Points Leagues: Kershawshank Redemption

Well, I thought I was extremely clever when I came up with the title for this one, but then a quick Google search proved that there were others that were clever before I thought I was being clever. Darn you Google for knowing so much! And darn you Al Gore for inventing the internet! Thanks to the internet, a guy can’t get away with anything these days. Google, Facebook and Twitter have made it next to impossible for a guy to get a reach around in the back of the bowling alley from the girl that rents the shoes without everyone knowing, and every one of those people finding out about it. But I digress…

As draft dates draw nearer, I decided it was time to put together and share my head-to-head points league rankings. But before I do, I wanted to let you in on my process. Points leagues are all about one thing. Points. It’s the only category that counts for jack squat. I wonder how many dudes out there actually have the name Jack Squat? I guess it’s better than Richard Nose. I don’t care if my player gets 100 points because he had 100 RBIs or because he stole 100 bases. Whatever he needs to do to bring home the bacon is A-O-K with me. In Japanese that would be “Aoki”. I don’t even care if it’s turkey bacon! Points are points. So ranking players within the same position comes down to who will score more points. I’ll touch on comparing players across positions in my next post.

In order to project points we need stats projections. At the moment there is no shortage of projections “on the line“. But which one should I use? Well if you are going to settle on just one, allow me to suggest Razzball’s Steamer projections. But, if like me, you are not a “one set of projections” kinda guy, then you’re in luck. Here’s what I have done. I downloaded stats projections from several “reputable” sources and have averaged them all together. These sources include (and are limited to) the following: Razzball Steamer, Zips, FanGraphs Steamer, CBS, FantasyPros, Rotowire, TG Fantasy Baseball any my own malamoney software generated projections. (Note: These projections were taken a few days ago, so any injuries in the last few days is probably not accounted for such as Hunter Pence).

I wrote a little NodeJS application that parsed all of these projections, matched up the players and calculated averages for each stat category that can produce points accordingly. I have attached an Excel spreadsheet below containing the resulting projections. You can modify the “Points System” worksheet to reflect your league’s points distribution. Doing so will update the FPTS (fantasy points) column in both the “Hitters” and “Pitchers” worksheets. It will not, however, update the “Positional Rankings” worksheet, but you can just use the filtering mechanism on the “Hitters” and “Pitchers” pages to examine each position.

Here are my 2015 Head-to-Head Points leagues Positional Rankings (based entirely on projected points):

Catchers:

First Base:

Second Base:

Third Base:

Shortstop:

Outfield:

Starting Pitchers:

Relief Pitchers:

With 728.22 projected fantasy points, Clayton Kershaw is expected to score more points than any other player in baseball. But is that enough to make him my number one overall pick over everybody’s golden child, Mike Trout, who is projected to score 509.34 points? You’ll have to wait until my next post when I use z-scores to determine the position-adjusted fantasy value above replacement (FVARz) values for each player based on points.

The scoring system I am using for the basis of this post is as follows:
RUN (+1), RBI (+1), 1B (+1), 2B (+2), 3B (+3), HR (+4), BB (+1), KO (-1), HBP (+1), SB (+1), CS (-1), SF (+1)
WIN (+7), LOSS (-5), IP (+3), K (+1), BB (-1), SAVE (+7), BLOWN SAVE (-1), ER (-1), HIT (-1), HBP (-1)

Excel Spreadsheet