Archive for 2014 Second Opinion

If you’re reading FanGraphs+, you could probably explain the idea of positional scarcity with relative confidence. But simply knowing that it exists is not really enough, because positional scarcity is a fluid, evolving idea. In the mid-2000s, the league was flush with power-hitting third basemen, but now the position is scarcer than outfielders and first basemen. It’s not enough to have read about scarcity and committed it to memory, because position scarcity changes all the time.

Now, if you are unclear on what positional scarcity is, allow us to explain (don’t just search it, less you end up on the player page for early-30s Red Sox legend Russ Scarritt, who was once worth more than two wins below replacement level just with his bat).

Back in 2011, our own Mike Podhorzer described position scarcity as follows:

In the simplest terms, position scarcity exists when there are not enough positively valued players at a position to fill up every active roster. In a standard 12-team league with 14 hitters, a total of 168 hitters will be drafted as starters and each must be valued and purchased at $1, at the very least. If you projected every hitter and valued their raw stats based on a $260 salary cap per team, there is virtually no chance that 24 catchers will make your top 168. There is also a possibility that there won’t be the required minimum of 36 middle infielders.

In short, some positions are deeper than others, and because positive fantasy value at some positions is less available (“scarcer”), the price for said value increases. If there’s only one shortstop who will help your team, your willingness to pay for him is a lot greater than an outfielder with the same stat line.

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Fantasy owners all have their little quirks. Every league has the guy who drafts closers way too early, or the owner (or owners) who just cannot stay away from their hometown team.

But me, I am the guy who builds a roster full of players with heavy platoon splits. I am the guy who will go the extra dollar for Matt Joyce, sign Brandon Moss and target Justin Morneau. I know full well that these players often ride the pine or put up ugly stats when left in the game for the wrong matchup. But I don’t care.

And not caring has served me well. The reality is, in certain circumstances, these players are vastly undervalued in fantasy. And this happens for a number of reasons.

First, there is just the general buzz around them. “Yeah, his stats are okay, but you know he can’t hit lefties at all.” Suddenly a lot of owners take a $10 player and discount him because he struggles in 30% of his PA. Forget the fact that the stats used to value the player already take his ugly split into account.

Second, the player’s numbers get deflated. Matt Joyce fell two home runs and three stolen bases shy of a 20-10 season in 2013 and without a doubt hitting those milestones would have impacted his standings. The fact that you could have used him in the 109 games he started and gotten 17 of the HR and all seven of his SB, and still had 53 games – a full third of a season – with another player to make up the difference, that fact somehow gets ignored.

The goal of any fantasy auction/trade/roster building exercise, though, should be to accrue the most production at the lowest cost, and platoon players can help you do that. Here is a perfect example:

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The diligent and hard-working fantasy owner has always had the opportunity to utilize fringe platoon players to their advantage. Players such as Matt Joyce, Nelson Cruz and Alex Rios can offer a special advantage to teams with deep leagues, deep benches and sustained focus. Paired with a mashing platoon mate, these guys can turn a position of interest into a position of strength.

But the righty-lefty split isn’t the only platoon split out there. Just as there is a distribution of LOOGY- and ROOGY-killers, there is also a selection of hitters who excel against ground-ball and fly ball pitchers. Fantasy owners should be more aware of not only the advantages of a potential ground ball-fly ball platoon, but also the players who can help them to that end.

This, we should note, is Platooning: Advanced Edition.

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Over the years, Bill Petti has done some fascinating research on hitter volatility. He recently updated that work at the new Hardball Times. I strongly recommend taking a look. You can follow Petti on Twitter @BillPetti. Hopefully he’ll now forgive me for shamelessly stealing his work for fantasy purposes.

Before we dive into Petti’s work and how it applies to fantasy baseball, let’s define volatility. In finance, volatility refers to variation in price over a period of time. A stock that sees frequent fluctuation of price is considered to be more volatile than a stock with very little price fluctuation. In fantasy baseball, we can replace price with category production or points. Player A is more volatile than Player B if his day-to-day performance is more varied.

