In the Razzball Commenter League, Mowses (Home Plate Security) and Mil Mascaras (Tequila Two Step) are separated by a mere .46 points at the top. This looks like a two person race at this point as 3rd place PWNightmare is 9 points behind but crazier things have happened (see Lou Pinella benching Jake Fox to f*** my NL-only team).

In the Fantasy Razzball League, we don’t have quite the photo finish shaping up as Jay’s Willy Wonka crew continues to treat the field like a bunch of petulant Veruca Salts with his crop of bad eggs. His 7,077 points is over 600 points ahead of 2nd place Jonathan Halket of THT Fantasy Focus. The only race of note is whether my team can nip Grey’s for a 2nd straight year. Despite a couple weeks of letting a move and a vacation take my eye off the team, I’m only about 100 points behind him, residing in 9th to his 7th. I will be championing my inner Spaceball and flip the switch so my teams will go from suck to blow (apologies to those of you directed from search because of that coin of phrase).

There’s been a big shakeup in the RCL Standings as previous leader Cruz Control (commenter Anthony) has dropped all the way to 7th as his Gorditas Supreme divisionmate Tijuana Two Step salsas into first.  The new leader – helmed by an unidentified manager whom we’d like to think is ex-WWF star Mil Mascaras – has a whopping 113 points (out of a possible 120) and actually has potential to gain a couple points in the last month.  A look at the masked manager’s Active Stats show that top teams don’t have to get every top draft pick right as Grady Sizemore, Matt Holliday, and David Ortiz are all relative disappointments.  Killer picks like A-Gonz, Joe Mauer, and a three-ace staff of Wainwright, Vazquez, and Beckett definitely helped as did key FA pickups like Kendry Morales, Andrew McCutchen, Ubaldo Jiminez, and Tommy Hanson.

Mowses (Home Plate Security) remains in 2nd with PWNightmare (Halie Selassie Lions of Judah) hopping three spots to 3rd.  Slidenfail ftw and Widespread Panic leapfrogged 10 and 7 spots respectively to crash the top 10.

As for the Fantasy Razzball League, Jay (Willy Wonka) has established a near insurmountable 600+ point lead on second place Jonathan Halket of THT Fantasy Focus.  Paul Moro of UmpBump has chumpbumped his way from 6th to 3rd while Grey and I are now only one spot away from each other in the standings (Grey – 7th, me – 8th).  While it’s sad knowing I’ll have to relinquish last year’s Razzball crown, I hope I can at least have bragging rights in the Razzball office.

BTW Grey, you really need to clean the break room fridge – I know you love your SAGNOF but it doesn’t stand for “Spaghettios Are Great Nasty Old Food”….

THE TOPIC: Where would you draft David Wright in a mid-season league and why?

I veered toward the most bearish in the group – saying I’d take him somewhere in picks 20-30.  Grey put him at #14 in his midseason fantasy baseball rankings.  Click on the link above to see what some other Fantasy Bloggers thought…

First up, the Fantasy Razzball League. Jay – a Razzball commenter – is ahead of a pack which includes 30 bloggers and 50 other participants. The rest of the top five are Mike Podhorzer from FantasyPros911 (who is overdue for a league update in our NL-only league), Jonathan Halket of The Hardball Times Fantasy Focus, our own Grey Albright and Razzball commenter Freak in 5th. I’m in 7th place and it’s going to take a ridiculous 2nd half to try and defend my Fantasy Razzball title from last year.

In our Razzball Commenter leagues, there’s a 3-way battle for first with Anthony, Mowses, and an unnamed entry whose team goes by ‘Tijuana Two Step’. All three are above 100 points in their 12 team leagues which is pretty damn impressive. The craziest part is that Anthony and Tijuana are in the same league with the next team nearly 30 points out. The team known as “I said You’ve Got No Game’ is in 4th followed closely with Rhymenocerous (no sign of Hiphoppotamus), PWNightmare, ThirdandKing, and Doc.

Here are a few blogger shoutouts for those that are still battling in the Fantasy Razzball league:

R.J. White from the Fantasy Baseball Cafe is just outside the Top 10. For those unfamiliar with the Cafe, it’s full of lively debate and the perfect place to take a date if your date is your right hand. I personally like the brick wall on the home page – makes me feel like I’m at some 80’s comedy joint like the Chuckle Shack or Giggles.

The Fantasy Baseball Junkie is lurking just outside the Top 20 – like a sugar junkie loiters in the back of a Dunkin’ Donuts when they chuck the old batch. The Junkie has some good advice and definitely showed some prescience predicting Nyjer Morgan and Scott Hairston would be traded only a couple days before they did.

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…

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.

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!

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.

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.

For those unfamiliar with ‘Fantasy Razzball’, it’s a fantasy baseball variation where you aim to manage the worst team possible.  (See here for rules).  We expanded from one Blogger league last year (won by me – suck it Grey) to 6 10-team divisions:  3 blogger leagues and 3 commenter divisions (note:  we may actually have some satellite leagues – need to check on this).  We then compile a total standings based on each team’s total points and an index based on league performance (basically, it’s total points of league divided by average league points).

The standings can be found here.  For future reference, we have a link to this page in our Razzball Leagues section in the top left of the homepage.

Big shout-out to the top 3 so far:

1) Mike Podhorzer of FantasyPros911.com

2) Grey Albright of Razzball

3) Freak of the Razzball Commenters

27 and rising) Rudy Gamble of Razzball (still smarting from Brandon Inge and Marco Scutaro’s hot starts)

As part of these standings posts, I’m going to throw a few 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.  Here it goes:

Jonathan Halket of THT Fantasy Focus – Jonathan writes for The Hardball Times’ Fantasy Baseball section and currently is leading the Jose Lima Division (of which I am in).  Definitely some strong content throughout that whole site – ranging from very statistical to smart but entertaining (e.g., Shysterball).  From his post-article bio that states “Jonathan Halket is graduate student in New York”, I have learned two things:  1) Jonathan Halket is in graduate school and 2) He is not studying English.

Paul Moro of UmpBump – Paul is one of a stable of awesome bloggers at what would’ve been Billy Martin’s second favorite blog after Razzball (Billy would’ve appreciated Grey’s ’stache).  Rather than copy/paste his whole bio, I figured I’d just copy his picture and give you the link to his bio.  If you’re a baseball fan beyond the fantasy aspect, definitely check out this site.

Cory Humes of MVN – Cory – who is also in my FantasyPros911 NL Blogger league – has a leg up on everyone in this game as he’s a diehard Pirates fan.  Cory’s too busy overseeing MVN these days to post some entries on Pirates Revolution but I’m looking forward to his coverage of the Pirates’ inevitable Razztastic slide this year.

That’s it for now.  We’ll try to keep these standings updates posts coming every 2 weeks and update the standings at least that often.  We’ll change the date on the standings page when we update it.