Fantasy Rankings Prep (Part 1 of 3)

About four times a season, Eno unleashes the shocky monkeys and a few of us slow-footed writers are forced to enjoy ranking all the players. For the next few days, I am going to go over how I prepared my rankings.

Note: I am trying to keep the amount of math to a minimum. If somewhere you get lost in the procedure let me know and I can explain the procedure in more detail.

The first item to remember is all leagues are not even close to being the same. In my three keeper leagues, two are points based and the other is an AL only league with one pitcher category being Wins+Saves+Holds. Additionally, some leagues have keepers. How the keeper’s “salary” is set determines a their value. Other league options have innings pitched limits (good rates stats needed) or as in the case of my league with W+S+H, an IP minimum is set to keep owners from only using relief pitchers. Catcher rankings can vary quite a bit from a one catcher to  two catcher leagues or even two catcher slots with a 162 game limit as in Ottoneu. For my rankings, I did them off a basic 5×5 12-team league with 23 positions (14 position players, 9 pitchers).

If possible, I like to use the standing points gained method (a couple of explanations on the methodology). Some other methods may or may not be better, but I like it because it shows the league’s biases and gives me good baselines for final league positioning. I will not go into every gory math detail of the ranking method, so you may want to go back read the two articles previously reference or read Art McGee’s book, How to Value Players for Rotisserie Baseball or Larry Schechter’s new book, Winning Fantasy Baseball.

To get my values, I calculated the average final 2013 values from the last 20 teams to draft at NFBC last year. Here are the final totals and averages for each place in the standings along with the value (slope method) it takes to jump up one position in the standings.

Hitters

Rank	AVG	Runs	HR	RBI	SB
1st	0.280	1109	293	1075	191
2nd	0.276	1078	272	1039	176
3rd	0.273	1048	266	1016	167
4th	0.271	1035	260	996	159
5th	0.269	1020	252	977	153
6th	0.268	1007	247	965	145
7th	0.267	987	241	949	139
8th	0.265	975	237	931	130
9th	0.263	960	229	917	120
10th	0.261	926	220	897	113
11th	0.259	899	208	854	107
12th	0.256	840	191	796	93
Average	0.267	990	243	951	141
Change to move up	0.00195	20.8	7.8	21.4	8.2

Pitchers

Rank	ERA	Wins	WHIP	Strikeouts	Saves
1st	3.11	109	1.13	1496	122
2nd	3.27	102	1.16	1446	110
3rd	3.34	100	1.18	1404	102
4th	3.40	97	1.19	1370	95
5th	3.48	94	1.21	1347	90
6th	3.55	92	1.22	1323	84
7th	3.62	90	1.23	1303	80
8th	3.68	88	1.25	1281	75
9th	3.76	85	1.26	1256	69
10th	3.85	82	1.27	1221	61
11th	3.95	76	1.29	1149	52
12th	4.10	70	1.32	1063	35
Average	3.59	90	1.23	1305	81
Change to move up	0.081	3.0	0.015	33.3	6.8

These tables can be used for two purposes.

Number 1:  Knowing where your teams stands during drafts and auctions.

I keep track of a couple of items (in the points leagues, just one, total points) during the draft to make sure I am not getting too unbalanced, SB and HR (possibly AVG). Once a player is picked, just total their projected stats. You can then know how close you are at getting to a value which will put you too high in the rankings and over killing a stat.

One item to notice is how the top and bottom one or two teams are further away from the pack. These teams won by too much and wasted the stats they accumulated. When you are building a team, don’t aim for the previous top value, aim for just more than second place.

Number 2:  Value Players.

Well, I am going to go stop here and go over this step in detail in my article tomorrow. Please let me know if you have any questions so far.