Archive for Meta Analysis

Exit Velocity! It’s all the rage now. And it should be. With just one season’s worth of incomplete data, we’re still trying to figure out what it all means. You’re familiar with my xHR/FB rate metric, right? That equation uses a hitter’s batted ball distance to determine what his HR/FB rate “should have” been. Unfortunately, batted ball distance is a result and the goal for any metrics I develop is to use metric that represent underlying skills. Exit velocity is that underlying skill. The hope is that it will eventually replace batted ball distance in my equation.

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Bear with me for a bit as I venture down an unusual path for Rotographs.

I’m not much of an NBA fan. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve pretty much devoted my fandom to Major League Baseball, the NFL, and college football & basketball. I’ve watched about 10 minutes of my hometown Pistons this year. A couple weeks ago I caught a late night Warriors game so I could have the Steph Curry experience (nope, didn’t even tune in for #73).

Despite the NBA not being on my radar, about a week and a half ago I kept seeing mentions about the “Hinkie retirement letter” in my Twitter feed. A lot of them. As soon as I determined that “Hinkie” was Sam Hinkie, General Manager for the Philadelphia 76ers, I said to myself, “Don’t care, moving on now.”

Then the next night, as I was walking around the house getting my Fitbit steps in (#dadlife), I saw this tweet from Jonathan Bales:

I’ll stop now. In short, this might be the greatest thing I’ve ever read. Highly recommend if you want to be +EV at life.

— Jonathan Bales (@BalesFootball) April 7, 2016

If you’re not much of a DFS player, you may not know Bales. He’s the author of the DFS series “Fantasy Football for Smart People” and “Fantasy Baseball for Smart People” and has become quite well known for all of his work in the DFS arena.

You don’t have to be a DFS player to enjoy Bales’ work (this is not a DFS article). I don’t have much time to play DFS regularly, but I love his work and thought process. So I had to go down the rabbit hole to see what he was talking about…

And it was this darn “Hinkie retirement letter” again. The greatest thing he’s ever read? Now I have to check it out. Read the rest of this entry »

So today is normally American League starting pitcher day, but that’s going to be pushed back. Perhaps to Monday. That’s because we’re only a week and a half into the season and there are still some crazy performance metrics being posted. I wanted to highlight them, laugh at them, and discuss them. By next Monday, they could be less crazy and there would be less laughing to do. And nobody wants them.

Statistics as of April 12, but will weave in performances from yesterday’s games when relevant.

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I considered titling this article “Buying Low on Sleepers.” But what is low? It feels more relative than the term discount. We have a general idea of what a player’s preseason market value was. Acquiring a player at less than said market value would be considered buying at a discount. So that’s what I’ll go with here, as the phrase “buying low” is generic advice that lacks the proper context to take action.

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The first week of the season is always a fun time of the year. The limited amount of data in the books makes it difficult to provide any sort of valuable analysis and any advice is going to essentially be given based on the tiniest of sample sizes. So what’s a fantasy player to do? Nothing. That’s right, the best moves you can make now are no moves.

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Every season, in addition to posting my standard bold predictions, I up the ante with my bold league leaders. If you thought nailing a bold prediction was tough, the bold league leaders is even more difficult! Just getting one right is worthy of celebration. Because these are bold, I automatically disqualify players I don’t personally believe should be considered bold. So I challenge myself and it typically causes me to bat .000.

We’ll start with the hitting league leaders in each of the five categories, split up by league.

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I must be getting old. Or maybe I’m just learning. But I have a confession to make. I’m starting to change my line of thinking as it relates to fantasy baseball player valuations and team construction.

I’ve been obsessed with the process of finding projections, calculating dollar values, and relying almost exclusively on those inputs to guide my draft process. To make matters worse, after already having those thoughts entrenched in my brain, I then read Larry Schechter’s book, Winning Fantasy Baseball.

My process and beliefs sounded a heck of a lot like the ones Larry uses. And he’s arguably the greatest rotisserie player of all time. “All these chumps not calculating player dollar values out to the penny are doing it wrong“, I thought.

Well, I’m starting to soften on that stance. And here’s why… Read the rest of this entry »

Expect the Unexpected.

That’s the mantra you must repeat to yourself daily as you head into your auction or snake draft. Because as much as you think you know your room and how you feel about every player, you are wrong. Trust me.

On Saturday morning, I headed to SiriusXM studios in New York City for one of the best days of the year — the American League Only Tout Wars league auction. Here’s a brief review of the rules:

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Last week, we kicked off updated rankings season. Several years ago, I began a series that has become an annual tradition – Pod’s Picks. When I manually project players for my Pod Projections, I rarely look at what the other systems are projecting. So I typically have little idea as to whether I’m bullish or bearish on a player, or my expectations are similar to everyone else’s. Outside of the projections, we all use different valuation systems. Even given the same projected line, two fantasy owners could potentially arrive at drastically different values for the same player. All this is a way of me saying that I never know who I like and who I dislike, compared to the market, until I see my rankings or dollar values directly compared to other sets.

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It’s time to move on to the starting pitching side of the ledger for our next set of Steamer and I entries. For the pitchers, I’ll be comparing my ERA Pod Projection to that of Steamer to identify who I am significantly more bullish and bearish on.

First, we’ll start with one of the pitchers I am far more optimistic on than Steamer is. But before we dive in, I wanted to note some of the pitchers I skipped over. Chris Young, Royals version, topped the list, for obvious reasons. He breaks all computer models and is a perfect example of why it is often better to rely on human forecasts than computer ones. After Young was the man that came back from the dead last year, Rich Hill. Obviously, a computer system is going to struggle with his projection and is also unaware of the work he did on his mechanics last season that may have been behind his improved control. He’s a total crapshoot though and a complete shot in the dark, so he’s not really worth discussing.

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