If you read Razzball, you know that we’re not afraid to criticize the rankings of ESPN and Yahoo!. You should also have realized by now that Grey and I don’t always agree on players.
Grey has his rankings based on watching a ton of games, poring through stats, fantasy acumen, and whimsy while my Point Shares rely on my cooked-up methodology (honed after a couple years) and various inputs that I’ve grown to trust (ZiPS, Marcel, FanGraph projections, Fantistics for playing time projections). Aside from tweaking some playing time projections, I just let the player data rank itself.
Since commenters often like to pit us against each other, we figured we might as well make a game out of it. I converted Grey’s rankings to MLB 12-team dollar values by crediting the same dollar value per rank that I have (e.g., his #1 overall pick gets the same dollar value as my #1 overall pick). This allows us to focus on the dollar value differences vs. just number of picks – because obviously a guy I pick for #10 and he picks for #60 is more noteworthy than a guy I put at #210 that he puts at #260.
The assigned rosters net out to $368-$369 worth of 12-team MLB value according to each owner but only valued at $215-$220 by the competitor. Perusing the rosters, you can see that Grey’s team is stronger in the corners and 2B/SS while mine is stronger in OF and C. This gives a sense of how we weight the various positions. There really isn’t any clear trend in pitching except maybe Grey gives more weight to consistent, reliably healthy closers where the agnostic Point Shares are willing to take on the risk of Street and Nathan. I expected something similar in terms of risky starters (I don’t adjust Point Shares for ‘riskiness’) but we both ended up with a number of risky pitchers (all of Grey’s besides Gallardo are on my risky list where I have Latos and Nolasco). I think this goes to show that younger pitchers are harder to value and thus more volatility in ranking systems.
| Grey’s Team | Rudy’s Team | |||||
| Pos | Name | $ | Rudy $ | Name | $ | Grey $ |
| C | Miguel Montero | $10 | $1 | Buster Posey | $25 | $14 |
| 1B | Ryan Howard | $36 | $26 | Luke Scott | $8 | $0 |
| 2B | Brandon Phillips | $25 | $19 | Martin Prado | $13 | $1 |
| SS | Elvis Andrus | $20 | $10 | Starlin Castro | $10 | $1 |
| 3B | David Wright | $38 | $31 | Jose Bautista | $26 | $16 |
| OF | Matt Kemp | $31 | $27 | Carlos Gonzalez | $38 | $28 |
| OF | Hunter Pence | $25 | $20 | Carl Crawford | $36 | $29 |
| OF | Manny Ramirez | $11 | $1 | Nelson Cruz | $31 | $24 |
| OF | Travis Snider | $10 | $1 | Jayson Werth | $25 | $19 |
| OF | Lorenzo Cain | $5 | $0 | Nick Markakis | $17 | $9 |
| CI | Michael Young | $19 | $10 | Chase Headley | $4 | $1 |
| MI | Rafael Furcal | $15 | $5 | Tsuyoshi Nishioka | $12 | $5 |
| UT | Casey McGehee | $18 | $10 | Torii Hunter | $18 | $12 |
| SP | Francisco Liriano | $19 | $9 | Justin Verlander | $21 | $17 |
| SP | Yovani Gallardo | $19 | $13 | Mat Latos | $19 | $13 |
| SP | Brett Anderson | $13 | $5 | Daniel Hudson | $12 | $9 |
| SP | Clay Buchholz | $11 | $7 | Ricky Nolasco | $11 | $6 |
| SP | Gio Gonzalez | $9 | $1 | John Danks | $9 | $4 |
| SP | Ian Kennedy | $8 | $2 | Travis Wood | $8 | $0 |
| RP | Jose Valverde | $12 | $10 | Huston Street | $14 | $8 |
| RP | Francisco Rodriguez | $12 | $10 | Joe Nathan | $8 | $3 |
| RP | Jake McGee | $3 | $0 | Brandon League | $5 | $0 |
| Tot | $369 | $216 | $368 | $219 |
Note that neither of us are actually proposing these rosters. For instance, I would never suggest Luke Scott as a 1B but there really weren’t any other 1B which I valued higher than Grey. And I can’t imagine Grey would choose to invest so little in OF.
We’ll revisit these rosters as the season goes on. I can see several ways to compare the teams including 5×5, using a modified version of Tom Tango’s point formula, and using the default ESPN or Yahoo points systems.
So what do you all think? On which team would you place your bet?
