What’s Worse in Roto, a .220 AVG or a 5.00 ERA?

Here is a tale of two tweets.

The first one tries to see if fantasy managers would consider rostering a great pitcher in every regard except they would have a 5.00 ERA.

Would you consider rostering an elite pitcher in all aspects (e.g. Woodruff) expect they would guarantee to have a 5.00 ERA (think Andrew Heaney HR issues but worse)?

— Jeff Zimmerman (@jeffwzimmerman) February 21, 2022

And now the same options (I see the steam vs. stream mistake, my bad!) but for a hitter who is projected to have a .220 AVG.

Would you consider rostering a hitter pitcher in all aspects (e.g. Kyle Tucker) expect they would be guaranteed to have a .220 AVG?

Assume a 5×5 Roto league.

— Jeff Zimmerman (@jeffwzimmerman) February 22, 2022

The results are a stark difference. The deal is that a .220 AVG and a 5.00 ERA will hurt a roto team the same amount. While it may not be obvious, a little math might help. To determine the effects, I took the Standings Gain Points equations from 15-team redraft leagues from The Process (a great resource, you should buy it).

AVG SGP = ((1669+H)/(6525+AB)-0.256)/0.0012

ERA SGP = (((489+ER)*9)/(1122+IP)-3.92)/(-0.0566)

These formulas determine how much a fantasy team would move up and down the standings based on the rate stat. The volume does matter since it’s worse to add 150 innings of a 5.00 ERA to a team than just 20 innings.

For this example, I assumed 500 at-bats and a 150 innings to pair with the rate stats. When both are entered into the above formulas, both totals work out to -2.3 SGP. They both drag down a team the same amount.

So why do my wonderful Twitter followers prefer to take a hit in batting average than ERA? I’m not sure, but one possibility is that the industry’s talking heads continue to mention that the league-wide batting average down over the last few years.

It’s a mantra that I fell into last season with a low AVG costing me thousands of dollars in winnings. It’s so hard to make up a low AVG during the season that I’m being conscious of my batting average this draft season. I might be putting too much emphasis on it, but my last attempts at focusing on just home runs and stolen bases didn’t work.

The deal is that to even start registering on the batting average front in a 15-team roto league, you have to have a batting average of at least a .243 AVG as seen by the average league standings in the NFBC Main Event.

And to get into the sweet spot for moving up, a team needs small changes to move up, their AVG needs to at least be around a .252 AVG

One other option is that most fantasy teams have 14 hitters versus nine pitchers, so maybe the fantasy manager believes there are more options to bring up their team’s batting average (or they already have a strong AVG base). The above formulas assume the average

I’m sure there are factors that haven’t I considered, but just remember that if a 5.00 ERA is unappealing, a .220 AVG should be in the same conversation.