Apr 20
I will eventually learn to write my posts in Word or Notepad, right? How many paragraphs must be lost to accidental keystrokes, browser crashes, or inadvertent page loads before I realize the web-based text editor sucks?
At least one more apparently, but let’s try this again…
I said it to start my carelessly erased first version of this post, but I should probably say it again: I really don’t like baseball. That is not to say that I actively dislike the sport; as a generalization I just don’t find it interesting.
Perhaps more than any other game ever devised, baseball is a game of situations. Runners on first and third with two out… Top of the seventh, one out, runner on second, down by one at home… Nobody on, a left-handed pitcher, right-handed batter, in a hitter’s stadium with the wind blowing in…
Any single baseball game is merely an aggregate of a hundred or so situations, each one existing largely independent of all the others. What happened before rarely impacts what happens now or will happen next, and therefore the sense of enjoyment provided by turning on the TV and watching a random at-bat is effectively the same for me as if I had been watching the entire game to that point.
The larger dilemma is that of these hundred random situations only a rare handful will actually end up affecting the game’s outcome, and because every team will play more than one hundred and fifty games in its regular season, even the game as a whole feels fairly insignificant. It doesn’t really matter to them, it definitely doesn’t matter to me, and as a result watching baseball just isn’t exciting.
Oh! Hello, Fantasy Sports. I didn’t even see you standing over there…
A few weeks ago Lukas asked me to join his fantasy baseball league. The economy is in a bit of a slump and I guess his league was having trouble finding enough stupid people to throw away 150 dollars. Fortunately, Lukas knew at least one stupid person. It took a little bit of persuading, but The Dirty Darcsens eventually claimed their place on the league’s roster.
As Lukas unnecessarily explained, my joining his league could be justified as a business expense. Sure, we are in the midst of building a fantasy baseball website, but to date my only actual interest in fantasy baseball was in knowing just enough about its mechanics to write a bit of useful code. Besides, aside from knowing the basic rules of the sport and the names of maybe half of the teams I know almost nothing about modern baseball.
True story, a year or two ago I went to a Cubs vs. Reds game at Wrigley and sat in the outfield bleachers. I was genuinely amazed to see Ken Griffey Jr playing outfield, then equally amazed when everyone in the stands started booing and taunting him relentlessly. Clearly I didn’t understand what was going on… Griffey is one of the all-time greats, right? Is he not good anymore? I definitely played my share of his various video games, but it soon became clear that my understanding of baseball was as antiquated as the N64 that I played them on.
Still, if nothing else the fantasy league would be a good opportunity to test the pre-alpha version of our developing website. Doing no research of any kind before our draft – honestly, it would be like cramming for a final exam for a class you never went to – I relied entirely on FantasyBlueBook.com to handle my player evaluations. Lukas helped me tweak my personal settings in favor of “n00b,” and then let the procedure I wrote (and which Lukas and I had so feverishly argued over) do its little magic. One tenth of a second’s worth of mathematical hocus-pocus and my screen displayed a long list of player values: a personalized cheat sheet for idiots that would hopefully save the day.
Fortunately for me this league used an auction draft instead of the otherwise standard round-robin draft. In an auction draft each person is given a set allotment of money that they can use to bid on players to fill their rosters. The upshot to this method is that everyone has a chance to get any player; they simply must be willing to pay more than everyone else. Of course, spending a lot of money on one player means that you will have less money to spend on the others. The challenge in these auctions is in determining what a player is actually worth and therefore how much to spend on him. You want to get good deals on your own players while forcing your opponents to overpay for theirs. Thankfully I had my FBB cheat sheets.
Furthermore, although I may be helpless when it comes to baseball I understand auction strategies well enough. As such I went into the draft with a predetermined plan to spend a lot of money up front on several of the best players, hopefully snag a few undervalued ‘good’ players, and then completely surrender on the back end of the draft. My reasoning was as follows…
It is a given that all of my opponents know more about baseball than me. They all know better than me which players are better than which others, and even with my cheat sheet I cannot hope to completely close that gap. Therefore I should make an effort to assert myself where relative player differences are large (among the best players) and surrender where those differences are small (among the lower-tier players). My goal was to create a team of as many studs as I could manage… and then, once I ran out of money, to fill the rest of my roster with random slop.
It may be a bad analogy but bet sizing in blackjack comes to mind. Playing perfect basic strategy in blackjack gives an expected value very close to 0. Counting cards correctly will give an expected value greater than 0. However, trying to count cards, but doing so incorrectly, actually ensures a negative expectation. Therefore, if you don’t know what you are doing… it is better to not even try.
