The Fantasy Baseball Sherpa

In this post I’ll take a look at the Top 10 Pitchers (both year-to-date and for the rest of the season) in a standard mixed league format (i.e. - Pitching categories are Wins, Saves, Strikeouts, ERA, and WHIP). Each player receives a Sherpa Point score ranging from 0 to 1 in each of the 5 categories; thus, the maximum possible score is 5.00.

For the counting statistics the league leader is assigned a score of 1.00; all other Pitchers’ scores are calculated by taking the ratio of their score in a particular category to the league leader’s score. For example, if the league leader has 15 Wins, a Pitcher with 10 Wins would receive a score of .67, a Pitcher with 5 Wins would receive a score of .33, etc. For average-based categories (e.g. - ERA and WHIP) a proxy statistic is used. Pitchers’ Sherpa Points scores in each individual category are added to calculate the Total Sherpa Points.

Top 10 Pitchers Year-to-Date

1. Cliff Lee - 3.60 (Remainder-of-Season forecast = 2.48 Sherpa Points, which ranks 18th overall)
2. Roy Halladay - 3.45 (3.68, 2nd)
3. Dan Haren - 3.39 (3.59, 3rd)
4. CC Sabathia - 3.22 (3.69, 1st)
5. Brandon Webb - 2.94 (3.25, 5th)
6. Justin Duchscherer - 2.93 (2.61, 13th)
7. Cole Hamels - 2.93 (2.96, 8th)
8. Tim Lincecum - 2.84 (2.44, 19th)
9. Ben Sheets - 2.67 (2.52, 17th)
10. Ervin Santana - 2.66 (2.03, 36th)

Top 10 Pitchers for Remainder of Season

1. CC Sabathia - 3.69 (Year-to-Date score = 3.22 Sherpa Points, which ranks 4th)
2. Roy Halladay - 3.68 (3.45, 2nd)
3. Dan Haren - 3.59 (3.39, 3rd)
4. Johan Santana - 3.35 (2.32, 16th)
5. Brandon Webb - 3.25 (2.94, 5th)
6. Jake Peavy - 3.25 (2.16, 22nd)
7. John Lackey - 3.13 (1.88, 34th)
8. Cole Hamels - 2.96 (2.93, 7th)
9. Mariano Rivera - 2.83 (2.33, 15th)
10. James Shields - 2.69 (2.27, Tied for 17th)

As you would expect, there’s more of a difference between the Year-to-Date and Remainder-of-Season results for Pitchers than there is for Hitters. While hitting stats are somewhat team dependent (e.g. - RBI, Runs Scored), a Pitcher’s Wins are much more team dependent, which makes them more difficult to predict accurately.

In my next post I’ll take a look at the Top 10 Hitters in an AL-only format.

Until then,

The Sherpa