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 A fan of the Yankees, Red Sox, and large sample sizes. 
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2.29.2004
NEW CONTENT I've received a couple emails letting me know that my blog's worth reading, but I should really post more often. Thank you, and definitely true. It probably won't be a daily thing, but I would really like to get more thoughts on here on a more frequent schedule. This is my first year teaching high school math, so I don't have a lot of free time, but a few times per week should be do-able. You can help me out in two ways - send me questions that I can answer on this blog and send me content to post on this blog. As far as baseball goes, I'm interested in MLB sabrmetrics, rotisserie, and Strat-o-Matic. Those are the three main things I try to post about. If I find the time, I hope to post my own projections, my own dollar values, and my own Strat rankings. But for now, it'll come in very small bits and pieces. FEAR If you've ever seen Bowling for Columbine by Roger Moore, you've heard how much fear dominates American society - media, advertising, everything. Fear of disease, fear of impotence, fear of lacking retirement funds, fear of growing old alone, fear of terrorism, fear of crazy foreign countries, hell even fear of fear, right FDR? I was stunned the first time I watched that film, because it was so true, yet I'd never realized it before. Since then, every time I've noticed excessive use of fear in American society, I've chuckled to myself and made a note of how sad it is. There's no reason for this excessive fear. With so much of it, it's hard for people to make decisions outside of the status quo. We know the way things are is ok, so why take the risk that another way will also be ok? Why order the tuna when you know the snapper's pretty good? We fear the unknown because we're being bombarded with so many things to be fearful of. Personally, I'm sick of it. Fear prevents original thinking. Fear prevents advancement of society. So many of my high school students, who should be the second most open-minded demographic next to college students, are anti-gay, are xeno-phobic, and are anti-try anything new. So, I've decided to blog all the little instances of the use of fear that are just really stupid. Just because someone uses fear as motivation doesn't make the cause bad, it's just that they should find a more productive and respectable way of promoting their cause. First on my list is the preface of the book I bought this morning, "Enter The Zone." One of my goals this year is to eat healthier - not because I fear being overweight or dying form a heart attack soon, but because eating right can give you more energy and a higher motivation to gets things done that you really want to do. Diets are stupid, because eventually you need to find an eating plan for after the diet, and if it's healthy enough for the rest of your life, you might as well just start on it now and skip the fad diet all-together. Not that the Zone is the perfect plan, but it contains solid ideas. Anyways, the preface starts out, "A sword of Damocles hangs over my head, something I've known since my early twenties. You see, I'm a walking genetic time bomb. I'm genetically programmed by nature to die of heart disease within the next ten years. My early death seems all but inevitable..." Uh, yeah, let me paraphrase. "Do the Zone, or you'll die." Nice little motivator to start things out. Barry Sears, the author, goes on to use some other motivational tricks (family bonding, the underdog, idealism, and intellectual bravado), but that first one just grabs you. Will better eating reduce the chance of heart disease? Yes. Will you immediately die if you don't buy this book and read it? No. Get over yoursel, Sears. You've got some quality ideas, but leave the fear alone. I'm sick of it. 2.26.2004
PEORIA STRAT DRAFT IN PROGRESS We're through five rounds of the Peoria Strat-o-Matic League draft and I thought I'd post an update. I traded my 1st round pick (I pick eleventh out of twelve in every round) for a 4th and 5th rounder (second position each round) and Adam Kennedy. My draft picks thus far have been: Luis Matos, Jeremi Gonzalez, Kyle Farnsworth, Francisco Rodriguez, and Jose Valentin. I almost pulled off a trade for Matt Clement to bolster (meaning "to make not so crappy") my pitching staff, but it fell through. My plan going into the year is to see how I do the first few months and then either trade the house for a shot at the championship, or trade all my good players to help in rebuilding in 2005. 2004 Lineup Against Righties: LF Brian Giles CF Luis Matos RF Richard Hidalgo 3B Hank Blalock SS Jose Valentin 2B Adam Kennedy 1B David Ortiz CA Ramon Hernandez DH Edgar Martinez 2004 Lineup Against Lefties: LF Brian Giles CF Richard Hidalgo RF Vladimir Guerrero 3B Mike Lowell SS TBA 2B TBA 1B Derrek Lee CA TBA DH Edgar Martinez 2004 Starting Rotation: Kevin Millwood Josh Becket Jeremi Gonzalez Roger Clemens 2004 Bullpen: Joe Borowski Guillermo Mota Kyle Farnsworth Francisco Rodriguez Eddie Guardado The plan is to get just enough starter innings to pitch 6 innings/game, then turn things over to the talented bullpen. Exactly the opposite strategy that I had last year, but last year's starters were unbelievable. We'll see if it works. I'm hoping to trade some excess talent (Mike Lowell, Derrek Lee, closers, Kearns) for starting pitching, but so far there aren't any takers. 2.18.2004
