Fantasy Baseball Advice

This week’s Fantasy Roundtable is hosted by phonetically fetishy friends at Fantasy Phenoms.

THE TOPIC: Three pitchers who have exceeded expectations so far are Jon Lester, Zack Greinke and Justin Verlander. Owners of these pitchers have been relying on them as weekly starters who play an intricate role for their fantasy teams. All three are on pace to strike out over 240 batters. If you had to choose one of these pitchers to continue this trend, who would it be? Why?

All three pitchers got a vote so it’ll be interesting to see how all us ‘perts will look in retrospect. I just wish the Phenoms offered up Jason Marquis because I think he’s a lock for 22+ wins…

This week’s Fantasy Roundtable is hosted by Big Jon Williams over at Advanced Fantasy Baseball.

THE TOPIC:  You find yourself in 7th place in a 15 team mixed 5×5 league.  You’ve just lost your best hitter to injury and your pitching isn’t that good.  If you really want to win, what do you do?

Spoiler alert! There’s no fool-proof way to do this – no matter how much you really really want to win – but there’s some good advice in here nonetheless.

One of our blogging brethren over at Midwest Sports Fans was analyzing 37 year old Raul Ibanez’s breakout start to the season and, as part of a rather detailed analysis of park factors and whatnot, ‘begrudgingly acknowledged’ that performance-enhancing drugs cannot be completely dismissed. A Philadelphia Inquirer journalist saw it.  By the next day, they had an angry Raul Ibanez threatening to ‘come after people who defame or slander me’ and labeling the charges as ‘pathetic and disgusting’.

While we are bloggers and naturally want to defend one of our own, we can’t bring ourselves to do it in this case. It doesn’t take an investigative journalist or top-notch blogger to figure out what’s going on with Señor Ibanez. We realized it in the first week of the season and didn’t think it was worth spelling out but now that it’s all the talk….well, we might as well spill the beans.

Raul Ibanez is not doing well because he’s on performance-enhancing drugs. C’mon, get real. It’s quite the contrary – he’s doing well because he’s finally off performance-enfeebling drugs.

Look at his career – do you really think any major leaguer would play 13 seasons for only the Mariners and the Royals if they weren’t on drugs? Think about what Seattle and Kansas City have in common. Who is Seattle’s most well-known musician? Yes, Kurt Cobain (sorry Jimi Hendrix). And who is Kansas City’s most well-known musician? That’s a harder one but you guessed correctly if you said jazz musician extraordinaire Charlie “Bird” Parker (sorry dude who played with the Sunshine Band). What do those two musicians have in common? Yup, they were dragon chasin’, white horse ridin’ heroin addicts.

Did you really think Ibanez was just a .290/20 HR type? He can hit that while his body is ravaged by smack. In fact, he has. Every single year until this year that is. Now the dope-free dope is finally having the monster season that he could’ve been having for the past 15 years if only he stayed clean. Hell, even his much-maligned fielding has gotten better.

So sorry Midwest Sports Fans but we’re siding with the hot-hitting OF in Philly who is angry on life. Keep ragin’, Raul!

Hey Razzballers – it’s been a while since our last formal standings update so let’s get crackin’….

In our Razzball Commenter League, the top three have been consistent for several weeks.  Anthony G leads the pack by 7 points as he has a remarkable 111.5 points out of 120 in the Gorditas Supreme division.  You’d think the division would suck but the overall league performs about equal with the rest of the divisions.  ThirdandKing and Mowses are the other two teams over the 100 point mark in their leagues and own the 2nd and 3rd slots. I thought it would be interesting to see what players were on more than one of those teams.  No player was on all three; here are those on 2 of the top 3: Adam Lind, Adrian Gonzalez, Mark DeRosa, Shin Soo-Choo, and Zack Greinke.  Most of the other likely prospects you’d expect show up on one of the teams like Ibanez, Broxton, Nelson Cruz, etc.  Perhaps we’ll do a test on the top 10 and bottom 10 teams to see who are the lucky and cursed players…. As for notables in the rest of the top 10, a pack of commenters have risen into the top 10 over the past 2 weeks:  VanHammersly, Rhymenoceros, NoonTime, and PWNightmare.

