Comparing the 2015 Tout Auction to 2015 Tout Draft’s Dollar Values. What?

If you order the auction dollar values from most expensive to least expensive, then overlay them on the player selection order in a draft, you get a dollar value for each draft pick. That’s what I’ve done with this year’s Tout Wars Mixed Draft (March 10) and Auction (March 21). (more…)

How Much A Difference Does Moving From BA to OBP Make?

Votto: Keeping a good eye on the base on balls. Tout Wars Weekend is coming up, which means thinking about On Base Percentage. The Tout Wars leagues use 5×5 OBP instead of 5×5 BA, which can change player values a surprising amount. There was a lot of talk last year (more…)

Some Category Valuation Observations for Roto Pricing

Rudy Gamble is running a series on player valuation over at Razzball.com, and he has lots of interesting things to say. One of the reasons for that is because he’s inquiring. He’s doing that most interesting thing, to me anyway, of trying to figure it out in public. The piece (more…)

Deriving Dollar Values from Mock Drafts

This past week I participated in two NL-only roto mock drafts. Yes, drafts. The beauty of a draft is that there is only one path to the promised land. Select the best player available for your team, from the next 12 players to be taken. A 12-team NL-only draft should (more…)

Finding Undervalued Pitchers: More Data, Fewer Undervalued Pitchers

I’ve been writing this week about some comparisons I was making with 2013 pitching metrics and 2014 data. One strong takeaway was an indication that fantasy owners weren’t valuing pitchers with low walk rates enough. Details here. One weak takeaway was an indication that fantasy owners weren’t valuing pitchers with (more…)

The FanGraphs Auction Calculator

FanGraphs posted a fantasy auction calculator today, or maybe they posted it yesterday. I found it today. Enter your league parameters and it will give you dollar values for the players your league will be buying. That’s the promise. One cool feature is you can bookmark the URL of your league (more…)

Finding Undervalued Pitchers: SIERA and FIP

Yesterday we ran correlations between various pitching metrics and fantasy baseball profits for pitchers, and found that most of the ways we evaluate pitchers—like strikeouts and ERA—influence a pitcher’s cost so much that they don’t help us predict profits. But we did discover that a pitcher’s walk rate wasn’t fully (more…)

Finding Undervalued Pitchers: Walk Rate

After I finished my look at correlation between 2013 pitching stats and 2014 fantasy baseball profits, I just had to look at which pitchers might bubble up this year because of their low walk rates last year. Hisashi Iwakuma, Jordan Zimmerman, Doug Fister, David Price, Masahiro Tanaka, and Clayton Kershaw (more…)

Finding Undervalued Pitchers: Fun with Correl!

My buddy Mike Salfino, who writes about baseball (both real and fantasy) at the Wall Street Journal and Yahoo!, loves (K-BB)/IP to evaluate pitchers, and to find those delightfully undervalued arms that help teams (both real and fantasy) win. I like (K-BB)/IP, too, but in talking about it I haven’t (more…)

Hey Duda. The death spiral of relative values.

I was on Baseball Prospectus’s Flags Fly Forever podcast last night, with Bret Sayre, Mike Gianella and Mauricio Rubio, talking about first baseman rankings, among other things. We had way too much fun with it, and what was scheduled for an hour lasted two, and I don’t think we wasted (more…)