FANTASY TIPS I'm getting ready for the fantasy season and have been asked by a bunch of people, "what's the best thing to do to prepare for an auction?" You see, my local league is switching form a draft format to an auction keeper league. I'm the only one with any experience in an auction, so everyone wants all my strategies and spreadsheets. I've tried to share all my strategies and I'd share my spreadsheets if I had 'em, but they're not ready yet. I'm going to go into this AL only auction almost as clueless as the rest of my friends. And that, my friends, is the number one no-no on the list of SkyKing's auction tips: 1 - Act like a Boy Scout and be prepared. 2 - Obtain, or produce yourself, a set of statistics projections based on the past three years of stats that are park adjusted and properly regressed. Most fantasy projections out there are completely unscientific. Properly regressed stats will appear to bunch players too much towards league average. This is good. Fantasy values don't rely absolute numbers, but on relative numbers. If you were to double everyone's stolen bases, the values players earn for steals would stay exactly the same. The top of this discussion thread at Baseball Primer outlines TangoTiger's simplistic Marcel the Monkey forecasting system. Why regress? Because each plate appearance is one small sample of a player's true abilities. When you've collected a full season's worth of plate appearances, you have a pretty good guess at his true ability, but the odds are that his true ability is closer to the league mean than he's shown. The more samples (PAs) you have, the less your regress and trust the samples. 3 - Properly translate these projections into dollar values, using your exact league specifications (number of teams and the correct categories). Use a replacement level model for value, no standings gain points crap or anything that some online auto-dollar-calculator uses. Take the time to learn how to compute values and do it yourself. Visit Mastersball.com for some good discussion threads about proper valuation. Or, better yet, buy their yearly annual when they make it available in a couple days. I bought the 2002 version and still refer to it, even thought the stats are out of date. The valuation and strategy tips are just that good. I've never bought another fantasy magazine or online service, but the Mastersball guide was worth my money. Proper dollar values give you the best chance of spending your money wisely at an auction. If you overspend by a few dollars on a few players, you've just wasted $10. Would you overbid by $10 on a single player? No, so why throw away $10 on multiple players. Values vary widely between different types of leagues. And stupid online values don't know what they're doing - they're either subjective or determined by some stupid computer program. Take, for example, Rototimes. For an 8 team league, they spit out 150 hitters with positive value, when only 112 will be bought. The top hitter, Alex Rodriguez, was valued at $28. Right. 4 - Before the auction, block out a plan. Make a list of players that you probably value higher than others. Make a list of players that will probably go for more than you'll pay. Write in a rough estimate for the amount of money you're budgeting for each position, based on the players you like. This method allows you to easily keep track of how much money you have left. If you budgeted $30 for your top outfielder and ended up gettng a deal on a $35 outfielder, you know you have to spend $5 less somewhere else. Nominate your overrated players early, at low prices. Let other people waste their money and then jump in on the cheaper players. 5 - Other ideas: mock draft a few times; check out my DIPS numbers (link at left) for pitching ideas or read my post about pitchers whose 2003 ERAs were most out of line with their actual shown abilities; read lots of good threads at Mastersball.com and RotoJunkie (the search function is awesome); email me with other ideas or questions - if I'm presented with an interesting question, chances are I'll post an answer at this blog for all to see. And if you're getting bored with rotisserie baseball, try a sim league - Scoresheet's a good gateway drug between roto and Strat-o-matic or Diamond Mind Baseball. I HAVE A SECOND READER I just received an email from John who reads this blog and likes it. Thanks for the encouragement, man. 2.05.2004
LONG LIVE AMERICA'S PASTIME Maybe I'm biased, maybe I'm just excited, and maybe I just don't like football all that much. But I feel like baseball's picking up some steam in the MLB vs. NFL popularity debate. It's not that baseball all of a sudden has done something wonderful, except that it's stuck to its guns. The NFL is finally realizing the downside to a few of its decisions that were made originally to increase popularity. The main point in baseball's favor was the high-dramatic and entertaining 2003 post-season. Both the Cubs and Red Sox had great chances to win the World Series, the Yankees lost to a bunch of young, no-name Marlins, and the pennant races were actually real this year. The NFL on the other hand experienced another season of extreme parity. People have often hailed parity as a great asset to the