In the Fantasy Razzball league, Mike Podhorzer of FantasyPros911 still is in the lead with Razzball commenter Jay and Jonathan Halket from The Hardball Times Fantasy Focus in 2nd and 3rd, respectively.  Only three players of note made it on two of the three teams:  Emmanuel Burriss, Brian Anderson (White Sox), Shane Loux.  Just goes to show there are many ways to both skin a cat and to assemble a crappy fantasy baseball team.  Other notables in the top 10 include the Razzball duo of Grey (#4) and myself (#7).  Razzball commenters ZK & Freak, and fellow bloggers RJ White from the Fantasy Baseball Cafe and Paul Moro of Umpbump.com.

Here are a few more shout-outs to the participating blogs.  We appreciate them putting their reputations on the line to compete against bloggers and commenters in our little masochistic game:

Melissa from the ESPN Podcast “Play Ball with Amanda and Melissa“.  This is the podcast that is ‘by women, for women”.  I’ve tried the blog and found it to be strong enough for a man.  I’m not sure why they haven’t had Grey or I on as it’s a well-known fact that more females visit our site (3) than any other fantasy blog.

Lee Perrault from RotoSavants - This blog is run by Troy Patterson and has been our friend since he came with us to Vegas and counted cards for us in blackjack.  Lee has held his own in the league so far, lingering just outside the top 10 for the past couple of weeks.  Luckily, rosters are finalized on Sunday nights so it doesn’t interfere with Monday night fish stick dinner.

Tirico Suave -  One of the funnier sports blogs around, Tirico Suave took the bold step of referencing an ESPN anchor as part of their blog name.  Loved this post/screenshot and it makes me want to buy MLB ‘10 The Show to see what it says about Conor Jackson and Joey Votto.

We all realize that a player’s lineup position will have an impact on his statistics. I’ve recently been pondering the fantasy impact of scenarios such as:

1. What is the impact of Russ Martin and Matt Kemp’s fantasy value if they hit 2nd vs. in the 5th through 7th spots?
2. If Kelly Johnson moves from 1st to 6th, will his fantasy value be impacted?
3. How much does it hurt a Cameron Maybin or Alex Gonzalez to hit 8th in an NL lineup?

I’ve come across analysis on optimizing a lineup – such as in Tom Tango’s Inside The Book – but I haven’t come across direct guidance on how this impacts fantasy value.  So I thought I’d take a shot at it.

If I were to predict the impact of lineup position on a player’s 5×5 stats, this would be my best guesses in descending order of perceived impact:

1. Runs – Hitting in the top 4 would have an advantage vs. hitting 5th-8th (with NL players hurt by pitchers’ reduced ability to drive in runs)
2. RBI – Hitting in the middle of the lineup would have an advantage vs. hitting at the top or bottom of the lineup (with top of the lineup worse off in NL because of pitcher)
3. SB – Hitting first or at bottom of lineup would have an advantage because managers are less likely to run players with middle of lineup hitters at the plate (exception hitting 8th in NL because pitchers will bunt them over)
4. AVG – Maybe hitting at the top of the lineup gives you better protection so you’ll see better pitches?  (disadvantage hitting 8th in NL as you have no protection)
5. HR – While it’s possible that top of lineup hitters are less likely to swing for HRs than middle of the lineup, I’m not convinced there is any real difference here except that top of lineup hitters get more plate appearances.

The big reason why I think Runs and RBIs are the most affected by lineup position is that they are largely out of the hitter’s control.  You can hit Pujols 8th in an NL lineup and he’ll hit over .300 and hit 30 HRs.  But there is little doubt that he’ll come up with less batters on base and be stranded more on base.  Because this is so lineup dependent vs. skill dependent,  Runs and RBIs prove to be the easiest ones to measure lineup impact because we can analyze aggregated totals for each position (vs. adjust for player skill levels).

