Fun with Visualizations: Choose Your First Baseman

While many expert fantasy players have been drafting and posting their rosters and drafting and posting their rosters and… you get the point…, you may be waiting out the lockout before you schedule your draft. If that’s the case, you’re probably exhausted from all the fantasy content that has been pumped out into the meta-verse and at this point, probably have your mind made up on a few players. Let’s put that theory to the test and let’s see if you can guess who’s who based on only their counting stat projections. This is my second installment of the choose your player game and here are the rules:

Step 1: Don’t scroll down to the table!

Step 2: Imagine drawing a vertical line in the visual below that does a good job of maximizing the four roto counting stats; SB, HR, RBI, and R. Try not to pick rank one, two, or three.

Step 3: Note your player rank, then scroll down to the table to see who you have chosen.

I created these ranks using the default settings of the auction calculator with steamer projections to sort by dollar value and limited the pool to players who were given a first base aPOS based on the default positional priority settings. Note that if you wish to do something similar, you should input the parameters of your league accordingly. The purpose of the visual above is to see that while a dollar value (based on z-score calculations) totals out all of a players’ category projections, you can still find some category by category bargains as you move down in overall value. A roster constructed accordingly could take advantage of this. It also allows you to strip away all that you have heard, about individual players and just focus on the projections. In this visual, player 18 is just that, player 18. If you didn’t cheat and scroll down, you don’t know who he is. When comparing his projections to the rest of the group, we see that his home run value is better than any player ranked greater than 11, his RBI projection is better than any player in the same group and his run projection is similar to the entire second half of rankings. Who is mystery player number 18? Scroll down to find out.

That long tail moving to the right of the first basemen (light blue) distribution in the image above shows us that there’s a larger selection of power in the 1B and OF positions than shortstop, second and third. Looking back up to the first image, you can see that players five through eleven are basically projected to hit the same amount of home runs. So, don’t think, “Oh no, first base is where I get power and I have to grab one now.” When looking at these visuals without the context of player name or team, we can see that you have many opportunities for power at the first base position and while there is a drop off after player rank 10, it trends upward again with players 16, 17, and 18.

Fantasy Pros draft simulator is a really nice place to practice drafting. Hopefully, these images will help you plan out your targets and find value while ignoring all the hype and bias that comes outside of just looking at projections.