for starters, we found tha the average BAO (best available option in free agency) had an ERA of 4.15 and WHIP of 1.34 over 191 innings. We then came up with a point being worth 0.05 of a fantasy team’s ERA from that standard deviation exercise. You have 9 pitchers on a fantasy team with the starters pitching an average of 1/6 to 1/7 the innings. So for an average starter to change a team’s ERA by 0.05, they would need to have an ERA 0.32 below the team’s ERA. For WHIP, this increment ended up being .032.

The last thing we factored in was IP. We multiplied the points by the pitcher’s IP divided by that 191 IP for the BAO. This gives extra credit to a pitcher with 230 innings vs. 190 IP with the same ERA since it has a greater effect on the team total.

So if a starter had a 3.15 ERA over 200 innings, it would be calculated as BAO ERA (4.15) minus player ERA (3.15) = 1.00 divided by the increment of .32 for about 3. Then that would be multiplied by 200/191.

Hope that makes sense…

Waiting on Rudy to answer your question, and he’s in Vegas. Betting the Giants probably.

Anway, I like the idea of using StDev but I fall off the table a bit with the math when looking at pitchers for the ERA and WHIP scores. This is because the lower the number the better – how do you equate lowest number to highest point total?

Thanks
Lou

We dug the most into AVG and, like ours, it looks like it factors in AVG and AB.

I think the calculation was something like:

(Player AVG – .153) / .153 * 5 * (Some AB factor)

.153 represents the difference in average b/w Magglio Ordonez (5.0 points) and Nick Punto (0.01 points).

For 2nd place Ichiro, this would calculate to 4.61 pts where he got 4.87 by ESPN. He also had 678 ABs which is very high so he might’ve got a boost from that. A more straightforward example is that Hanley Ramirez received more points than Chipper Jones with a lower average and more AB (4.03 pts / .332 AVG / 639 AB for Hanley, 3.84 / .337 AVG / 513 ABs for Chipper).

ERA and WHIP probably factors the ERA/WHIP and IP in some way.

Our key beef with all three is less in how they calculate it and more in the fact that negative points aren’t awarded for below average performance. While a below average HR total (say 10) is better than zero, a .250 average only hurts your team….