Roto Graphs Survey Results
On Friday, I asked for our reader’s input on a few topics and here are some of the results. Thanks to everyone that filled out a survey (over 330 filled out) and hopefully we can use the information to better serve our readership:
5 categories for each pitching and hitting: 58%
Even with the expansion of other types of fantasy leagues, the basic 5×5 league is still the most common.
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.
What is a reserve roster? I think I answered yes for each of my three leagues but after your comment I’m not sure that was the right answer. And if I was confused, it’s possible that others may have also been confused.
Yeah, I think Rotographs is using a different definition than I or CBS does. CBS uses Reserve and Bench interchangeably. How is Rotographs defining it?
I play in a hitters only league, so I was unable to answer the question about minimum/maximum number of pitchers (zero was not an option).
The 50% or more results might be a little misleading, as I said yes, but there was only one player (Placido Polanco) on the waiver wire that was owned in 50% or more, and most of the rest are under 30%.
Yes. There are two kinds of leagues this year: those that have given up on Adam Dunn and those that haven’t. His presence on the wire is not necessarily indicative of league depth.
Having said that, I welcome more of a mix between high ownership and low ownership waiver wire content. Players with c. 50-70% ownership are often very reasonable trade targets even if they aren’t actually on waivers.
I figured there would be just be a couple higher players, but 5% of the leagues have players that are owned in over 90% of the leagues.
Struggling pitchers (Scherzer, Billingsley, Chacin) often get dropped in my H2H league out of desperation streaming (stupidity?). Those guys have ownership close to 90%. After that handful of pitchers, there’s a fairly large amount of unowned OFs and 1Bs with 60-70% overall ownership. Also, Geovany Soto.
Thanks for doing this!
One additional observation I would make is that for the small number of AL/NL-only leagues they sure do get a lot of attention. For example outfield rankings are largely split by league, which seems a rather arbitrary distinction for 89% of readers. Not that I care much about rankings personally, but still.
Also I’m glad to see I’m not the only person who enjoys H2H leagues. They seem to get a fair amount of hate, but personally I think they offer many advantages to the forward-thinking player by creating the opportunity to radically alter tactics from week to week and day to day without fear of losing ground in season-long rankings.
I agree with this. I realize that there are a lot of OF and SP to rank, but separating them into two posts for AL and NL leads to uncertainty. Even if there was just some consistency between the corresponding posts that would be better; I keep seeing tiers named after bands or landmarks and other random things and it’s hard to compare, you know?
plus 1,000….
the AL/NL split for pitchers and OF is silly, especially given the results above.
I’m in both h2h 5×5 and roto 6×6 but hate having Loses as a pitching category (OBP as the 6th hitting). What do other people use that is a counting stat since I want to keep it even (4 counting, 2 ratio)?
Holds, gets more RP involved.
Yes, holds. Also Quality Starts is a fairly common 6th category. But I prefer holds, because of what Jeff said, rather than QS, which just magnify SP’s.
I like using K/BB in my h2h league. High walk pitchers are punished for more than just whip, which is especially good since my long time league-mates will never let me add xFIP or anything more challenging as a category.
We use “Decisions”, which is W + QS – L. We forgo saves (and holds) entirely. The effect has been that RPs are useful (we don’t distinguish between SP and RP) in that you put some of them in your line up every single day, rotating starters through based on their schedule. Crappy “closers” don’t get used, but non-closer RPs with good skills (e.g. Venters, Robertson,…) most certainly do.
Mike, you could use quality starts instead of losses. I almost want to get rid of wins in my league because they are so arbitrary.
For me the H2H vs Roto debate came down to the fact that I play fantasy baseball (and football) primarily as a social activity, in a league that features only close friends of mine (and occasionally their brothers). Because of this, H2H is a much better format because it keeps everybody more active and involved in the league throughout the season. In the first couple years when we had a roto league, everybody but the top 3 or 4 lost interest by the end of July, only making basic roster moves and few trades. Roto is a better format for simulating the decisions that a real life manager has to make. It is a vastly superior exercise of baseball acumen, and I enjoy a few leagues full of players on the internet from all over the country. H2H is very reliant on small sample size and can be majorly influenced by luck, which makes it run counter-intuitive to a lot of sabr ideals. But in terms of playability among a group of friends, it is way better. Trash talk is common, and even when someone is out of the running for the title, people want to play spoilers and block others from winning. That is an element of fantasy sports that Roto lacks in all but the most serious leagues, and the social aspect is a major reason why fantasy football has exploded in popularity while fantasy baseball has merely become sort of socially acceptable. So while I enjoy roto more as a baseball-centric game, I have a lot more fun in my H2H league, and I think a lot of other people do too.
Agreed with the above. One interesting twist (which we do) is to make a sizable regular season cash award which is not based on H2H records but rather on Roto scoring. Therefore the best team is guaranteed to win something. But there is still the fun of H2h and playoffs and trash talking and whatnot.
Indeed. We don’t have an official monetary value on it, but major bragging rights go to the roto champion, who can (and will) brag to everybody that they had the best team all season, even if they lost in the end.
For 5×5, you shouldn’t assume that the traditional Roto categories are being used. Our league uses OBP instead of AVG, and Net Steals. On the pitching side we use INN, WHIP, K/9, HR/9, and a highly modified pitching decisions category.
Regarding the question “How many have players who are owned in over 50% of leagues but available”, I think that is still misleading. I play in a deep 16 team league and there are players over 50% available. But the WW is stretched very BARE. Its just that hot starting or highly ranked (but currently useless) players get abandoned on many people’s teams I guess. Even Brett Anderson is owned in 45% of leagues says Yahoo right now and he’s been out for months already.
Just thought of an interesting (to me) question that the survey didn’t address but could perhaps be posed in a future survey:
Do you play mostly with strangers or “real life” acquaintances?
I am only in fantasy leagues that are run by and primarily comprised of people I have a close-ish relationship with (coworkers, friends, friends of friends), and I would have thought this was the norm. But from the occasional discussion I see over trade disputes, which often use lack of real-life relationships as evidence against collusion, I get the impression that playing with strangers is more the norm.