Yesterday, I laid out the framework for how I go about projecting players entering MLB from a foreign league. This year, two hitters from the KBO League of South Korea will be making their debuts this year, Byung-ho Park of the Twins and Hyun-soo Kim of the Orioles. Refresh your memory of each of their statistics by reviewing yesterday’s post linked to above. Now that you’re back, let’s get to projecting.
Fantasy baseball season is upon us and interest will probably spike once Super Bowl L is over. Since I may be considered an expert in fantasy baseball, I get asked questions about this or that player. Who is a sleeper? And tons of keeper questions. With these questions, I follow three rules.
Sometimes the questions are a little harder to answer and the answer can be a little fuzzy with so many possible inputs and outcomes. Quite a bit of the analysis I see and hear are people just making up values. I have found I can’t go with my gut and some semblance of an intelligent answer should be constructed.
I know I have a few more resources than the average fantasy owner and I would like to put those resources to work. I have taken various questions I have seen discussed and have come up with what I hope are some more intelligently constructed answers.
The two items I will use for most of the analysis is public opinion (from Twitter polls) and historical data. With the polls, I can use the information from the crowds to at least get a consensus of public opinion. The public could be wrong, but at least I have a reasonable anchoring point to start the discussion. With the historic data, the average and range of values can be known.
Here are some questions I have pondered this pre-season and my current answers.
This year’s new faces from foreign leagues on the offensive side come to us from the KBO League of South Korea. First baseman Byung-ho Park was signed by the Twins and is expected to serve as the team’s primary designated hitter, as Joe Mauer is entrenched at first. The Orioles signed outfielder Hyun-soo Kim and he figures to play left field on an every day basis, though as a lefty, could end up being platooned. We have precious few players historically who have come over from the KBO League to look to in order to assist with our translations. So forecasting these two players is extremely difficult. They are essentially just educated guesses, and although all projections technically are, these are far less educated ones!
Fantasy baseball is an inherently analytical game – you are trying to use a scarce resource (either dollars or draft picks) in a wiser manner than your competitors. And so it is no surprise that fantasy players have become big fans of the projection systems from ZiPS to Steamer to PECOTA and beyond. Just last week, Justin Vibber shared his ottoneu Surplus Calculator which uses Steamer projections to find expected values for MLB players.
In the ottoneu Slack community, the surplus calculator and other similar tools have become the primary manner of determining player value – if Steamer says a player will produce $30, that is the baseline. And this creates an opportunity to profit by ignoring projections.
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Hard to believe, but it’s almost February. Almost all the top free agents have signed. It’s almost prospect season, and it’s almost time for pitchers and catchers to report. All these things add up to a baseball season that is almost here.
Patience.
But patience is a luxury we don’t have these days in fantasy leagues like Ottoneu that have a keeper deadline (January 31st) fast approaching. Auction formats make player valuation even more complex, and now that it’s crunch time, tough decisions need to be made. How comfortable are you hanging onto that $20 Corey Dickerson while the risk of a possible trade out of COL remains a real possibility in February or March? Despite the power and the incoming fences, how does Giancarlo Stanton’s unavoidable injury history influence your decision to keep at $56? How much value, if any, has Zack Greinke really lost moving to Arizona? Is he a $35 starting pitcher? Everybody loves Kyle Schwarber as the next best thing (C and OF!), but where’s the line? $20? $25? $30?
Ottoneu is a smarter, better brand of fantasy baseball. By design, it’s a fantasy platform engineered for the hardcore baseball fan that doesn’t enjoy the term “off season”. Ottoneu is the perfect fit for FanGraphs readers looking to join a competitive fantasy baseball league with a lot of cool features, a sabermetric-economy, and a massive community of raving fans.
You can read first-year feedback from Ottoneu players here. You can also learn a lot more about the game from the FAQ, but here are the top 10 reasons you should consider joining or moving your fantasy baseball league to Ottoneu this year:
Looking over some recent real and mock fantasy drafts, one name which is coming up as a potential sleeper is Jose Reyes. His fantasy value is unknown with his projected value being quite a bit different than the position he is being taken in fantasy drafts. Dan Swartz had him ranked 34th using Steamer projections while he was actually going 151st in NFBC drafts. The reason for the huge difference comes down to his pending criminal charges for domestic abuse. While the legal, ramifications may take a while to go to court, MLB has enacted a new domestic violence policy which has yet to be tested. I can see why people are reluctant to draft Reyes. Well, here is an attempt to put a reasonable fantasy value on him for 2016.
Estimating games missed
To get the expected games suspended, I went with two methods to find the answer, asking the crowd and asking the expert. Both sources generally agree with the time missed.
For the crowd, I asked my Twitter followers how much time they expected Reyes to be suspended. Most people put the value between 25 and 50 games with an average value near 35 games.
Then I moved on to FanGraphs legal expert Nathaniel Grow. When I asked him how he expected the situation to play out, here is his response.
While Reyes’ status remains uncertain, a suspension somewhere in the 25-50 game range would probably be a reasonable, conservative estimate of the punishment he is likely to face from the league.
So somewhere between 25 and 50 games, which is around where the crowd put the number. I will take the view of a conservative owner and go with a 50 game suspension to figure out his value. If an owner wants to take a chance, they could assume fewer days missed.
Finally, it’s the last recap of my projections from the 2015 season! The Pod Projections are derived using the methodology outlined in my just released eBook Projecting X 2.0: How to Forecast Baseball Player Performance. As usual, Steamer and I is a comparison of my projection to Steamer’s. Steamer was significantly more bullish on James Shields, who moved to the National League and joined the Padres, both of which should have boosted his fantasy value. It didn’t of course, as his ERA and WHIP both jumped, despite a career high strikeout rate.
At last, we have reached our final 2015 Pod Projection review! All pitcher projections were based on the methodology laid out in my just released eBook, Projecting X 2.0. Yes, it’s the follow up to the original Projecting X, and is chock full of new research, new metrics, new ideas, and new methods for projecting baseball player performance.
Last week, I examined how a decline in pull rate (Pull%) and contact rate (Contact%) may be a precursor to overall decline. The idea was that if the hitter was worse at doing either or both, they could be in for a larger than normal decline. The research was an initial stab at the data and I got some great comments for future areas of stuady on it. With a few tweaks, I was able to take the ideas and refine the research in order to have a better understanding of what can be a good sign of a major decline.
Idea #1 – Use O-contact% instead of Contact%
Reader Brendan stated the following:
It would be interesting to take this concept and run an ANOVA amongst the 4 groups + control for o-zone contact rate AND z-contact rate separately, being that o-zone contact % is the one peripheral that drops off the cliff dramatically for older players. We’d get an idea about the extent to which overall wRC+ is affected by o-zone contact decline. Hardy’s 2014 and 2015 o-zone contact rate was much lower compared to recent years.
So I analyzed the data with various combinations of Contact%, O-Contact% (outside the zone contact rate), and Z-Contact% (inside the zone contact rate). I looked at several different combinations and none were really any better than Contact%. I decided to move forward with just Contact% for the rest of the analysis.
