Fantasy Baseball 2008

Oh yeah, it's that time of the year. Of all fantasy sports, baseball is without a doubt the best. I have had a mostly straightforward formula I have used over the years to rank players. This year's results top 30 (I did top 30 so I could squeeze in Tim Lincecum):

1. Johan Santana 9.997069335


2. Chase Utley 9.395566713


3. Matt Holliday 9.28777674


4. Alex Rodriguez 8.06973671


5. Albert Pujols 7.362279704


6. Jake Peavy 6.687233845


7. Vladimir Guerrero 5.979646533


8. Victor Martinez 5.724916421


9. David Ortiz 5.661505849


10. Ryan Howard 5.650694866


11. Alfonso Soriano 5.226027058


12. Carlos Lee 5.114022165


13. Jonathan Papelbon 5.06406981


14. Grady Sizemore 5.012756748


15. Lance Berkman 4.721401161


16. Hanley Ramirez 4.707462255


17. Miguel Cabrera 4.202140221


18. Jimmy Rollins 4.069476267


19. J.J. Putz 4.013553495


20. David Wright 4.007944434


21. Joe Nathan 3.984203692


22. Adam Dunn 3.907455051


23. Mariano Rivera 3.793661698


24. Prince Fielder 3.7901273


25. C.C. Sabathia 3.749804343


26. Russell Martin 3.703008847


27. Carlos Beltran 3.629816436


28. Ryan Braun 3.556328479


29. Tim Lincecum 3.377436453


30. Robinson Cano 3.376123846

The big weakness is always my source of projections. I prefer to be somewhat random about this. Sometimes I tweak based on personal bias. This year I did not. The numbers don't mean too much, unless you are in an auction league. In that case, a rating of 0 corresponds to the average price of a starting (non-bench) player. An increase of 1 point corresponds roughly to a 40% premium. So if rating(Player x) - rating(Player y) = 1.0, then $(Player X)/$(Player Y) = 1.4.

Dumb Baseball Analysis

The world is full of dumb baseball analysis. The popularity of fantasy sports has only lead to greater proliferation of this strain of stupidity. Here is some from a fantasy baseball newsletter I got this morning:

Question: Which players' new addresses have affected their Fantasy value the most?
Answer: Dontrelle Willis -- Only the Yankees scored more runs in the AL than the Tigers last year, and Willis brought Cabrera (who led the Marlins in batting average, homers, RBI and walks last year). Willis will also have an established closer (Todd Jones, whom he pitched with three seasons ago) and he won't be asked to lead the pitching staff anymore. He had some personal problems that might have attributed to his down season, but now, with less responsibility deeper back in the rotation, he can just pitch.

This nugget of wisdom is from David Gonos who holds the highly regarded title of "Senior Fantasy Writer" for CBS Sports. Now I will give him one thing, Willis will be playing for a team that scores more runs, so this should help his win total. That will increase his fantasy value. But what is this garbage about an established closer, ahem Todd Jones? Mr. Jones will be 40 in April. His ERA over the last three years is 2.10, 3.94, 4.26. His K/BB: 4.43, 2.55, 1.44. His GB/FB: 2.04, 1.85, 1.51. This guy is a disaster about to happen. Now the Marlins have the 29 year old Kevin Gregg who had a 3.54 ERA and 87 K in 84 IP last year. I'm not saying he's great, but compared to Todd Jones...

The Todd Jones stats raise another issue. Look at that 2.10 ERA he had three years ago. That was when he was pitching for Florida. His numbers have obviously declined since. Some of this can be attributed to age, but some of it must be attributed to switching to the AL. Guess what, Willis is making the same move. Would it really be shocking if his ERA went up from its already not-fit-for-fantasy-baseball 5.17?

Finally, you gotta love the last bit of logic from Mr. Gonos. Dontrelle won't have as much pressure on him because he will be at the back of the rotation. Maybe Mr. Gonos should get a new title "Senior Fantasy Psychiatrist."

