Off Season Projects
I have several projects to complete this off season to help fantasy owners for the 2012 season. Please let me know if there are any other ideas you would like me to examine over the off season. If I can’t get to the subject, others may be able look into the issue.
Fantasy “WAR”
Every player has factors that they can and can not control that factor into their stats. Pitchers can control the number of strikeouts and walks they allow, but they have little control over run support and defense. I want to get a player ranking system that shows the player’s true talent: contact, speed, and power. Then add in the factures they have no control over like the batters around them (more RBI and Run opportunites) and position in a lineup (more SB and Runs from the lead off spot).
The process will take a few weeks, but it should help an owner understand where the player gets their fantasy value and which surrounding changes affect the player.
Positional Rankings
Once the Fantasy “WAR”, or whatever it ends up being called, has been finalized, I will come up with a systematic way of ranking the players using talent, health, batting position and surrounding team talent. It will not be like what ZIPs does on Fangraphs where they guesstimate the final season stats. Instead, the values will constantly project the player’s talent using several factors.
Injury Information
Finding out how a player performs after an injury is important information. I am in the middle of examining pitchers coming back from TJS, so this information will be made public soon. Also, I will look into back injuries. They seem to really take a player off their game and seem to linger for a while. Let me know if there is any other specific injuries that you would like to see looked at.
Draft Rankings
I will be keeping my pre season overall rankings in a Google Doc with information and links on each player. It will be only the players I have examined in articles or otherwise. As I examine more and more players, the list will grow. I prefer to have a good understanding of a player than a vague notion from every player.
Reader Requests
Let me know what you want to see. It is a long off season, so I will be hurting for topics. Do you have keeper league questions? Ranking a few players? Draft strategy? Now is the time to let me know how I can help you answer any questions you have bouncing around. If I can’t find an answer, one of the other writers may certainly be able to find it.
Jeff, one of the authors of the fantasy baseball guide,The Process, writes for RotoGraphs, The Hardball Times, Rotowire, Baseball America, and BaseballHQ. He has been nominated for two SABR Analytics Research Award for Contemporary Analysis and won it in 2013 in tandem with Bill Petti. He has won four FSWA Awards including on for his Mining the News series. He's won Tout Wars three times, LABR twice, and got his first NFBC Main Event win in 2021. Follow him on Twitter @jeffwzimmerman.
RE: Fantasy WAR
Great idea. Something that I do for my league. To me the hardest part of implementing this idea publicly is establishing replacement level. The baseline will change depending on how many teams one’s league has. For a projection, I would also suggest having weights for statistics year-to-year correlation.
Once you have a means of determining Fantasy WAR, simply use the highest rated player on the waiver wire, or the average of the five to ten highest players, and set that as your replacement level.
This method works pretty decent. Also, I will rank the top X players and then the ones at the bottom are the replacement level. The replacement level setting will be the hardest.