Show Me What You Got
Fantasy baseball season is heating up. Dynasty drafts are escaping the early rounds, NFBC ADPs are starting to get a serious sample size behind them, and the interminable football season finally ended when Tom Brady didn’t see his shadow. If you’re waiting to get started on your 2020 baseball prep, well… stop waiting! Get crackin’.
Recently, I’ve been re-watching Rick and Morty. The show is strangely fertile ground for ideas of all shapes and sizes. Today, we’ll play Show Me What You Got. Use the comments to Show Me What You Got. It could be original analysis, commentary on ADP, meta analysis, a new way to aggregate useful data, funky league designs, or any other baseball-adjacent topic.
If I like what you got, it may appear in a future post – with proper credit going to your username of course. In keeping with tradition, if I don’t like what you got, I’ll cancel your planet. If you’d like to be credited in a specific way, please say so. This can be arranged via email or twitter DM if you’d like a more private line of communication. Obviously, you may also request that I don’t write about what you got. Sadly, I cannot offer monetary remuneration for your time.
If anyone is finding themselves bewildered by the loose Rick and Morty reference, here’s what’s happening in plain english. This post is the fantasy version of the community blog. Rather than fully-fledged posts, I’m only looking for fully-explained ideas. I’ll do the not-so-heavy lifting of typing words.
There might not be an opportunity to post all the great ideas here on FanGraphs. If that occurs, I’ll try to give everybody their full due via my personal blog.
You can follow me on twitter @BaseballATeam
If I showed you what I’ve got…I might get arrested! Haha
U snowflakes have no sense of humor!
Jessica Mendoza’s twitter handle states “Be the change you wish to see in the world. – Gandhi”
FWIW Gandhi never actually said that
Apparently J Mendoza wants a world where whistleblowers are shamed/vilified for speaking the truth.
I would be fascinated to know how the ADP of slow-improving top 10 prospects has fluctuated over the years. For instance, Dansby Swanson was a top 10 prospect not long ago but his ADP bottomed out before the 2019 season, clearly showing that fantasy managers (understandably) had given up on him. An older case is Alex Gordon, who was absolutely left for dead before turning into a solid outfielder for some years.
I guess I’m also wondering how long it takes, on average, before fantasy managers give up on a previously coveted prospect after they’ve debuted in the MLB. It seems that every time a top 10 prospect list comes up everyone believes it represents 10 great future MLB players, but that obviously isn’t the case.
OK I’ll go… Not sure if this is the kind of thing you’re looking for but I’ve been tinkering with this sheet for a few seasons and it really helps me plan out my auctions.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15SPlYIbjdm4x9MFPnvYBy91VUg9z9jqOvJurA-lvwY0/copy
Essentially, it’s an interactive sheet that let’s you build an imaginary (as opposed to fantasy) squad while the sheet tracks their projections and projected auction prices so you get to the stat totals you want while staying under budget. By draft day I typically have 3-5 duplicates of the first tab with different squads constructed depending on how the draft goes.
I hope it’s a pretty self-explanatory tool once you get it open but here are a whole bunch of notes:
1) Drop downs have most of the players at that position sorted by ADPs I found in late December.
2) I built this around a 10 team auction league – you’d have to modify it for a different setup but I think it’s pretty basic Excel work from here to do that.
3) The projected prices I’m using are based on historical prices from 4 years of draft history in my home league. Therefore, the prices are only mildly scientific but close enough for estimates. You can tinker with the values over in the other tabs as much as you want – if you leave the formulas you shouldn’t have to worry about breaking anything.
4) Projections are via FG Depth Charts – Usually use ATC but I’m still waiting!
5) I added a row at the bottom of the H & P sections so you can set thresholds and targets for the year. Helpful to stay on track.
6) H/P budget split is the traditional 70/30 even though I’m more of a 60/40 guy.
7) I only have one position per player at this time… waiting for Yahoo to open up so I can do an export. Definitely a weakness that I fully acknowledge at this point.
8) If you are doing a snake draft you could probably replace the price with projected round and build a team with a player from each round? I’ve never tried that but I guess it would work in theory.
9) I’m an Excel amateur so any suggestion to improve formulas or organization are graciously accepted 🙂
I Like What You Got
I don’t suppose you’re handing out permissions to that there wondrous spreadsheet, eh? 😀
Hmm I thought I made it open but I guess not. Try it now? Hopefully it still makes a copy and we aren’t all mucking around in the same sheet..
No luck, but is that link above the one you got from the “Get Shareable Link” on the right-click dropdown menu or the top right spot in the Share window? I think that allows everyone to look at it if I’m not mistaken.
I sent a request to try to get viewing access too, if you are willing to open it up 🙂
Seems like an excellent resource!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PuD-pb0o3jrKNDAjZ6C_LUmPdqsEabc8UdQKtnOm_8s/copy
Sorry about the bad link – hopefully this one works. Permissions are set as open as I can make them!