Petti’s research is in day-to-day volatility, which differs from streakiness. As fantasy owners, we know that Jay Bruce is one streaky mofo guy. He’ll put up 20 excellent games followed by 30 atrocious games and he’s been doing it since the day he entered the majors. By Petti’s measure, Bruce is only four percent more volatile than league average over the last three years. That’s (probably) because he’s not measuring these long term fluctuations.

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A year ago, I discovered how highly correlated a hitter’s average home run and fly ball distance is to his HR/FB rate. Chad Young and I then embarked on a quest to use an assortment of data, including this batted ball distance, to construct an expected HR/FB, or xHR/FB rate, metric. Unfortunately, we failed to find an equation much better than the one that used just distance, of which the R-squared was just 0.54. While this was an excellent start, it simply wasn’t good enough to use in place of plain old HR/FB rate.

Thanks to Jeff Zimmerman, whose Baseball Heat Maps site inspired this quest to be undertaken to begin with, I have been provided with a wealth of additional data. The hope was that it included another piece or set of pieces to the HR/FB rate puzzle.

I began with a player population set that included 4,985 hitter seasons from 2008-2013, which also included pitchers during their times to the plate. In order to prevent the results from being skewed due to the randomness occurring in the smaller samples, I removed all player seasons with fewer than 20 total home runs and fly balls. This left me with a pool of 2,645 ready for analysis.

Let us begin with a correlation table:

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Finding diamonds in the rough is *the* goal for fantasy owners. Top 100 prospect lists can give you an idea of which young players are up and coming. I am not going to be looking at players experts have been writing about. Instead, I am going to look for non-prospect position players who have a chance to contribute in the majors if given a chance. Your diamonds in the rough.

To help me find these players, I have created a metric which looks for traits which may not get the most notice by the ranking services. Here are the criteria I used to filter the players:

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Tis the season to make New Year’s Resolutions. Lose 15 pounds, read more books, watch less television, get outside more often, or in Ian Kinsler’s case, steal more bases, as the second baseman recently told Anthony Fenech of the Detroit Free Press. Until 2013, Kinsler had stolen at least 21 bases in each of his full seasons but swiped just 15 last season. He missed some time with a rib injury, but Kinsler blamed how he was managed by Ron Washington as well.

“…and when he did steal, many times it was as part of a hit-and-run in front of the strikeout-prone Elvis Andrus, Kinsler said in a teleconference after he was traded from Texas to Detroit in late November.

“A lot of times that didn’t work out for the team and I got thrown out by two to three steps,” he said. “So those necessarily have to go down as a stolen base attempt but those necessarily in my mind aren’t a stolen base attempt. I’m moving because of the hit-and-run.”

It is human nature to blame others for your shortcomings. It’s not my fault I gained 10 pounds or only read two book last year. It isn’t my fault that I logged 100x the hours on my laptop than I did a treadmill. It is my kids’ fault because their schedule is very busy. It is my wife’s fault because of the long honey-do lists she leaves me on a daily basis. The truth is, all of those things are my fault because I did not manage my time more efficiently.

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If you participate in a fantasy baseball league, then there is a very good chance you have been flabbergasted about a trade made between other league members. You may have been outraged at the inequity of a trade. You may have had no doubts the two trading partners are involved in some nefarious scheme. But before you start jumping to conclusions about whether there is any collusion taking place, you need to first understand what collusion means and also what it does not mean.

The Supreme Court of Fantasy Judgment advocates for fantasy GMs to be able to manage their teams freely and according to their own preferences. Whether they have paid an entry fee or not, GMs should have the freedom to make their own decisions in the management of their team so long as they do not compromise the integrity of the league (e.g., entering into collusive agreements with other GMs). The Court defines collusion as a secret agreement or conspiracy for fraudulent or treacherous purposes.(1) Like many acts of treachery, collusion can take shape in many forms. Collusion can also have various levels of offense in terms of what the participating parties are trying to accomplish. But in the end, they all undermine the integrity of a league and need to be decisively addressed.

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