Playing Percentages in Baseball
One of our fave posters is uncharacteristically cranky this winter. :- )
Not that I deny having mastered at least 10 kinds of stupid. ... but .... forgetting that SB's are not equal to HR's, and stuff like that, isn't one of them.
It is ten kinds of stupid to use ROTO draft logic in relation to ANYTHING about real-world baseball.
Anything? You mean like the roto draft logic that says 45 homers are better than 9? That doesn’t apply, because it’s a roto draft logic, and not "real baseball"?
There are any number of principles that apply in greater or lesser degree. Let's keep MC and D-O-V the dogma-free zones that they've been the last few years, what say.
Every statistic used in fantasy baseball represents actual events occuring on the green grass of MLB fields. Math is the science of symbolism. When we say "112 RBI" or "17 Wins" we are symbolizing a whale of a lot of actual, "real baseball" events that occurred.
I'm talking about ten years' worth of 112 RBI vs. ten years' worth of 0 wins because your pitcher lost a rotator cuff. That is a roto draft strategy, but you don't get to rule it out of court because it's played on the internet.
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I use “roto” as a generic term as it applies to points leagues, sim leagues, etc.
Yes, you have to be careful with applying some 5x5 strategies to MLB, like the SB's, for example, and some of the ladder-management stuff. We all know that. You're shouting 3rd-grade math lessons at grad students here.
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This particular comment (get production out of your first 6 picks) wasn’t referring to 5×5; it was referring to sim leagues. But you should have been able to see how the logic applies in any form of baseball, amigo.
If your business hangs on five key investments, getting safe and good return on all 5 leverages your returns better than any other strategy. That applies in the stock market, in chess, in raising kids, in sim baseball or on Safeco Field.
I sign five players to $15m salaries, and they all return pretty good years, and you sign five, and one of them is on the DL, there isn't any way your four are going to outproduce my five. That's true of the statistics we count in fantasy baseball, and it's true of the actual scoreboards down on the field. The stats are the games.
You acquire five Vlad Guerreros, they’re going to return more consistent production than five Erik Bedards. The roto STATS reflect the ACTUAL PRODUCTION OCCURRING ON THE FIELD.
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=== I Got Your Sim-League Strategy Right Here, Pal Dept. ===
The fact is, you bet on twenty Brandon Morrows, and I bet on twenty Delmon Youngs? At the end of the decade I am going to have TWICE your production. That is true of their statlines, and it is true of their on-field production.
Play some sim-league. You’ll learn a lot. Not all of it transfers. But the lesson-learned on the Brandon Morrows of the game, and their tendency to disappoint, that does transfer.
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=== Rephrase, Counselor ===
Now, once you are AWARE of the FACT that star hitters, as a group, return more production on your bet (in the long run) than do star pitchers, after you factor in injuries and volatility ...
And once you are AWARE of the FACT that pitching PROSPECTS (like Morrow) are much harder to predict than are hitting PROSPECTS...
And once you have the sound judgment that has you preferring young star hitters to young star pitchers, in terms of ROI...
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Now you do have a problem. You do have to have TOR starters. It's as Bill James put it once to us, when he "endorsed" (so to speak) the idea of drafting Jeff Clement with the #3: "Catchers are risky. But you have to have a catcher, right?"
There are Yahtzee slots on your scorecard -- SP, C -- that are going to involve a lot of risk. But you have to attend to those slots on your scoresheet, sooner or later. Third-order logic "normalizes" that risk in a compartmentalized sense for that slot.
But that's not the same thing as saying you'd rather have Brandon Morrow because you like his chances better than Delmon Young's. Morrow has a good 50% chance, maybe more, of producing ZERO for the Mariners. Young's chance of producing zero is probably less than 10%.
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Which brings us back to square one. Morrow is a talented young starter who (a) has a shoulder history and (b) hasn't done anything yet. You trade him for Delmon Young unless your Yahtzee card has painted you into a corner that forbids it.
The Mariners don't have any of their Yahtzee slots filled in, except #1 SP, 2B and RF. They have to make the trade.
Cheers,
Dr D