This is a rewrite of something I wrote at the old Fantasy Baseball Generals site, discussing the various pitch or ditch strategies. I have been getting shellacked in NFBC this year because of a slow start by my staff and have been trying to get back into the race via pitch or ditch with terrible results. And I think the below sums up my problems this year, in that I have been pitching hot pitchers only to see them cool off. I now wonder whether it is worthwhile to start cold pitchers and hope for a turnaround. But the flaw here is that no matter what I will fall into the problem set forth below.fakeFCKRemove
There is a new and marginally interesting take on the old, tired debate between scouts and stats going on. Our pal Derek Carty from The Hardball Times is playing in the CardRunners’ Expert League, where fantasy baseball experts are pitted against professional poker players. This is a great idea, and we really hope that some fresh, bright minds might be able to bring a new perspective to the game.
And so it starts. Every year within a week of Opening Day we start getting a slew of emails and calls asking us whether some crazy blockbuster deal is a good deal. Big trades like these are never good deals unless they are bald-faced dumps. Moreover, you are not in a good position to properly evaluate your team. Lastly, your team should be improved incrementally, not in one fell swoop, unless something odd is occurring.
I recently attended a work-related seminar on negotiating, and unlike most seminars it actually had some useful information to impart. Even better was the fact that much of it applied to fantasy baseball, which no doubt was their intent. So, here are some of the best things I learned, some of which we wrote about in our Ten Tips on Trading for the Draft Guide, and some of which are new.
It is the time of year for my longshot predictions. Last year was a very good year, as I hit on more than half, including nailing Adam Lind almost on the nose.
The genesis of this column is not the fact that I want to give you information; it is because I hate when people say after the fact “I predicted this in April.” So, I always go on record with my predictions and I make them precise. You will not see “player X will flop,” for example. All of these are things that I think have a reasonable chance of happening in 2010. Feel free to leave your own below as a comment. More than anything else in fantasy this is the one column that I love to do and love to hear from others on so please comment!
Ten rules and ideas to try for a successful fantasy auction.
Don’t slavishly adhere to dollar values. One of the worst mistakes you can make is to adhere to dollar values come hell or high water. My first foray into this madness was the old John Benson idea that you should only spend 85% of your projected value on a given player. This would be great in theory were it not for the fact that the number of positions are limited.
The so-called Verducci Effect has now effectively been repudiated. It is not a fact and not something you should think about anymore. A few sites have done this research and shown that it has no predictive value. But that begs the question of why did it develop, and are there other examples of this fallacious logic? There are, and these are examples of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.
Recently we have been getting a lot of questions from subscribers about keepers. Often times the question is something like “should I keep player X at $12 or player Y at $3?” On another site’s message board there was a question asking whether one should keep Mark Teixeira at $38. One question that I saw (not from anyone here thankfully) was a trade of a $21 Troy Tulowitzki and $0 Colby Rasmus in a 17-team mixed league for a $0 Homer Bailey and $0 Ben Zobrist (!)
For a recent position opening at BaseballHQ.com we were asked to write an article about changes to the fantasy baseball format. Below is the essay I wrote that won the position, with credit to Brian Joura for the last idea. These are some changes that would drastically improve the fantasy baseball experience for most players, and they approach a fundamental change in how we play the game. I would love to hear comments, since we have the most learned constituency in the industry here on our Premium Site.
