of advertisers. Have them host a bunch of leagues where one of the categories for your pitchers, other than the standard 5 or whatever, is “days *not* spent on the DL”. Make one of the categories for hitters, other than the standard 5 or whatever, “UZR/150”.

Take part of the advertising dollars and give the winner of each league $X,000 bucks. All of a sudden, there’s a real incentive for people to try and predict injuries and defense, and you’ve got literally thousands of people coming up with their own way to do it. Who knows what they’d come up with?

Fantasy is the gateway drug. Why not try and get people hooked on the good stuff?

I’ve seen something like this more than once in fantasy tip sheets:

“Player X has really been raking at the plate for the past week, so you might want to consider picking him up.”

Or, “Batter Y really killed Pitcher Z in 8 at bats in 2 games early in the season, so you should start Batter Y against Pitcher Z today.”

Luke hit the nail on the head.  There’s some really great fantasy analysis done, it’s just mostly not done by the fantasy experts associated with the sites we use.  I’ve used Yahoo almost exclusively.  They have 3 or 4 guys who are constantly writing articles that have literally zero value to me.  Yesterday’s headline was about Hanley Ramirez possibly being traded.  Nevermind that there’s no logical reason for the Marlins to do that.  I think fantasy writers are considered less credible because the ones we’re most exposed to are pretty bad…

you guys are wrong about OBP--the majority of leagues use it now. in my experience, such as it is, the fantasy community follows and learns about both real baseball and statistics, which at least is more than we can say for a lot of people.

A-Team is right though, much of the fantasy content is pretty badly written and not thoroughly analyzed; guys win a house league for $30 and think they can start their own blog.