I Hate Rankings
I recently signed on as an editor with a great up-and-coming site. One of my first assignments is to compile rankings for the 2015 season. As an editor whose compensation is tied to site activity, rankings are my best friends. The denizens of readerland LOVE rankings. As somebody who’s trying to build a new fantasy brand, well-done rankings are an excellent vehicle. As a fantasy player, I have serious reservations about the whole process.
Rankings have their time and place. Not every fantasy player is like me – in fact I’d hazard that most aren’t. I have internalized opinions and values on just about every player available. For somebody like me, rankings are there simply to avoid panic. If I have three third basemen left in my queue and they’re taken with the three picks ahead of mine, I can turn to the spreadsheet to avoid a bad selection. For auction leagues, I build value sheets to establish priors. I want to know how Mike Trout, Andrew McCutchen, and Carlos Gomez should compare to each other. I know the dynamic nature of the auction will push me to use any number of strategies and tactics.
RotoGraphs readers aren’t typical fantasy owners. A lot of you share my grasp of the player universe, which is what makes this topic possible. While I don’t actually hate rankings – that’s just a bold title – I do think they’re an ass-backwards way of building a roster.
When I analyze my best and worst rosters, I consistently find two things – depth and a smidgen of luck are the keys to victory. It’s also important to draft to the scoring format. Yadier Molina might be a better fantasy player than Evan Gattis, but if your league uses OPS, you may prefer Gattis’ superior power.
Building a strong fantasy roster is like spinning a convoluted web. Simplistically, all you have to do is draft the best combination of players to fill every position with multiple redundancies subject to your scoring system. Easy, huh? Rankings and value sheets contribute to that process, but they’re just a beginning.
Honestly, they’re not even an important component to my draft preparation. Last season was the first in which I didn’t incorporate any external rankings into my draft preparations. I did just fine. Instead of ranks, I simply used very basic raw projections (Steamer plus ZiPS divided by two) and my own intuition.
So here’s my advice. Reference the rankings we and other sites post, but prepare so you don’t need to lean upon them on draft day. Rankings are a crutch. They’re a way for you to punt responsibility for the make-up of your team. Learn to draft and value players for their expected stats rather than their place on an ordinal list.
As we get closer to draft season, we’ll have additional coverage on various strategies, tactics, and methods for drafting in different scenarios. For now, just remember this simple mantra: don’t be a rankings bitch.
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But don’t you need to put your averaged projections in context of rankings to identify when to draft/ how much to spend relative to other team owners? Or are you saying ADP is separate from rankings
Yeah I am confused about what you mean by “rankings.” I mean you kind of internally naturally rank everyone ordinally whether you want to or not. Its good to keep a non-ordinal sense of how different tiers group. Do you just mean external rankings?
To be honest, it’s kind of a half developed idea. We instinctually rank, and that’s probably unavoidable to some degree. But it’s only marginally useful to know that Player X is better than Player Y. What we really need as drafters is to know how valuable a player is subject to our very specific constraints. And that depends on who you’ve drafted and what’s left on the board.
It’s a difficult topic to write about because it involves internalizing a very complex system.
Yeah I rank based on pretty basic projections (some mix of Steamer + Fans with some of my own input because I can’t help it). Of course on draft day you need whatever heuristics you consider useful to determine which position to move on but I tend to stick pretty rigidly within positional rankings when I’m drafting. Even if I am stocked with power I wont move a speedster up arbitrarily to balance, its early enough to just load up on talent and work with trades if you need to midseason. Its easy to want to irrationally break rankings on draft day but if you made the rankings honestly beforehand best to leave them be, IMO.
I agree with dacure
So you hate relying on other people’s rankings and make your own based on league size and format. Anyone who doesn’t tailor their rankings to size and format is doing it wrong anyways.
I was expecting a ranking
This is the 4th best article I’ve read today
I use rankings all the time when I’m trying to guess how other owners will value the players I’m trying to trade, draft, or bid on.
Considering the fact that half the players ranked in the 1st round each year don’t return 1st round value, it’s nice to hear an expert admit that the value of most sites “rankings” lists is somewhat overrated.Good job Brad.
That’s not evidence that rankings are bad.
While he doesn’t say it, I think the author’s point is that in comparing the values of players according to rank, it is a mistake to believe that the values between 1 spot on the ranking is the same each time/place. There could be a cluster of 4-5 players at a position that are almost the same, but the next ranked players could be far worse. Group players in value tiers based on your own analyses.
And I would add, consider expected health, and how the context is different for that player from one year to the next.
I hate you. I hate you. I don’t even know you and I hate your guts. I hope all the bad things in life happen to you and nobody else but you.
I weep for a nation that has forgotten Chappelle’s Show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N5p8IXzNdc
Here’s the problem with rankings:
Rankings are ordinal. Player value is not.
The tier system is a way around that, but I think OP is going for an argument beyond even that, which is that value is also context dependent on what you currently have. If you have two star 2B but can only play one of them, well depth is good but if you’re top 2B stays healthy all season, that back-up second baseman TO YOUR ROSTER is worthless.
If any tiers are even worse, because you collapse the distribution into four to six bins–which hides the divergence in the top two between players supposedly within the tiers.
rankings love you anyway
I use rankings to help me gauge if I’m taking a guy too early relative to other owners. A rough example: If I’d take a guy in the 6th round, but he typically wouldn’t go until the 8th round, I’d wait until the 7th to take him and use my 6th on someone else.
A few of my leaguemates lost Jose Abreu to me last year. One had Abreu as a 3rd round value but ADP was round 10 so he was waiting until round 6. I took him in round 6 the pick before his.
Brad, you don’t actually hate rankings. You might hate that your level of “fantasy guru” expertise is evaluated based on your generic rankings. You might not find generic rankings very useful, since your leagues may tend to have custom settings. You may even find that the draft itself is less interesting than the rest of the fantasy baseball experience.
But rankings are an unavoidable part of fantasy sports, whether you use someone else’s custom rankings, create a spreadsheet yourself, or rely on the pre-rank values available in the host site’s interface. At the very least, you need a mental ranking to decide who to choose with your next pick in the draft!
You know, what I find more helpful than straight out rankings, who is #1, #2, #56, etc, is what I built for myself, a ranking/tranche system, where you can see the tiers, but you intuitively KNOW the rank. I suppose its a hybrid. Say I want to evaluate offense, I evaluate every offensive stat for every player, including the sabermetrics I create on my own, BUT I put it on a 0-100 scale. Since some stats like OBP are in decimal, and some stats like RBIs or doubles are whole numbers, if you were to add those raw stats together, it wouldn’t make much sense, but if you put everything on a zero to one hundred scale, now you have math at a glance, instantly you know if someone is at 74, and another player is at 63, that glance means you know how far apart each player is from the other, plus how far away they are from the leader in that category. The added benefit is that the stats that you couldn’t add together before YOU NOW CAN because its all on the same terms…you can then use whatever discount model you like to regress the players, or bump their projected performance up if need be.