A fantasy baseball season turns on two axes. The first is the preseason prep, during which we decide who to draft and then do our best to get those guys.

The second is inseason, when we make trades and release players while acquiring others.

Many years ago fantasy baseball's first great stat service operator, Jerry Heath, compiled something he called Hypothetical Standings. These are an attempt to discover what sort of draft each team had, which is an oblique way of looking at how they handled the regular season. The standings below are compiled using the first-week rosters of all the teams in the league and the full season stats applied. This is how we would have finished if we played with our first week roster all season long. (Real hypotheticals are made from the draft rosters, but Cardrunners drafted early enough that I thought it made better sense to include the waivers and trades that were made during the preseason, before the games began.)

I would have ended up in a three-way tie for seventh, rather than a two-way tie. Big deal!

If you would like to look at the spreadsheet, click here. Let me know if you see any significant errors.

Cardrunners League gives each team $260 FAAB at the start of the year. It also allows FAAB to be traded, something that happens frequently, so that a team that spends can sometimes get back to a better position by making trades that include FAAB.

But the large amount of FAAB makes it difficult to gauge what a good bid is on a player. Earlier in the season I made aggressive bids on players (I thought!), llike $44 on Sam Fuld, only to have someone else bid $176. FAAB bids are always shaped as much by each team's needs as the projected value of the player, but my point is that having a larger budget makes it that much harder to assess exactly what a good bid is.

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Each roster period, we all send an email to the whole league that shows our rosters and reserves. I find it a lot easier to keep up with what teams are doing from these emails than scanning the website.

It's a bit of a pain to do, but I like it.

Bill Phipps wrote, in Methodology: The Model: 

 

The premise behind the model is that the more closely a category is contested the more valuable that statistic is relative to other stats. For example, imagine on August 1st that you had your choice of increasing your total in any category by 5, how would you choose which to add? To answer, you would need to look at the standings and see how valuable 5 extra Steals would be relative to 5 extra HR, or Saves, or Wins, etc etc. This is what our approach attempts to solve.

 

First, we look at the history of as many leagues as we can to see how each category historically disperses. To do this, we take the team totals in each of the categories and measure the standard deviation between the teams. This gives us a good approximation of how tightly clumped we can expect each category to be. After measuring all 10 categories, we then set about determining what each stat is worth relative to each other. To do this, we translate each statistic into a common currency. 

I apparently misunderstood what this meant, but upon reading it more closely I don't understand how the math works here. I'm particularly interested in how the standard deviation is applied to the stats (and what stats exactly), so that they can be converted into adjRBI.

Thanks.

In the comment string of a previous post, Rudy from Razzball.com talked about the various factors that go into a winning season. He said that he thought 40 percent of winning was luck, which is a big number and also one I pretty much agree with (given a margin of error of some arbitrarily large number).

The issue here is how much of league results are determined on draft day. How much do waiver acquisitions matter. How much do farm teams matter. One of the problems with the balkanization of fantasy rules is that for the most part, we're all playing different games. There is no obvious way to answer these questions for everyone since they'll vary from league to league.

Still. the question has an answer in the league you play in, and maybe we can figure it out.

To the extent this board is focused on AL or NL only leagues, feel free to comment. Draft? FA Acquisition? Strategy? Luck? What did I miss? What wins your leagues?

Quantify if you can.

Because I think there are some serious problems pricing players for auction based on their projections, and because I perhaps jumped the gun critiquing some of Bill and Robert's assumptions building their model (or maybe not, we'll see), I find myself tarred as someone who doesn't believe in models. But this isn't true. I thought it would be instructive to detail my methodology, at least in a broad sense, for setting player prices, projecting player performance, and preparing for the auction. As a so-called fantasy expert, I do these things to create products I sell to the public, as well as prepare for my own leagues, so please pull up a chair and watch the sausage get made.

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