There is a saying in fantasy sports that winners are made in the late rounds of a draft. Assuming that everyone knows who the studs are it can be assumed that they will be equally distributed throughout your league. Barring injuries, the studs should generally cancel one another out. Therefore the real difference makers are the marginal players who end up outperforming all the other marginal players. Because it is obviously difficult to identify these sleepers, the team manager who can accrue them is the one most likely to win the league.
Notice that a few paragraphs back I commented how it was fortunate for me that this league used an auction draft. Were it a standard round-robin draft the conventional wisdom that I just described would undoubtedly hold true and I would be resigned to no better than middle-of-the-pack. But because we used an auction I could attempt to shift my personal strategy a bit from the norm and hopefully play away from my weaknesses. By going for a stud-heavy roster my hope was that I could claim a sufficiently disproportionate amount of talent among the elite tiers to effectively compensate for the gap that I would almost certainly have to give up among the lower tiers due to my inferior knowledge. Like a novice card counter I should not waste my time trying to push small edges by doubling down on 12 or 13. I am better off just betting big and hope that my 18s and 19s are good enough to win.
Right from the start of our auction it was clear that I had no intention of being frugal with my money. I quickly put together a stable of expensive players, deliberately overpaying for a few of them. A number of other managers seemed generally unwilling to compete, perhaps feeling content to use their money on the next-best guy. At nearly every step of the draft I had spent more money than anyone else. In fact, I went completely broke before the draft was even half completed. Unable to bid any higher than the one-dollar minimum I was left to watch the second half from the sidelines… exactly as I had planned. The funniest part of the auction occurred as we neared the end. The frugal managers who had decided to simply get out of my way in the beginning eventually came to realize that they were holding more money than there were remaining players to spend it on. After too many rounds of thinking, “I’ll just take the next guy” more than one owner suddenly realized that the next guy simply wasn’t all that good. While I may have overpaid a few dollars for an elite player like Brian McCann or Jose Reyes, these owners were left with the horrific realization that all of their extra money was completely worthless. The worst such offender ended the auction with an extra 45 dollars sitting useless in his account – 45 from a starting budget of 280. Literally, he could have bought the most expensive player in the entire auction using only the money that he left unspent. His team is in a very real sense missing Jose Reyes or Hanley Ramirez. In truth it is actually worse than that because not only did he not get Jose Reyes… somebody else did (me, duh). So far as fantasy sins go, this one is all but unforgivable.
Through a solid combination of auction savvy by me, stupidity by some of my competition, and a surprisingly useful set of data from FantasyBlueBook.com I think I had a fairly successful draft. Lukas ran some numbers and deemed that I had the third best post-draft team in our league. Of course his bogus system automatically puts his team in first place so that doesn’t mean a whole lot. The projected margins among the top three teams were very small, but the jump to number four was significant. There is a very long season in front of us, but despite my obvious shortcomings I will hopefully have a solid base from which to begin.
As of this writing, after two weeks of play, The Dirty Darcsens sit firmly in second place.
In case you care, here is my current team.
* Note that I went a little bit heavy on Cubs if only because 1) they are actually pretty good and 2) they are the only baseball team I can normally stand to watch.
Hitters
McCann, Brian C ATL
Napoli, Mike C ANA
Lee, Derrek 1B CHC
Ramirez, Alexei 2B CHW
Ramirez, Aramis 3B CHC
Reyes, Jose B. SS NYM
Tejada, Miguel SS HOU
LaRoche, Adam A. 1B PIT
Abreu, Bobby RF ANA
Dye, Jermaine RF CHW
Fukudome, Kosuke RF CHC
Hunter, Torii CF ANA
Ludwick, Ryan RF STL
Lopez, Felipe 2B ARI
Kouzmanoff, Kevin 3B SD
Lewis, Fred LF SF
Ross, Cody CF FLA
Laird, Gerald C DET
Pitchers
Beckett, Josh SP BOS
Burnett, A.J. SP NYY
Meche, Gil SP KC
Sabathia, CC SP NYY
Sonnanstine, Andy SP TB
Weaver, Jered SP ANA
Davies, Kyle SP KC
Millwood, Kevin SP TEX
Perez, Oliver SP NYM
Broxton, Jonathan RP LA
Rivera, Mariano RP NYY
Wilson, Brian RP SF
Franklin, Ryan RP STL