Auction calculator on Ottoneu community page, I think using steamer 2020 projection, say Grienke and Bumgarner combined will generate $8 in value next season. I’m not saying it is not possible, and it is quite likely the computer is much smarter than I am. However it seems off for two pitchers whose FIPs have never or rarely ended above 4 in a season. I tend to use projections as signals of which direction a player is trending rather than the final word. Otherwise, Can projections be counterproductive? It seems like players break out when they make positive changes. Projections cannot capture that, right? They cannot anticipate a swing change or change in pitch mix, right?
Topic suggestion: How the distribution of outcomes (“He could hit 40 HRs if he put it all together”) affects value in the middle and end of an auction or draft, and systematic errors that people make in that regard.
On my lunch break so can’t do this justice, but I submit Tommy la Stella as a huge draft day bargain. Only a broken bone could stop what was shaping up to be a massive breakout year for the journeyman infielder.
Injuries of course are predictive of future injuries but broken bones are one of the few injuries that you can almost write off as they tend not to have lingering effects and are basically a fluke accident.
He has improved his launch angle and his power spiked as expected. He has always had good contact skills, which he maintained during his breakout.
My upside projections for this season would be something akin to peak Justin turner. He can be had in the 200-300 pick range so there is a ton of room for profit here.
agreed he was having a monster year, but his barrel rate is so low it looks like he just got quite a bit of luck. idk how else to explain his HR rate on such a low amount of barrels.
20-team Ottoneu league #1053 “Twenty-Sided Diamond”. Nothing unique in terms of rules, but the league size led to a shortage of outfielders, as well as trades with tooooons of salary coverage, to the point that we’re adding rules to keep it from getting out of control. Fellow Fangrapher Trey Baughn is a member as well.
24-team “Ultimate” dynasty league that covers baseball, football, and basketball. Owners claim a city, and we have host franchise roster rules with perks like adding any 3 prospects during the baseball season. We play with individual player salaries, 40-man rosters, arbitration for graduated prospects, and a 10-round prospect draft in the offseason for baseball. Rosters can own up to 100 players if they max out their MLB and farm systems. I love it, and I was lucky enough to take the crown in 2019! https://www.fantrax.com/fantasy/league/ivijlpe3k3alima5/home
Best rec. for an active and deep slow draft site? Really want to participate in NFBC this year, but I’m in one of those 5ish states that carpet bombed all online sports competitions involving money 🙁
I’ve got a compelling series of short articles I’ve written every season about why THIS is the year I have figured out stolen bases and how to successfully draft for them in all of my leagues. It’s called “Dr. Steal Base or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Draft Villar.”
It’s always followed up by another series of articles about how incredibly wrong I was, entitled “Eyes Wide Shit.”
This sounds like a fun read. I do some write ups about my drafts, which I started back when I felt that my drafts were out and out awful. I write a post-draft write up and then an end-of-season follow up on how the picks actually turned out. I’ve determined that everyone’s draft is usually terrible except for some key picks. Once in awhile there’s someone that has a great overall draft but that’s rare, so nowadays I don’t beat myself up too much about it.
Eric Davis is an extremely underrated player with a peak that should be more acknowledged.
The problem is that the peak is really only one year – he has a 7.1 WAR season, then the next two are 4.7 and 4.3. On the flip side he did have two of the greatest fantasy seasons ever, were fantasy really a thing back then.
“In a 162-game span—June 11, 1986 to July 4, 1987—he made 659 plate appearance and batted .308/.406/.622 with 47 homers, 149 runs, 123 RBI, and 98 stolen bases.” If this was one season it would be one of the best ever for a five-tool player.
Been toying with an idea for a while that I haven’t seen anyone write about — a supplemental stat to ISO that could be more useful in some circumstances, called “average bases per hit” or just ABPH. You take the number of total bases and divide by the number of hits rather than at bats.
ISO and SLG are both good, but both categorizes high AVG players with moderate pop (think Michael Brantley) alongside or ahead of low AVG but serious pop players. ABPH might categorize like-with-like more readily when it comes to player type and also be used to project future power breakouts for younger, developing, or maybe even swing-change players. For example take a stat profile like Sano or Gary Sanchez in 2018, both of whom were hitting around .200 with excellent ABPH metrics but generally lower ISOs and very low SLG. If a fantasy player thought their AVG was lower than they deserved due to BABIP bad luck, their ABPH would suggest they could have big power years coming should the average rise, where ISO wouldn’t provide quite the same projection.
Sano and Sanchez are known quantities, but I imagine the same would be true of prospects. Despite having the same ISO, a prospect who slashes .230/.330/.500 with a low babip for a season probably has more raw power potential than a guy who slashes .320/.360/.590 with a high babip for a season — or at least I would guess as much.
Has anyone researched this stat, and if so, is it a) as potentially useful and b) as different from ISO and SLG as my instincts tell me?
Could be worth some exploration. One thing you have to be careful of is the interaction of HR and BABIP. If you think a power hitter is due to see a climb in BABIP, beware that it could come at the expense of HR. Sometimes those guys are low BABIP because their 2Bs went over the wall.
It smells like it should be a moderately different stat than ISO and SLG, but I’m less sure about it being useful.
