The Fantasy Baseball Sherpa

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ll be evaluating several popular, widely-available sets of fantasy baseball projections over the next few days. The goal is to determine whether each set of projections can serve as a realistic base for ranking players for your fantasy baseball draft or auction.

Here are some of the benchmarks based on 2005-07 MLB data that I’ll be using to evaluate the Pitchers’ projections:

1. Total Innings Pitched (IP) for all Pitchers, all Teams should be in the range of 43,200-43,400.
2. Total IP for a Team should range from 1,400-1,500.
3. The number of Wins and the number of Losses should both equal 2,430.
4. The number of Saves as a percentage of the number of Wins should range from 49%-52%, implying that the number of Saves should range from 1,190-1,265.
5. The number of Earned Runs Allowed should be in the range of 20,500-21,750.
6. The overall Earned Run Average (ERA) should be in the range of 4.25-4.50. Contrary to “conventional wisdom”, the difference between National League and American League ERA has been negligible over the past 2-3 years.
7. Total Walks Allowed should be in the range of 15,000-16,250.
8. Total Hits Allowed should range from 44,000-45,250.
9. Aggregate Walks + Hits per Inning Pitch (aka “WHIP or “Ratio”) should be in the range of 1.37-1.41.

As I stated in the “Hitting Benchmarks” post, if the set of projections underlying the player rankings/dollar values you’re using is inaccurate, then the resulting player rankings/dollar values are also likely to be inaccurate. Again, this problem will probably not be apparent to you in the early stages of your draft/auction - you’ll probably find that all projections for the top-tier players will be reasonably close to one another.

However, once you reach the second and third-tier players (where fantasy drafts/auctions are won and lost), it’s imperative to be working from a reasonable set of projections. If you aren’t, chances are you’ll be significantly overstating or understating a player’s true worth.

If it turns out you are working from an inaccurate set of projections, you have 2 options: (1) Hope/pray that everyone else in your league is also working from a set of projections that’s at least as inaccurate as the one you’re using, or (2) Throw away your current set of player projections/rankings/values and look for a better alternative. Again, over the next few days my goal is to be able to help you do just that!

Until next time,

The Sherpa

Tags: aggregate projections, fantasy baseball draft, fantasy baseball projections, The Sherpa

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 8:16 pm and is filed under fantasy baseball, fantasy baseball sherpa, fantasy baseball strategy, fantasy baseball strategy blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.