Introduction
When my final adjustments for the 2004 season were made, an interesting thing happened to most ranking lists generated by RotoRank. The top tier of pitchers all substantially increased in value. This sudden rise has triggered a lot of questions from inquiring minds about why this happened, so I thought I’d address everyone at once.
I have explained League Value in several of my older articles, so some of you may never have read about it or may have chosen to ignore it. The League Value represents the number of categories a player can be expected to contribute toward your final standings above and beyond the average MLB player. So, the higher the League Value of a player, the greater the chance he has to contribute to your team's final statistics above the Average MLB Player.
Baseline Value
A new item I plan to display on reports next year is the baseline value for a league. The baseline value will be the average projections of a hitter or pitcher for the upcoming season, based upon your league's configuration. These baseline stats will represent the expected statistics a player with a RotoRank League Value of Zero should (on average) contribute to your team.
For example, let’s assume a fantasy league with 30 teams that tries to mimic MLB lineup configurations exactly. I compute the hitter’s baseline by taking the top 30 C, 1B, 2B, 3B, and SS plus the top 90 OF’s to represent each team’s MLB starting lineup. To compute the pitchers baseline, I take the top 150 starting pitchers and the top 150 relief pitchers. Once I have established this baseline value, I take players in the database, and I compare their stats to the baseline. If the player has the best statistics above the average player for a specific category, they earn a value of 1 (100%) for that particular category. If a player has the worst statistics in that category, they earn a value of –1 (-100%) for that specific category. A players overall RotoRank League Value add up the statistical value they earned in each of your league's categories, and if a player's positive contributions balance out his negative contributions, then he is similar to the overall average player and has a RotoRank League Value of Zero.
So, for a pitcher in a 5 by 5 Rotisserie League, the maximum league value they could potentially earn is 5. We all know that this is unrealistic, since no pitcher will lead the league in Saves and Wins, but if there were ever a pitcher who did, he’d be at the maximum. The same is true for hitters in a 5 by 5 league. If a player would dominate HR, R, RBI, AVG, and SB in a given year, his League Value would be 5. We all know that hitters are more likely to contribute to their 5 categories than a pitcher can to their 5 categories, so in most cases, hitters will rank higher than pitchers.
The reason why top pitchers seem to be prominent in the top two rounds of my latest projections is due to the fact that even at best, a pitcher will likely only contribute in 4 categories, but the top tier pitchers dominate those 4 categories above the baseline, that they become more valuable than most hitters. Hitters may contribute to all five categories, but there are far more hitters that surpass the baseline values than pitchers.
The Pitchers’ baseline has less variance in its calculations, meaning that a majority of the players perform near the average, and there are only a few cases where pitchers are very good or very bad against the average. On the other hand, Hitters have a bunch of players grouped well above the average and a bunch of players grouped well below the average, so stud hitters won’t stand out as much as a stud pitcher!
When I lowered Mark Prior’s statistics due to his injury, the bar was lowered for where the small top tier pitchers were grouped, so without Prior’s dominance in innings, strikeouts, and ERA to suppress the rest of the pitchers comparisons against the maximum values, they all increased in value. But this alone didn’t propel the shift in rankings. I also upgrade a lot of lower tier players, who then increased the baseline average for hitters and thus decreased the value of hitters across the board.
League Value
If you closely look at league value, most player grades have a group of players within a very tight range of values. So, in theory, a slight increase in one player’s stats in that group will shift them from the top to the bottom of the group.
The League Value allows me to create the player grades and the draft flexibility you need to use the expert draft guide. Just because a player is graded an “A+” doesn’t mean you have to take him in round one. It just means that his ending value for the 2004 season will have him worth a first round pick. So, if you continually draft players who are rated higher than the round you are in, you are maximizing your draft day value.
Negative Values
Sometimes it may be necessary to take a player with a Negative Value. A Negative Value just means that the current player is not expected to out-perfrom the average MLB player statistics in your league. You will mostly see this situation when taking guys like a Henry Mateo who may only get 100 at-bats but get 11 stolen bases. Those stolen bases may be critical to your final standings, but you team would have likely done better if you found a player with a positive RotoRank League Value.
Conclusion
My draft system doesn’t try to predict draft order of your draft. It is impossible to predict the human element of the draft! Even if everyone in the league were using the same RotoRank draft list, your draft would not look like the rankings on the reports, because everyone has different strategies for building a team, so they may not take an outfielder when RotoRank suggests they take one!
If you feel more comfortable seeing the lists as they were, where the top 6 picks mimic that of every other Fantasy Service on the market, let me know and I will be happy to put up a copy of the old database for you to use.
The difference in the projections don’t seem like a lot on my 3/24/04 Upgrade Notes, but there when they are all combined into the mix, the impact is much greater than you’d anticipate unless you were a NASA Scientist, in which case, they know small changes can lead to big differences…
Remember, if you use the position scarcity analysis chart like I do, you’d just realize not to draft a starting pitcher in the first two rounds because they are more plentiful than the other high grade players, so you would be looking to draft an “A+” hitter of some sort in round 1, an “A” player in round 2, then in round 3, try to grab one of the remaining “A+” pitchers who slipped because most common draft guides are still using the projections they set in December last year as opposed to the latest information available.