How to Handle Different Categories: OBP

Because the standard roto format uses batting average, most analysis, rankings, and projections are based on that and the other standard roto categories. If your league uses additional categories or replaces traditional categories with new ones like average being replaced by OBP, you’re can’t just rely on the normal analysis and cheat sheets provided by fantasy sites. You’re going to have to do a little bit of extra work. The purpose of this post is to aid those playing in leagues in which OBP has replaced average as a category.

When  OBP replaces average, you can’t simply look at the guys who have the best OBPs to determine who gains an advantage in this format. What really matters is the difference between OBP and average. To determine when the difference becomes significant, I created a spreadsheet with all qualified hitters from the last three years with their OBP and average. Then I calculated the difference between those numbers,  the mean and the standard deviation for the differences. The mean was .068 and the standard deviation was .02. I then sorted the differences large to small and cut out all players that were within one standard deviation of the mean. Below are the lists of players who were more than one standard deviation from the mean.

As you can see on the “good” list, there are a lot of high profile hitters with great OBPs not listed. Guys like Adrian Gonzalez, Buster Posey, Ryan Braun and many others aren’t on the “good” list because they already have good batting averages and thus don’t get a bump in an OBP format.

As mentioned, most rankings and analysis are based on the assumption of batting average as a category. My own personal rankings and projections are as well because that’s the format that I, and most readers, play in. For my projection system I use something I call roto rating. The idea is fairly straightforward. I project all hitters in each of the five standard roto categories and then I assign them a value for each category on a scale of 1-10. The scale is created by creating ten tiers for each category.

I took the 200 hitters from last year with the most plate appearances (this being roughly the number of hitters usually drafted in a standard 12-team league) and created the tiers based on that list. For example, there were 20 hitters who had a batting average above .307 last year and the next 20 hit between .292 and .306. If I projected a guy to hit .307 or better, I assigned him ten points for average. If I projected a guy to hit between .293 and .306, I assigned him nine points. And so on and so forth. After I did that for each category, I added up all the points and gave each guy a roto rating (You can see my top 200 here).

To determine how much of a bump to give or how much to knock a hitter down in an OBP league, I created tiers for OBP. Below are the tiers I used for average and OBP.

From there I could compare where a guy fell in the average tiers to where he fell in the OBP tiers and adjust my rankings accordingly. Below are the guys listed previously, this time with the number of points they would have gained or lost in my “roto rating” system.

Just to give this a little perspective, any player going after the first few rounds would go up or down about a round for each two points gained or lost. For the guys going in the first two rounds, the changes in value are a little smaller. On the good side of things, Jason Heyward probably becomes a no-doubt second round pick if he wasn’t already there for you, Prince Fielder and Jose Bautista become sure-fire first rounders, and Joey Votto is the clear #4 pick behind the big three and might even be worth drafting ahead of some of the big three depending on how high you were on Votto to being with. When I calculated the mean and standard deviation for OBP, Votto’s OBP came in at more than four standard deviations above the mean. On the “bad” side of things, Adam Jones goes from a late third/early fourth option to a late fourth/early fifth option, Adrian Beltre goes from a late second/early third to a fourth rounder, and Starlin Castro goes from a fourth to a late fifth or sixth rounder.