The latest episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.
Guest: Trevor May, New York Mets
Interview
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The End of Season Recap Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.
The focus of this podcast is on fantasy baseball strategy.
Today, we look back at the topics and highlights of our season-long coverage, and give thanks to all those that made our show extraodinary this year.
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The Live Episode from First Pitch Arizona 2021 of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.
Guest: Derek Carty
What’s new in THE BAT X for 2022?
Strategy Section
The Season Wrap-Up Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.
Guest: Ian Kahn
Most memorable moments of the baseball season
Our successes and failures in 2021
Sandy Alcantara – Is he a top 10 pitcher for 2022?
The full one hundred and sixty-two major league season has now concluded. After two whole tumultuous years, it is with great joy, that I am able to utter this sentence once again. After just a 60-game short season in 2021, completing the full schedule docket is a sparkling achievement.
It is now time to check back on how we fared during the past season. Here at RotoGraphs, that tradition starts with reviewing our pre-season bold predictions.
As always, I will remind my readers that we will never succeed in perfectly mining all of our bold predictions, nor should we. If this was simply a contest to obtain high precision, then we would have filled our lots with easy guesses. “Gerrit Cole will strike out 180 batters” – is an amazing baseball accomplishment, but it is far from bold. In fact, ATC was the low projection system on Gerrit Cole, and predicted an expected 257 Ks. Forget bold – the statistics may have suggested a probability of circumstance close to 60-75%.
Bold predictions are meant to be a far more remote event. They are meant to be unlikely.
At the other end of the spectrum, bold predictions are also not meant to be impossible. “Albert Pujols will steal 25 bases,” is not within the realm of any reasonable possibility. That is a prediction into the weird or absurd – which is NOT the purpose of these columns.
This author perennially suggests that bold predictions should lie in the 70th to 90th percentiles. In other terms, we should be boldly calling events that are 10-30% likely to occur. In return period speak – an occurrence that should unfold every 1 in 3.3 to 1 in 10 years. It should be a prediction that would happen once, twice or thrice a decade.
The point of the exercise is to highlight certain undervalued (or overvalued) players by choosing a few unlikely, but achievable outcomes. By doing so, the goal is for the reader to pay the player(s) in question a bit more (or less) attention than the market would suggest.
Well, we are down to the final week of fantasy baseball. After a short 60 game season in 2020, we are blessed to be approaching game 162 here in 2021!
We here at RotoGraphs, are hoping that you are right in the thick of the competition for your league’s fantasy championship title. For me – I am right in the middle of an intense battle with one of the legends of rotisserie baseball, Ron Shandler, as well as our own Jeff Zimmerman.
The league that I am referring to is the Mixed Auction LABR league. I was one this division of LABR’s inaugural members back in 2020.
Above is a photograph of some of the participants of the live 2020 auction draft from Tampa, Florida. Due to COVID, this year’s draft was held online. LABR is one of the longest running (if not THE longest currently running) expert leagues of rotisserie baseball. It is an honor simply to be invited to compete.
The Mixed auction LABR league is a very standard 12-team 5×5 rotisserie league. We use the standard scoring categories (R, RBI, HR, SB, BA, W, K, SV, ERA, WHIP), and standard rosters (14 B, 9 P). Scoring periods are weekly, trading is allowed, and the initial draft is of the auction variety. Last year, I went into great detail recapping my draft – a two-part article that can be found here and here.
As many of you might already know, as a risk management actuary – my day job consists of running simulation models to recommend purchasing decisions to the upper management of my company. I simulate possible fires, hurricanes, medical malpractice claims, and other liabilities that we may be on the hook for.
Borrowing several actuarial methods, I adapted some of these models in order to develop a proprietary in-season fantasy baseball tool. It is a probabilistic final standings simulator. Using the current league accumulated standings, a source of projected ROS statistics, a volatility and a correlation model – I run 4000 iterations of what might happen for the remainder of the season.
The Final Week Decisions Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.
League Updates
Injry Guru’s Trivia of the Week
Waiver Wire
Pitcher Preview
Injury Update – Reuven gives us the injury updates.
Housekeeping
The Mid-September Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.
Live show announcement!
The Early September Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.
9/11
The Closer Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.
Guest: Greg Jewett
Closers