Step One: Eliminate the Bias from Your Fantasy Baseball Picks
Growing up, there was nothing finer for a kid than waking up every morning and turning to the back pages of the sports section to scan the box scores for the previous night's games. Numbers streamed down those four columns—ab, r, h, rbi—after every hitter's name much like the neon symbols rained down in the opening sequence of "The Matrix."
Like The Matrix, those box score numbers occupied an alternate reality for us baseball fans who took great pleasure in absorbing statistics and the endlessly fascinating configuration of numbers.
Nowadays, with the Internet and SportsCenter, box scores don't carry the weight they once did. But scanning lists of baseball stats is not a dead skill. For fantasy baseball, it's essential.
The first step in winning your fantasy baseball league is to create a solid draft list. To do that, you must create a bias-free player rankings sheet.
A bias-free player rankings sheet
Here's how: Take a stat sheet that lists the last three year's statistics, like the one that Yahoo distributes to its Fantasy Plus subscribers, or the ones that appear in various baseball magazines and books.
Fold the papers vertically so that you can only see the stats and not the names.
What you want to do is try and spot a player's trends. Are they moving up? Was last year's numbers a substantial increase over his three-year average?
You're also looking at the overall quality of last year's stats. Even if his home run and stolen base total don't add up to much (see Design a Very Simple Formula to Evaluate Players), is there something that stands out across the board that might make him a great fantasy value?
What to do with these stat sheets
For the hitters, what I do is scan the sheets and put a checkmark next to the stats of approximately the top 72 players. Then I'll divide them up into two groups. I'll give an "A" to the top 36, and a "B" to the next 36, and I'll keep dividing groups into halves until I come up with an ordered Top 72 list.
There is no exact science to this. This is an exercise in ranking players without being biased by the names. The idea is to rank your players without looking at their names to see if there are any surprises, either at who made your list, or at how highly you ranked a lesser-known player. Doing this exercise might also yield some draft steals.
Looking back over the years, in 2006, this exercise showed huge potential for a player who hit 19 HR, 87 RBI, 14 SB, and .307 in 479 AB the year before. If given a full season, one could reason, this player could have a huge year. And yet he was not ranked in the Top 100 in most fantasy lists. That meant a big draft day bargain for whoever drafted Matt Holliday.
Let's do a more recent example using 2009's stats to show you how this works. Which shortstop do you tihnk will be ranked highest on most draft lists in 2010?
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R
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HR
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RBI
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SB
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AVG
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Player 1 |
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91
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27
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91
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17
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.297
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Player 2
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65
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26
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102
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5
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.300
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Player 3
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73
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18
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64
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13
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.248
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Take a good look at those stats. Player 2 and Player 3 will likely be ranked higher on most fantasy baseball draft lists than Player 1 because of their history of high performance, but also because of their famous names. The point of this is to notice that Player 1 is actually capable of having a better season than the other two, and most likely is only getting better. So if you're truly objective, Player 1 deserves a good look at being placed in the same category as the other two: Carlos Lee (Player 2) and Grady Sizemore (Player 3). Get ready in 2010 for Ben Zobrist (Player 1).
Step Two: Design a Very Simple Formula to Evaluate Players »
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