Ok, now all of that being said, I would expect Dontrelle to post better stats then he did last year. This has very little to do with switching teams (though the extra run support should mean wins, as mentioned earlier.) He had bad luck last year. His BIPA was .311. In other words, of all the balls put in play (not strikeouts, walks, or home runs) there was a .311 probability the ball was a hist. This is very high for a pitcher, but pitchers have very little control over this. It is mostly a matter of luck. You can control strikeouts, walks, and home runs, but it's hard to control singles vs. ground ball outs, or a double vs. a fly-out. Of the 42 NL pitchers who pitched enough innings to "qualify" statistically, that is the third worst BIPA, behind only Matt Belisle and Scott Olsen. So if he just gets a little better luck, i.e. less balls in play are hits, then he will see significant improvement. Whether that is enough to overcome the move to the AL remains to be seen.

Fantasy Baseball

The baseball regular season is almost over, thus fantasy baseball is almost over. I had three teams this year, two on ESPN and one on Yahoo. All three were free, but ESPN's service is far superior to Yahoo's. With ESPN you get live scoring, so at any time you can login and see how your team is doing. That's enough reason right there to play ESPN over Yahoo. I found that Yahoo's player news was not nearly as good as ESPN's. There were numerous times that it didn't indicate that a pitcher was going to be starting until just hours before the game actually started. This info was always available 24-48 hours earlier on ESPN. I wound up relying on ESPN to figure out which of my pitchers on Yahoo were starting.

Of course maybe my opinions are horribly biased. My two ESPN teams are winning their leagues easily, but my Yahoo team is in 8th place. So maybe I think ESPN's game is superior just because I've had more success on there.

Anyways, the end of the season gives me a chance to reflect on players that I did a good job of predicting their performance as well as ones that I did not. I had several players that drafted in all of my leagues because I was sure that they would outperform expectations. I also had some that I was sure would under-perform. Here's the ones that I was especially high on.

Chase Utley
Matt Holliday
Mark Teahen
John Smoltz
C.C. Sabathia
Ben Sheets

Five of the six were pretty good, four of the six really good. Obviously Teahen was the big disappointment on the list, and the biggest reach. So it's ok that he bombed, since he was a very late round draft pick. Sheets was also fairly cheap. He may not have been a slam dunk, but his team yielded my best free agent pickup: Ryan Braun. I picked him up on all three teams, and he's been amazing.

I did have one huge screw-up though. That was Carlos Pena. I picked him up in May, and gave up on him because he wasn't playing everyday. This was especially bad for my Yahoo team that never had a good first basemen all season.

So what about predictions for next year... Eh, it's football season. Ask me again in January.

(More?) ESPN Fantasy Baseball Problems

My ESPN fantasy baseball teams have been doing very well this year. I always check them in the mornings. This morning I noticed something odd with the statistics and standings. Here's a picture of the standings sorted by WHIP:



Quick note if you're not familiar with the WHIP statistic in baseball. It stands for Walks + Hits per Inning Pitched. It's basically how many base runners a pitcher allows each inning on average. Thus a lower value is better.

So you'd expect the team with the lowest WHIP (VENEZUELA ANATOMY with a 1.143) to be at the top of the list when teams are sorted by WHIP. Having the best WHIP, they should also get 10 points contributed to the point totals used for overall standings. Instead, VENEZUELA is in third place and the team with the fourth best WHIP is in first.

Do we have another case of ESPN having problems? Well, sort of. You might have noticed that I was using the Windows Safari browser. There have been a lot of bugs with WinSafari. So it was only prudent for me to load the same page in Firefox:


Now everything looks exactly as it should! Notice that not only have the display orders changed, but the point totals as well. You might notice the my team (Campbell HGH in bold) even has two more points in Firefox than in Safari (89 vs. 87.) I tried the same page in IE7 and Opera, and it displayed correctly (just like Firefox) in both of those as well. I'll give it a try on MacSafari later, too.

So how could using Safari cause such a bizarre "bug" with Safari? Well doing a view source on the ESPN page revealed a lot. Here's a snippet:

This Sortable JavaScript class is the key. It looks like ESPN just passes in the raw data (each team plus it's cumulative statis in each category) to this JavaScript class and then uses JavaScript to do not only the sorting, but also the point calculations (since it is based on the sorting) and overall rankings.

It seems like a reasonable way to render such a page. All sorting and calculations are done client-side. JavaScript is certainly more than capable of handling such tasks. Well, at least it should be. These screen shots suggest that there is a bug with Safari's JavaScript. It would seem like a fairly severe bug, too, since it seems to be related to how it is comparing floating point values. That's just a guess. It could be a lot more subtle than that.