Write about how statistically January is the most difficult month for baseball writers to think of topics.
I maintain a google doc for my dynasty league on which I pull from various fantasy-oriented top prospect lists and dynasty rankings (linking to the original sources), create composite rankings, and then shoot out various breakdowns specific to our league. I do it partly out of generosity, but also with the hope it will lead some of our more casual owners to make better draft bids, FAAB bids, and transactions. What do you think of this? Would your opinion change depending on whether I am the commissioner or not? (I’m not.)
I like this, but I am impressed you send it out to others. It seems like a personal thing to have in order to compare your team’s prospect status to others (I do this). Sharing with others might indeed motivate some to be better, but it also might stir feelings of resentment, envy, or defeat. You certainly are doing some of the league’s homework for them, that’s for sure, which is a nice thing in of itself.
“Well then I guess it’s time to crunch the numbers”
-Water T
That’s the worst episode of the show, though. Except maybe the one with the dragon.
Use Jeff Zimmerman’s research on injuries, quantify probabable days lost to injury per player, and plot that against expected auction price or ADP to derive a quantitaitve value of Risk per player. Probability times consequences = Risk. I have defined the probability in this scenario to be solely time lost to injury, but it could be expanded to include playing time in general or call up dates for prospects. Consequences are what you paid for the player, or lost paying for them.
This has been tried. It doesn’t work.
Interesting. I would like to see it. Have a link?
Sorry. Though it smells like something we’d be missing far too much data to model usefully. Real teams might be able to do something with it actuarialy with all the biometric/rapsodo/etc. data they have available.
Testing the “List of 12” concept (500 IP). At this point, there is quite a bit of data. Look at the probabilities based on the data set. This years group is:
Anthony DeSclafani
Blake Snell
Brad Peacock
Carlos Rodon
Dylan Bundy
Eduardo Rodriguez
German Marquez
Jon Gray
Jose Berrios
Jose Urena
Kenta Maeda
Matthew Boyd
Mike Clevinger
Mike Montgomery
Steven Matz
Vince Velasquez
Zach Davies
I like German Marquez, Kenta Maeda and Steven Matz from this group.
I think this has been done more thoroughly by others, but I like to look at end of year $ values vs ADPs to capture guys who projections are consistently low on for one reason or another. Guys like Moose & Grienke are some prime examples.
I’d love to see more content around draft day strategies, especially during the auction. I find there is always 3 – 5 rounds where I just flub…one year I missed bidding on Tommy Pham, who went to the winner for $2. I blinked and he was gone. One time I purchased Starling Marte at a reasonable cost, but that was after I already drafted 3 eligible CFs, including Mike Trout. Marte sat on my bench for 2.5 mos before I finally traded him at a discount to someone who had their starting CF injured. As soon as I won him, I knew it was a mistake.
2nd…for non draft and holds, is there ever a time you should draft prospect pitchers. I drafted Luzardo and Whitley for $1 flyers last season, but they never saw the light of day in the majors last year while offensive prospects Guerrero and Jimenez were drafted at higher costs, but at least played in the majors in 2019.
3rd…is there any benefit in stacking players from the same team in weekly point leagues as there is in DFS. Or even simple rules like, focus majority of your offense on one league and pitching from the other to minimize when your players compete against each other as a strategy in weekly pts leagues.
Finally, variance strategies would be cool. E..g if you pick up Sale (high risk / high reward) who should you pair him with in later rounds (e.g. Bauer / Berrios high IP with potential upside).
I know I can’t math #3 or #4. Too much to wrap my head around.
#2 is pretty easy – if you have bench to spare, you can roster prospects of whatever type are most useful to you. You just picked the wrong prospects. Shoulda grabbed Paddack then later pounced on Gallen as he arrived (easier said than done, I know). One caveat, most people have less free bench space than they realize. Their Whitley fliers come directly out of the bottom line.
#1 is a matter of failure and adjustment. You’re already citing what you need to do, you just need more experience so you can do it instinctively. In general, it’s better to stay aggressive and accidentally win a few good players a couple dollars over cost. Except if everybody is being aggressive in which case you have to really pick your spots.
I have a great idea. How about a “how to” article about how to make a post about NFBC drafts that gets pulled down from Fangraphs the day it is written?
It’s been awhile since I’ve had a personal troll. I’ve missed this.
I was surprised at this as well, as it was a solid article. Sorry you have to deal with it.
It was pretty weird that they just Disappeared that article with no explanation or acknowledgement that it ever existed. The opposite of transparent is opaque!
Discussed it on Twitter. https://twitter.com/BaseballATeam/status/1219463970098229250
Ah. Gotcha. I wouldn’t have posted here had I seen that, but without a twitter account (social media is a minefield with my job), I can’t follow anyone and would have no idea. A shame that people went after that post so much. It’s the one recent article of yours I fully supported, lol. Maybe you like having a personal troll a little too much. 😉
I try not to troll. In fact, I made a comment in the missing article that was fully supportive of your position in that article. Alas, I cannot prove it now. 😉
I saw it! Also, the article is still live in a sense. You just need some creative googling.