The Process: The Next Evolution in Fantasy Baseball
The Process is done. After months of writing and disagreements, the fantasy baseball guide I wrote with Tanner Bell is for sale. Simply, we researched and created the guide we would want. It’s not going to contain player capsules or positional rankings. Dozens of sources provide them. Instead, it’s going to give the reader the ability to create their own and the 2017 NFBC Main Event Champion and my podcast mate, Rob Silver wasn’t happy about the end results as he states in his intro.
Jeff Zimmerman and Tanner Bell are both awful people.
Thanks Rob. Before Rob gets to explain himself, here is the general flow of he book.
The book starts as a comprehensive guide from creating projections (e.g. Holds), …
… turning those projections into player values, …
.. how to use those values to come away with a loaded team from the draft (e.g. using ADP to an advantage), …
.. and in-season advantages (e.g. two-start pitchers).
Besides over 200 pages on procedures, we added dozens of pages on stats including all Steamer projected splits, …
… standard Standings Gain Point calculations, …
and those formulas incorporated into the projections.
I learned a ton putting all my ideas together logically and we are just getting started.
Going back to the intro, Rob sort of redeems himself later in his intro.
The Process is one of the biggest steps in the last decade or so to bridge that strategy gap. While I claimed that this is the book I would have written if I got my act together to write a book, the reality is there is some new, cutting-edge research that I would never have been able to include.
Read this book, learn from this book, take parts of this book and add your own research and analysis to go even deeper than this first edition of the book was able to go. Sadly, as people read this book, winning leagues will get even harder for guys like me.
Jeff Zimmerman and Tanner Bell are both awful people.
Hopefully, you find the book useful and please let up know how it can be better in the future. And we aren’t as awful as Rob makes us out to be.
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.
Hi Jeff, I am very excited to read the book! Is it available as a hardcover or just as an e-book via the link? Thank you.
Same question. I am old school, and like modeling reading in front of my kids e-things are just games to them.
Those poor kids.
oh my gawd…what’s the number for CPS in your hood?
No, the time frame needed for a hardcover didn’t work this year.
Stay at home mom Kelly Richards from New York after resigning from her full time job managed to average from $6000-$8000 a month from freelancing at home… This is how she done it
…….
▬▬☛USA~JOB-START
Stay at home mom Kelly Richards from New York after resigning from her full time job managed to average from $6000-$8000 a month from freelancing at home… This is how she done it
…….
▬▬☛USA~JOB-START
Great news- thank you so much! Will it be available in hard copy at some point?
I think that looking at ADP isn’t a viable thing today !!!!! Here is the reason: I do many pre-season drafts. I bet 95%+ of them turn into auto drafts after only a few rounds. So the ADP of any player after round X is meaningless. Those ADP’s are mainly based on the initial web sites projections.
We used the NFBC drafts where people put real money, up to $25K per entry, to play. These owners aren’t auto-drafting.
On the new NFBC website you can adjust ADP for different time frames, so you can take the latest drafts for ADP if you want.
my leagues ante up $50-$150 and WE don’t autodraft. Deb is just being lazy.
If you’re reading a book like that odds are you are not in a league that auto drafts and if you are you should find a more competitive league.
uh…you aren’t forced into that, right? End game is where leagues are often won and autodraft won’t help much with that. Make the commitment to work the pre-draft player list, or stay with the draft. Or don’t…but own it, at least. You are allowed to move players up the site’s pre-draft rankings, you know.
Jeff…how much of this book allows you to do some (relatively) quick calculations on your own (with Excel), specific to one’s local league? I ask this, since a step-change in fantasy baseball understanding for me came when I read Art McGee’s valuation book about 20 years ago…and had to calculate my own SGP for my league. It was an eye opener and left me with a much greater understanding of the impact of certain stats for certain positions.
We go through three separate methods to calculate the values and the advantages and disadvantages of each. We got the process down as simple as possible.
Jeff: are there specific chapters/calculations for those of us doing auction leagues – specifically with keepers and a boatload of inflation?
Comish4lif, that is a great question. We do a lot of coverage of auction leagues, calculations of values, and strategy. We do talk about in-draft inflation in a redraft league, but we do not discuss inflation specifically related to keepers. Jeff and I view that this will be a living and breathing book that we add to each year. That definitely needs to be something we add for next season.
::looks up Mike Gerber::
::recoils in horror::
Ha. Jeff really gave you a peak under the covers with those screen shots.
Gerber’s average is a horror show all by itself.
Great work. I slightly agree with the headline though. This perfection of analysis could have the same effect on fantasy that happened to online poker, I.e. smaller edges for good players and “rec players” getting driven away from the game.
But then again you can’t stop progress, either you go with it or you go the way of the dinosaur.
Dominik, I’m flattered by the thought this book could have that kind of effect or that it’s perfection of any kind. Our goal is to incrementally improve the book, add to it each year, and bring anyone interested along for the ride. I try to add a new wrinkle or two to my own process each year and find that challenge fun.
Very true. It is getting tougher every day in Fantasy Baseball, to have an edge on your competitors. Sabremetrics are a terrific thing, but for those that got in on the ground floor…..well that advantage is diminishing as more and more guys understand analytics.
It’s true, but it’s important to remember we do it primarily for fun. The research, analytics and draft plus the actual seasons adventure is the cake, winning is just a nice Cherry. There are so many parts to a full season that small advantages add up but a competitive league beats one with 2 or 3 really strong players IMO.
Dominikk, I played poker online for a living for nearly a decade. I also played live, I still do. However fantasy baseball, quite like online poker is about game selection. It is great to think that you can win an NFBC main event, and I will play a few this year, however the greatest ROI in my opinion is on obscure websites where Altuve is still going two overall.
Also, I just bought your book now.
Thanks, Carter! Hope you enjoy it.
Also separate topic, but has anyone written a strategy post on 50 man draft and hold leagues?
Carter, we do include some lengthy discussions on risk, cover multi-position eligibility, and have the average NFBC Draft Champions standings and standings again points. Those are all topics I think have extra importance when no transactions are allowed. But we stop short of a specific discussion on draft and hold leagues. I’ll add that as a future topic.
I will occasionally see posts about this topic as someone is going through one of these drafts, but I think they tend to end up being team-specific more than generally applicable to all situations.
Awesome Dude I cant wait to read this!!
SGP assumes that category results in a league are consistent over time, meaning they can be used as an accurate predictor. 1) Are they, and 2) by what measure?
This is one reason why Z-scores are better because it is “forward-looking” as it is opining on the dispersion of results in a category, not opining on the summed dispersion of past results.
Mike, we do present our view of the cases behind SGP, Z-scores, and PVM in the book. There is an instructional piece on how to use each of the three main methods. A lot of the SGP information is included to make that process easier and to help for those that may not have past standings information to rely upon.
I agree that there is something appealing about the forward looking nature of Z-scores and PVM. But there’s also something to be said for how much more intuitive SGP seems to be to people. I think SGP has proven it can be used as an accurate approximation of value. SGP or some close derivative is used by many top players in the game.
When it comes down to it, it’s not the valuation method you use that’s going to make or break you. It’s more likely the projections you use and your incorporation of risk into those projections. Those themes are a significant focus of the book.
Jeff and Tanner’s excellent book on drafting and capturing positive value has a suckiness risk of zero. There are several new ideas that make this book a great read and may change the way you go about managing your team. Or at least some fine tuning.
I’m glad it was helpful
How can it be better? Hard copy!