There was a time in the not so distant path (2014) when I had only two children – my oldest daughter and the Razzball MLB tools. Soon after, the child count went to six (three daughters, MLB/NFL/NBA tools) and the concept of having free time to take on big projects went up in smoke.
When you enter this stage in life, you find that you have exchanged dollars of time that you could have invested in productive pursuits for tokens of time that could only be used to: 1) hoard and efficiently crank out little projects/pursuits, 2) hate on others who waste their dollars of time, and 3) bemoan how you spent those dollars when you had the time.
Most of the time I have invested on Razzball – setting up the projections/tools, the player pages, etc. – has proven to be an okay investment in time. It certainly hasn’t made me rich but there are worse things in life than making some money on your favorite hobby.
But, by far, the STUPIDEST investment in time I made on Razzball was the Historical Baseball Player Rater which created fantasy dollar values for every year starting with 1903. What the hell was I thinking?
This dawned on me soon after finishing the work and I blocked it out of my memory for the most part^. Enough that I did not even bother to incorporate any new years since 2014.
^ Patrick Davitt dug up the Historical Player Rater for our interview/podcast in 2018. That was a pleasant trip down memory lane.
Looking back, I can see that some good came out of the endeavor. Thinking through how you normalize stats across 100 years with markedly different hitting + SB environments, reliever usage, numbers of MLB teams, etc. led to improvements in the Player Rater methodology for preseason/season-to-date/rest of season player values. A beneficial side effect to having to adjusting league size (a 12 team mixed league when there were 16 MLB teams is more akin to AL/NL only…thus you have to convert to 6 team mixed) was it forced me to move away from displaying Point Shares (my Standard Gains Point variant) for category values to auction dollars in the Player Rater.
Additionally, as more fantasy analysts started using the Player Rater for their analysis, there was a greater demand to look back at previous years.
So with a little bit of unwanted free time on my hands (fuck you COVID-19), I incorporate the 2015-2019 player rater data into the Historical Player Rater and created ‘last 5 year’ Player Raters for Hitters and Pitchers. All can be found under Player Rater in the main menu.
Some general notes:
- The Last 5 Year Player Raters are based on 12 team mixed league value with standard 1-catcher rosters (13 hitter/9 pitcher). There is little difference in ranking/value between this format and NFBC aside from catchers (which, as many of you know, I refuse to adjust up as much as traditionalists).
- Here is an FAQ on the Historical Player Rater.
- I have made improvements on the Player Rater since the Historical Player Rater work. After comparing the two, improvements made between 2015-2019 include 1) removal of any positional adjustments (which do serve a purpose historically) and 2) greater variance in category $ values. Hence, you will find some odd quirks like Nolan Arenado’s 2015 season being the highest $RBI season ever and 5 of the top 11 seasons since 1947 are between 2015-2019.
- While it is a completely pointless exercise, there are less fun ways to kill time than to see which hitters had the most top 10 fantasy hitter years or which pitcher had the most valuable fantasy season of the past decade? You can even try the Top 200 Fantasy Baseball Hitter Seasons quiz on Sporcle (here is another quiz with the Razzball Player Rater’s Top 100 for 2020). If you like them, please rate them 5 stars and Nominate them to be added to the Sporcle homepage!
Enjoy and stay safe everyone.
