Points Leagues: Happy Father’s Day To The Baseball Dads!

A belated Happy Father’s Day to all the dads, granddads, step-dads, and even all you dads-to-be in the future.  I’m writing this on Father’s Day, and I just finished the time-honored tradition of dads teaching their sons a lesson.  That’s right, my son wanted to take me on in a game of driveway hoops.  He may have a step on me driving to the hole, but he still can’t stop the rain.  It was close until I drained the game-winning three from the corner.  Another successful father-son lesson delivered!

As I was celebrating my win as eloquently as all us dads do, it gave me an idea for this week’s Points League article.  Let’s see which generation of fantasy players are carrying our teams so far.  We have the “Dads” represented by the 30+ year old players and the “Kids” represented by those 29 years old and below.

The rules are simple: we’ll take the top 15 qualified hitters and the top 15 qualified starting pitchers (Points/Game) to see which cohort takes the grand prize.

Now that the stage is set, I’ll do the analysis.  I really don’t know how it will turn out.  This should be fun!

For the hitters, 62 players qualify for the “Dads” team and 100 players qualify for the “Kids” team.  That same trend holds for the pitchers, too, where 31 make the pop squad and 44 for the youngsters.  Slight edge to the kids.  I note the pitchers are just SPs.  There are no RPs on either squad because they do not yet qualify.

The average age of our top 15 hitters are 32 for the “Dads” and 25 for the “Kids”.  On the pitching side, those numbers rise to 33 and 27, respectively.  Let’s see who made the lists:

Let’s see who made the top 15 lists:

The Hitters 

Aaron Judge leads the way for the Dads with a robust 8.32 points/game rate.  You’ll note thought that the youngsters have a higher floor with Jackson Chourio coming in higher than the bottom two dads.  We need to do some math to determine who wins this half of the competition.

Turns out, it’s pretty close.  One side averages almost 349 points as a group, while the other comes in at just 345.  However, the key metric to earn the trophy is points/game.  That one is much closer, with the winning side at 5.38 points/game compared to the other at 5.23 points/game.

The Winner:  The DADS!

The Pitchers

Again, it’s no surprise who leads all pitchers.  In this case, it’s a young gun from Detroit.  Unlike the hitters, the kids take the highest points/game AND the highest floor.  Let’s do the math and see if the observations carry through.

This one is pretty close too.  One side averages almost 243 points as a group, while the other comes in at just 229.  I bet you can figure out who’s who in that one.  But again, the metric we need is points/game.  Like the hitters, that one is much closer too.  The winning side comes in at 17.32 points/game compared to the other at 16.52 points/game.

The Winner:  The KIDS!

Overall Winner

Come on guys!  We can’t let these youngsters take over our game.  Sure, they may be quicker and throw the ball harder,r but we have the experience to keep them humble.  I’m putting you older players on notice!

Before I put a wrap on this fun exercise, a couple other statistics to share:

• Across all qualified hitters, the average points per game are 3.53 and 3.41 for Dads and Kids, respectively.  That ratio of 1.035 is a little better than the 1.027 ratio for the top 15 hitters respectively.
• Across all qualified pitchers, those same numbers are 13.46 and 12.84, respectively.  The astute reader will notice the average across all qualified pitchers shifts back to the Dads.  This ratio of 1.048 is significantly better than the 0.954 ratio noted for the top 15.

Now that we “Dads” can go out with a win, it’s time to take our ball and go inside.

I hope you enjoyed this fun look at the numbers.  Again, Happy Father’s Day to all of you out there.  Be the best role model we can to our kids and make them earn the Ws.  They’ll be better for it in the long run!