Throwing out the first pitch (2/17/08)
Hi everyone - welcome to the Sherpa’s fantasy baseball strategy blog!
A recent Google search revealed ~15,000 results for “fantasy baseball strategy” and ~40,000 results for “fantasy baseball blog”, but just 1 result for “fantasy baseball strategy blog”! While I’m sure that many of the “fantasy baseball strategy” results would indeed lead you to blog entries, it still seems hard to believe that there aren’t already a multitude of blogs geared towards the millions of people who play fantasy baseball. So, when I tout my blog as the top fantasy baseball strategy blog, there’s almost no competition!
I have several goals in starting this blog:
- Promote my new fantasy baseball website www.FantasyBaseballSherpa.com. Many people who play fantasy baseball have an intuitive feel for Position Scarcity, which captures variances in supply vs. demand at the different roster positions. However, the Sherpa has figured out how to quantify Position Scarcity, which can put you at a huge advantage in preparing for your league’s draft or auction!
- Post updates to the Sherpa’s Preseason Hitters’ and Pitchers’ Projections, as warranted by developments during Spring Training.
- Discuss fantasy baseball strategies from both a qualitative and a quantitative standpoint.
- Discuss other fantasy baseball topics that will appeal to a wide audience.
I welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to disagree with me - it makes for much more interesting discussions! I won’t be able to respond to specific questions you may have about your own fantasy baseball rosters, but feel free to include examples if they help you make a point about fantasy baseball strategy.
Hoping to guide you to victory!
-The Sherpa
Tags: fantasy baseball sherpa, fantasy baseball strategy, fantasy baseball strategy blog, position scarcity
February 20th, 2008 at 11:40 am
I look forward to reading your blog about fantasy baseball strategy, but I myself struggle to come up with any idea of what I would consider strategy. I mean my strategy is the same as the other owners in my league- to score the most points and win. Any time I’ve gone into a draft thinking “my goal is to X” I’ve found out that its the same goal as some other owners so its quickly defeated.
I’ve played under different formats over the years and with different groups of owners and in my opinion the most important lesson is to know your league. It’s similar to the talk you hear from players who have a new stadium- “we don’t know how the park is going to play yet”. I’ve found that you can take advantage of your league by knowing that a certain type of player is undervalued, for example. That knowledge is the best strategy to take advantage of.
One other thing that I’ve never seen a great discussion about- what is your opinion on whether you have to SEE a player in order to determine their value? I do not watch every MLB game, not even all the games for a single team. Therefore I know there are players that I own that I’ve never seen before. For example, two years ago I read a comment on a website about Juan Rivera possibly losing playing time in the near future, so I quickly traded him for the hot-hitting Casey Blake who was hovering near .380 at the time. Then a week or two later I caught a glimpse of Juan Rivera while watching a game and I was floored! That guy looked like a huge powerful player and the way he swung the bat made me feel like a fool for trading him. I still think of him as Vlad junior. What are your thoughts? Do you need to see the players to validate your opinion of their value/potential?
February 23rd, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Hey Sam, wholeheartedly agree with you about the importance of knowing your league, whether it be something about your league’s criteria or the tendencies/preferences of your fellow owners. It’s fun to search for “inefficiencies”, then use the resulting knowledge to your advantage!
Good question too about the importance of seeing individual players vs. relying on their stats - kind of like the tug of war between the scouts and the sabermetricians that Michael Lewis wrote about in Moneyball. I tend to rely more on statistics and what people close to the team are writing/saying about a particular player’s opportunity for playing time. Since I’m not a scout, I don’t see most players often enough to form a valid opinion based on my personal observations. Some statistical categories also lend themselves better to observation than others do (SBs & HRs vs. OBP for Hitters; Ks vs. ERA for Pitchers).
When all is said and done, getting an accurate read on a player’s future playing time is more important than either historical stats or personal observation. Juan Rivera might well be a more valuable player for fantasy purposes than Casey Blake if both were playing regularly. However, Blake will help your fantasy team a lot more than Rivera if he’s playing regularly and Rivera isn’t (which is likely to be the case yet again this season)!