sport, but I never have. Sure, you want every team to have its chance to compete without some team dominating year in and year out because they spend more money or some stupid non-talent reason like that, but things have gotten a little ridiculous. The salary cap has destroyed team continuity. Teams will turn over half their roster every year. Dynasties are no more. And the talent level is decreasing because most teams only have one year to make a system or QB-WR combo click. Steve Young's talked a lot on ESPN that quarterbacks today aren't playing as well as they could - not because of talent, but because it takes time to learn to play with the rest of your team within a system. Peyton Manning's numbers keep getting better and better because the Colt offense can keep building on it's foundation year after year, instead of spending time re-teaching the tricks to new players. The NFL also relies too much on drama and one-upsmanship. My mom loves the whole Doug Flutie story. It's kind of neat, but if you want dramatic human interest stories, go watch a soap opera. A sport survives based on its product on the field. The rest is just icing. Without the strong product, the icing is too sweet. Some people love Sharpie and cell phone TD celbrations. On some level, so do I. But the NFL is doing the right thing in cracking down on that stupid stuff. They need to place the attention on the field, on the game, on the sport itself. The number one thing both the NFL and MLB could do to increase their popularity is to educate their fans. Teach baseball fans about newer age baseball analysis instead of feeding them traditional drivel. At some level, every fan knows they're beeing had. Teach the football fans about the various routes the WRs are running. Teach them about the actual reads a QB goes through. Teach them about the various holes in the offensive line and how a gameplan is a complex strategy attempting to confuse the defense and take advantage of their holes. This is done to a certain extent, but just because some of the audience is stupid, don't think the rest of us are. It will take the NFL a few years to get out of its currently overdramatic presentation of itself. MLB doesn't have to climb out of that hole (although FOX is attempting to put MLB into it.) And if Bonds keeps playing like Bonds, how big would a chase for Hank Aaron's HR record be for the game baseball? An additional popularity explosion on top of the current positive trend would be amazing. 2.03.2004
WHY YOUR MOVABLE TYPE BLOG MUST DIE You know, I don't think this guy likes the blogosphere all that much. Very interesting look at things, if you can fight through his constant use of exaggeration. Personally I thought blogging was just for sports geeks. Baseball blogs are really the only ones I read (especially if you count Baseball Primer as a blog.) But sports blogs didn't even make Mr. Whiner's list of most annoying and overused topics. Frankly, I think we should take that as encouragement to start up more baseball blogs about more unique aspects of baseball. One thing that sets baseball blogs (at least the ones that I read) apart from political or world news blogs is that the content just can't be found from mainstream media sources, including online sources. Rob Neyer is the closest you can get, and he's not exactly on the cutting edge anymore (still love him, though.) I consider hard-core and sabrmetric baseball fans to be in the minority. We have an underground, rage-against-the-machine, viva la revolution! type thing going on. This kind of information isn't covered anywhere else. We're not preventing people from finding "real" information when they search via google - we (well, others like me that actually post occassionally)are the real information. Keep the baseblogs rolling, and keep 'em interesting. If anyone knows if Blogger causes a lot of the same issues as MovableType or why LiveJournal is so much better, let me know. 2.01.2004
SCHUYKILL KINGS CRASH AND BURN Well, the Kings won over 100 games during the regular season, leading the league in offense and defense, but lost the Peoria Strat League World Series 4 games to 1 to the Hell Raisers. I'm a little disappointed, but as we all know, anything can happen in a four games series. The effort to prepare for the 2004 season starts right now. Keeper lists are due in two weeks. The tentative 18 keepers are as follows. I need to cut two of them. As you can see, starting pitching is my weak point. If you've got any advice, let me know. Hitters Hank Blalock Mike Lowell (trying to trade) Roberto Alomar (can hit righties ok) Derrek Lee (trying to trade) David Ortiz Edgar Martinez Brian Giles Vlad Guerrero Richard Hidalgo Austin Kearns Pitchers Eddie Guardado Joe Borowski Guillermo Mota Josh Beckett Kevin Millwood Roger Clemens Derek Lowe Brian Lawrence Answers Could Come to Elusive Questions Play by play data has done amazing things for baseball analysis. It's probably the single most important thing since the whole idea of analysis came about. This article suggests we're about to experience the next level of detail in play by play. It's short and a must read. Scouts like tools. Dorks like numbers. Now we'll be able to measure the tools with numbers. Scouts and dorks combine to rule the baseball world! (It's kind of like Voltron, except it won't get ripped off by the Power Rangers.) |
