Answers to fantasy baseball questions since 1996
{ Monthly Archives }
Major League Baseball : Fantasy : Ask Rotoman
The new column features a look at potential power sources down the stretch, a comparison of Curtis Granderson and Brian Anderson, a damning evaluation of Corey Patterson (for this year, anyway), and a hatful of names who might come up come September 1.
Timmy of The Roto Authority turns us on to this excellently informative site covering current major league contract.
Keeping up with contracts is a big job, and this anonymous fan from Kansas says they are not official, but are drawn from reported sources. He or she does not say they’ll keep it up forever, but for now it’s a nice site with a ton of good information.
For those of us interested in how steroids have shaped the game, this BP writer has a lot of thoughts, but doesn’t draw any conclusions except for the obvious one: There are too many variables and too much we don’t know (like, who actually has taken steroids and when) to feel comfortably right getting too definite.
Most salient point, that even now there are plenty of performance enhancing drugs that won’t be detected by any drug screen.
Those who have followed the issue closely won’t find a lot new here, but it is a reasonable survey of what’s in play and what’s at stake.
Major League Baseball : Ask Rotoman
The new column is up, with a ranking of mid-level starting pitchers for next year, a three-for-one deal invloving the D-Train and A-Sor, questions of double-dealing, and a look at whether Matt Morris is hurt or just has a dead arm. The latter is better.
The new Ask Rotoman column is posted at mlb.com, considering Jason Bay vs. Mark Prior, explaining why pitcher’s get unearned runs when they make the error, discussing how it looks for Jim Thome and Oliver Perez in the last seven weeks, and evaluating Adam Eaton.
This week’s column is posted. Felix Hernandez is in the house. So is Kyle Farnsworth, a whole passel of wannabe closers, too many second basemen, and a look at what makes a save. You can read it at mlb.com, on the fantasy page.
Baseball Prospectus just had a free week, where you got to taste the offerings if you aren’t a subscriber. This story by Joe Sheehan has a chart that shows standings for one-run games and regular games. His point seems to be, well, let him tell it: ” What follows are two sets of standings: record in one-run games, and record in other games. I think it’s illustrative of the point that the latter is more indicative of team quality than the former.
Record in one-run games is essentially the team version of player performance in whatever clutch situation (late-inning pressure situations, runners in scoring position, et al) you care to measure. It’s not predictive, and is generally unrelated to overall quality. Within a season, however, it is valuable and can be the difference between success and failure.”
If the archive is free, however, take a look at the standings. The Blue Jays are atop the AL East standings, if you take out their pitiful record in one-run games. And the Marlins are neck and neck with the Braves in games that aren’t determined by one run. It is a canard that a team’s record in one-run games is determined more by luck than anything else, but that doesn’t mean those records are completely determined by it’s luck. It’s just flashier to imply that they are.
Our problem is that we tend to take the limited knowledge we have about the game, based always on small samples, and try to extrapolate greater knowledge. The guys at BP hit this wall every day because their whole reason for being is to demonstrate that the oundation of baseball is scientifc (or at least mathmatically consistent). But while this approach helps illuminate all sorts of bad thinking about the game, as Bill James demonstrated a long time ago, almost every effort since to extend that realm further based on the science of baseball statistics falls flat, because in reality the margins are so wide that at any given moment anything can happen.
It seems the game is a lot like poker. Skill matters, for sure, but the really interesting thing is trying to figure out how much it can encroach on the dominion of luck. Which is why the game is so darned fun to follow, and why Sheehan shouldn’t waste his time explaining what made him write off the Astros and A’s back in May. The answer? Showbiz, baby. He’s providing it, his readers are buying it.
Will Carroll has a story today outlining what is actually known about the Rafael Palmeiro suspension. It’s good stuff, as usual, mostly because Will writes clearly and for the most part limits what he says to what is known. All else he labels clearly as conjecture.
The key issue here is whether Palmeiro could have tested positive to drugs other than steroids. The secrecy of the whole process forces us to assume the worst, and heck, maybe we should. I don’t know.
I would have said before this that Palmeiro was a very dubious Hall of Famer. Now, oddly, this diamond in the rough is getting more famous for being the first big fish to test positive (and to point his finger at Congress). On the latter point I have a feeling we haven’t heard the last word, and the penalties for perjury in front of Congress are severe.
It could get much more ugly before it’s over.
