When putting together the recent series about how many stats the teams of last year’s NL Tout Wars league added after the auction, it occurred to me that I’ve never seen the same issue looked at for mixed leagues.
So, I ran the hypothetical standings for last year’s Tout Wars Mixed Auction, which then allowed me to compare the draft-day totals with the end of season totals in each category.
In last year’s NL Tout the hitting categories added about 10 percent to the totals, while in pitching the teams added about 20 percent to the totals of the counting stats. You can visit the previous posts for the data.
I assumed that in a 15-team mixed league, where there are many more available free agents, a manager’s ability to replace the weak and infirm with productive regulars would mean that the draft day standings would be much more diluted. And they were more diluted, but not by that much more.
In the mixed league, hitting stats were increased by about 15 percent, while the pitching stats increased by 30 percent. Once again, the golden ratio persists between hitting and pitching, with inseason changes playing twice as big a role in the pitching categories than the hitting cats.
I think this means something similar, that it is better to focus your budget on hitting than pitching, but it is important to point out an important difference in the context in which Mixed Leagues play, as opposed to Only Leagues.
This chart adds a column called TOTAL. That’s the amount of stats available in each ML universe. For the mixed league, that’s all AL and NL stats. For the NL only league, that means NL stats alone. The DIFF column shows the percentage of the total of the univers the fantasy league was able to collect.
Not surprising, the only league captures a much bigger percentage of the total stats. It stands to reason, since it employs a much larger percentage of the league’s population of players.
The one exception in mixed leagues is Saves, where a substantial percentage of the total is rostered even in a 15-team mixed. That’s surely because Saves are relatively easy to identify and usually end up being generated by one player on a team at a time.
Perhaps that explains why Fred Zinkie bought so many saves in the auction last year. Who gets the saves is not always a sure thing, but once you have them they are a real commodity that other teams covet.
In both leagues, the Win and Strikeout categories seem to have lots of available extras, but I’m not so sure that’s strategically useful. Fantasy teams roster a relatively small percentage of the total innings pitched (Tout Mixed collected 15947 of ML’s 43653 total innings pitched, or 36 percent), so there are lots of wins and strikeouts gained by pitchers who do not fit on a fantasy roster.
I would venture that the percentages in the DFF column above represent something similar for all the stats. No fantasy league can get them all, but the margin between what they do get and what is theoretically possible to get is a vein of quality that fantasy managers need to tap.
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