ESPN Fantasy Baseball Reset

In the aftermath of the problems at ESPN fantasy baseball, they've decided to reset the whole game! I guess it makes sense. I had some great pickups one one of my two teams -- the team that wasn't affected by any of the problems. Maybe other teams in that league were, but I don't think so. It seemed like any problems were on a league-wide basis. My second team had problems, and there were definitely extra messages from ESPN posted to that league that weren't posted to the other league. Oh well, it's not like we're paying any of this. ESPN has offered reasonable compensation to make up for everything, including giving ESPN Insider access for the duration of the baseball season. That's pretty nice. I don't know how many times I would get an RSS post from ESPN that was insider-only, and I wouldn't know it was insider-only until I had clicked on the link back to ESPN's site.

Fantasy Baseball: ESPN vs. Yahoo!

I've played fantasy sports for more than ten years now. A lot of that has been on ESPN. I've spent a lot of money of fantasy teams. Two years ago I started playing a little on Yahoo Sports as well. Their service is free, but it was clearly not as good as ESPN's.

What's interesting though is that this year there seemed to be some pretty fierce competition between ESPN and Yahoo. ESPN started making their fantasy baseball free for the firs time. They reduced the features and eliminated prizes. They kept around more complicated leagues with prizes, but of course they had a price.

Yahoo continued to expand their features. They how had live scoring, something you had to pay for in the past (and something ESPN has had for several years.) They've also added more bling to their interface, with drag-and-drop rosters.

But now something kind of funny has happened. Well at least it's funny to a programmer like me it's funny. ESPN clearly was unprepared for the popularity brought on by making fantasy baseball free. They had simplified the free version of things, but kept most of the features from the $20-30 version. They've had so many problems. On the first day of the season, there were frozen rosters, wrong scores, broken waivers. They've sent out some emails apologizing for the many problems:

To all of our ESPN Fantasy Baseball players,

We wanted to be sure you had the latest update on what is happening with ESPN Fantasy Baseball, and what we're in the midst of doing to get things back on track for you.

We have every resource, including our full technical team as well as additional specialized technical and quality assurance personnel, working to resolve these issues.

Based on extensive ongoing work and testing, we expect to have the problems affecting Fantasy Baseball resolved by Wednesday. It is possible that between now and then testing could reveal complications that would push the resolution to later in the week. However, we are confident in targeting Wednesday and are taking every step during that time to ensure that the solutions we provide for you will be complete and long-lasting.

While it may sound simple, the core problem lies in issues with transaction information being processed incorrectly and at incorrect times - which presents complexities as data progressively compounds.

Here's the latest on what is being done:

We have made significant progress finding and working towards a fix for the core problems responsible for roster irregularities and incorrect waiver, free agent and other transactions. Due to the nature of software, thorough testing must be performed to ensure that the solutions we implement will fully resolve the issues and preserve the long-term integrity of the game. To do that, we have created parallels of ESPN Fantasy Baseball leagues in a development and quality assurance environment -- simulating the live game activity. In this environment we have been, and continue to run extensive testing of potential fixes for the core problems. There are approximately 70 different variations of our game currently in use, and we are simulating all of these. In parallel, we have programmers and technicians troubleshooting problems that have created scoring and standings irregularities - isolating and testing potential solutions.

Please know -- it is not just rhetoric when we say we continue to work non-stop to resolve this. We owe you the fastest, most effective and stable solution - and that is our sole focus.

We will continue to communicate with you as there are further developments, and you will hear from us again no later than Wednesday at 3 p.m. ET.

We apologize again for the frustration you've experienced and appreciate your continued patience.

You are our number one priority.

John Kosner, senior vice president and general manager, ESPN.com and the entire ESPN.com Fantasy team

Ouch! I like how they've now created "parallels of ESPN Fantasy Baseball leagues in a development and quality assurance environment" and "There are approximately 70 different variations of our game currently in use." Sounds like there are configurations that they didn't test -- at all. They didn't have unit tests for it or functional tests by QA. They've resorted to cloning live data to do their testing against. That's really not good!

I had thought that simply weren't prepared for the scale, but it sounds like their problems are deeper. Talk about an embarrassing situation for their engineering group.

Oh, and for what's it's worth -- I have two ESPN teams, and one Yahoo team. They're all doing crummy so far. My hitting has stunk, though my pitching has been very good. I'm not worrying though. I figure my guys will start hitting. Hopefully ESPN will have their problems worked out by then.