RotoGraphs Audio: The Sleeper and the Bust 1/29/2015
Episode 188
The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live! It’s tough to let go, so this one runs a little long.
In this episode, Eno Sarris and Nicholas Minnix talk about, among other players in the news, Glen Perkins, Devin Mesoraco, Michael Bourn, Mike Napoli, Travis Snider, and Anthony Ranaudo.
Requested topics discussed: Marcus Semien, Brock Holt, and Mike Fiers; keeper question about Cueto/Harvey/Betts/Dickerson, Wright/Alcantara/Pederson/Benoit, and Altuve/Braun/Han-Ram/Scherzer; and general questions about depth by position for a 15-team league, replacement level with bench players included, and the portions of your budget to allocate to hitting and pitching.
As usual, don’t hesitate to tweet us or comment with fantasy questions so that we may answer them in our next episode.
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or via the feed.
Thanks to Ian Miller, aka Teen Archer, for the intro/outro music. Approximately 102 minutes of joyous analysis.
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Nicholas Minnix oversaw baseball content for six years at KFFL, where he held the loose title of Managing Editor for seven and a half before he joined FanGraphs. He played in both Tout Wars and LABR from 2010 through 2014. Follow him on Twitter @NicholasMinnix.
Oh, more nerds who think Cueto is going to regress even though he’s out pitched his sabermetrics for the last 5 years.
I just wanted the seven dollars and the ability to keep Harvey into the future, but okay you can call us names.
I think nerd may have evolved from insult to compliment.
By nerd, are you referring to the daily baseball metric created by the one and only Cistuli?
haven’t listened yet but the roof came down on Matt Cain eventually…
You sound like the type of person who thinks if red comes up on the wheel 5 times in a row that black is a lock on the next spin.
Law of averages bro! Eben is small samples!!! But seriously, I doubt many people who are regular readers of fangraphs, don’t have at least a basic understanding of probability and statistics.
That’s a bet that I’d take.
Besides, pitching performances aren’t random variables and seasons are arbitrary endpoints.
thanks for answering my question. i appreciate it.
RIP Minnix
Will this be transcribed in a post for us?
Hope you come back Nicholas. You and Eno make a great team.
Good luck with whatever you do after this Nicholas. I do hope you come back, I enjoyed these.
Thanks Nicholas, I have enjoyed your passion for talking fantasy baseball. Always look forward to the pod on Tu/Th to listen to while doing homework/studying. Good luck in your future endeavors.
Good job Nicholas. No need to feel disappointed. You consistently produced quality content with Eno. Hope you come back some day when the time is right!
Nick,
Great Job, don’t worry about the keyboard an mouse clicking. It shows me you are doing research mid-show which I appreciate. Having listened to a number of fantasy baseball podcasts in my time, this one is my favorite because I am smarter about baseball at the end of each episode. Just for comparison, I tune in to almost every episode of sleeper and the bust. I have tried the podcast the mothership in Bristol puts out, slickly produced, but not worth the time I spent listening to it (in fact I frequently felt dumber at the end of it). Quality wins every time, and you provided quality. So thanks, and best luck in your future endeavors.
So listening to this episode was a bit… troubling. The part about player valuations was just plain wrong, suggesting the use of a 61/39 split. The circular logic of “they should be split 61/39 because that’s the way we allocate for our end-of-season rankings” was also bizarre. There is of course the possibility that the way you come up with values for the end of season rankings uses the same fallacious reasoning that led you to believe the 61/39 split makes sense for pre-season valuations.
By the logic used to get to 61/39 teams must allocate on average $11.30 for their MI slot, and $11.30 for their 1B slot, and expect to get $11.30 of value, on average, from each of the 23 lineup spots. Does this sound logical? If you want to get abstract, then it could be argued that the budget should be 50/50 since half the categories are hitting and half are pitching.
Zach’s apparent suggestion to do values based on 60/40 and then buy players based on 70/30 to match everybody else’s values is also backwards. If you do this, you will load up on high priced pitchers and burn through your $78 pitching budget in a flash since you’ll think all the top pitchers are going for $10 less than their value. It will be practically impossible to spend all of your auction budget since almost every hitter worth more than $5 will go for more than your values. To spend your whole budget, you’ll be forced to do on-the-fly value adjustments to boost the hitter values, when you simply could have scaled your values to the expected P/H split in the first place. If you think the true split should be 60/40 (still a tenuous position to take) then you should spend 60% of your budget on hitting, and the values should be made such that they match what the rest of the league will do, which is a 70/30 split.
I think the Twitter conversation Eno linked to is more reasonable, especially Gianella saying: “the *correct* split is how your league allocates its dollars.” and Kreutzer saying “Market dynamics define the market. It isn’t flawed, it simply is.”.
One example I’ll give here is closer valuation. In a 5×5 league, if you ignore closers, you have very little chance of winning. There’s some chance that you hit it big on a few breakouts like Brantley, Altuve and Kluber last year, but you shoot yourself in the foot before the race even starts. And the market for closers usually doesn’t follow their “theoretical” value. They cost a lot more. They just are what they are, because that’s what the market determined. Perhaps people don’t want to miss out on closers since there is an extremely limited supply, they don’t want to waste all their FAAB by speculating on saves, they don’t want to ruin their ratios by rostering a bunch of crappy relievers that they wasted their FAAB on (think the whole White Sox mess last year, how would Webb/Belisario/Lindstrom/Petricka have helped?). Regardless, the market is what it is. You pay the prices necessary for things you need. And the market says, hitters get 70% of the auction budget. And to be honest, I’ve seen many more people have success by going toward 75% than I have seen with people going down to around 60%. There are just so many pitchers available on waivers throughout the year, and a much higher percentage of end-of-season value comes from waiver pickups when compared to hitters.
No, I wasn’t saying that they should be 61/39 because that’s how we allocate for end of season rankings. I was saying 60/40 because that’s how the lineup slots are allocated. It can’t be 50/50 because your hitting side doesn’t give you any pitching stats.
But yeah, I came to the same conclusion — that it would be better to bake your 70/30 into your values because that’s how everyone will be doing it.
Why would you value based on lineup slots, though? I don’t see how that makes sense. And I don’t know what you mean by “It can’t be 50/50 because your hitting side doesn’t give you any pitching stats”. You could have a thousand hitting slots but you still only get 60 roto points, and you can have only 1 pitching slot, and it’s also worth 60 roto points.
And you say on the podcast that if you tally up at the end of the year what every player is worth, it’s inherently going to be be 60/40. Why? It’s only 60/40 if you force it to be 60/40. I don’t see that as justification for using that split in the first place. This is what I meant by circular logic.
Thank you Nick. Your sense of humor made every episode great. Good luck.
Goodluck Nick. The way you addressed and embraced constructive criticism is admirable and appreciated (not that I ever provided any).
What in the world is the deal with poor Mr. Minnix? It sounds like he’s being sent to the “farm” where he can run and run. I’m worried.
Nick’s vocal stylings always remind me of those old Chris Farley bits where he interviewed celebrities e.g.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/4186
Good luck, Nick! Hope all is not so dire as it sounds.
I had a blast listening to your podcasts, Nicholas. They really have meant a lot to me. I wish you all the best for the future.
Yes, hopefully this wasn’t a firing. Always enjoyed the Pod.
Sad to see you go, Nicholas. I really enjoyed your work on rotographs. Many blessings with whatever your next step is.