Here is how I measured the Runs/RBI impact:

1. Gathered the hitting statistics by lineup spot for each of the 30 teams for 2008 (courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com)
2. Created a Plate Appearance index that accounts for the differences by lineup position. This is based directly on the aggregated results from B-R and, obviously, #1 hitters get the most plate appearances over the season, #2 hitters get the second most, etc.
3. Created a Runs index as follows:  (R-HR)/((1B+BB+HBP+ROE)+(2B*1.7)+(3B*2.4)).  This formula divides Runs by Total Times on Base, removing HRs as this nets the same result for any lineup position.  ROE = Reached on Error.  I weighted doubles and triples up based on some information gathered on Baseball Analysts regarding run probability when on 1st base, 2nd base, or 3rd base.  The impact of weighting doubles and triples vs just counting all hits as equal was negligible.  I was not able to factor fielder’s choices into the denominator.
4. Created a RBI index as follows:   (RBI-HR)/(H-HR).  I wasn’t sure how to value the RBI potential of doubles and triples over singles so I didn’t account for it.  RBIs potentially gained by sacrifice flies or ground outs weren’t accounted for in the denominator.
5. Created a R/RBI index that averages the two indexes.

Below are the results for AL and NL.  The indexes are skill-independent.  So if an AL hitter moves from the leadoff spot to the 9th spot and hits exactly the same, they will have 22% less plate appearances (110/90 – 1), 41% less runs (127/90 – 1) and 14% more RBIs (1- 78/90).  Also, realize that this is based on opportunities to score or drive in runs.  Just because the NL 9th hitter has a higher index than 8th hitter does not mean they will score more runs in total.  It means that a NL 9th hitter who gets on base is more likely to score a run than an 8th hitter.

American League (2008)

National League (2008)

For Runs, the indexes mostly confirmed expectations.  I found it a bit surprising that AL 6th hitters are at a slight run disadvantage vs. AL 7th hitters but it’s understandable as 7th hitters benefit more from being driven in by top of the lineup hitters.  I’m also surprised how big of a run advantage leadoff hitters have vs. 3rd/4th hitters as their actual run totals tend to equal out.  I guess the biggest driver here is the larger OBP that 3rd/4th hitters generally have vs leadoff hitters (oh for the days of Rickey and Boggs’s .400+ OBP).  A last point is that the Runs Index for AL/NL are near identical for the first 4 lineup spots but then the NL slides more precipitously for 5th-8th hitters.  This may be a sign of both the NL’s lack of a DH (which reduces lineup depth) and the weak 8th/9th hitters in the NL.

For RBIs,  the AL RBI index distribution is as expected.  The 3rd/4th/5th slots have the biggest advantages with 3rd/4th being similarly advantaged over the 5th slot.  The NL indexes, however, show a much bigger RBI advantage for 4th hitters and (to a lesser expent) 5th hitters vs. 3rd hitters.  NL 2nd hitters also see a big drop in RBI advantage vs. their AL counterparts.  The explanation for both is likely reduced RBI opportunities because of low NL 8th and (especially) 9th hitter OBPs.

The Runs/RBI indexes indicate that any move from the top 5 lineup spots will lead to a measurable decline in total Runs/RBIs – at least partially driven by the increased plate appearances.

So to answer the earlier examples:

1. The R/RBI impact for Kemp and Martin if they hit #2 vs #5 is basically nothing – you’re just trading off Runs when hitting 2nd to RBIs when hitting 5th.  But moving down to 6th or 7th does have a 13-20% impact on R/RBI.
2. If Kelly Johnson is moved to the 6th slot, he’d see an estimated 33% increase in RBIs (100/75 – 1) but an estimated 35% drop in Runs.  It nets out to a net loss in combined Runs/RBI but it might not be a bad tradeoff if you’re team is weaker in RBIs than Runs.
3. Hitting 8th in an NL lineup is the death knell for Runs but is actually better for RBIs than either hitting 1st or 2nd.

Hope this analysis comes in handy when re-assessing players’ values based on their lineup slot.  Next step for me is trying to figure out how I can neutralize the skill-dependency to measure SBs and AVG impact of lineup position.