Valuing your Picks (2016)

February 27, 2016

Ah, the snake draft. A time-honored tradition of fantasy baseball players unwilling to commit 8 hours of their lives to an auction draft every year. For those of us in keeper leagues, this time of year brings the additional joyous task of trying to strategize for the upcoming draft. Do you trade away players for picks and rebuild in the draft? Trade away picks for players to strengthen your core team? Try to steal away the most undervalued players in the league before their owners realize what they have? Cut any number of ways, if you start throwing draft picks on the table at some point you’ll arrive at the question… what is a draft pick worth, anyway?

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Draft with Tiers (2016)

February 20, 2016

It may come off as odd to say this, as a purveyor of the best draft tool around, but draft tools can’t do everything. One of the great subtleties to drafting in fantasy baseball is seeing and exploiting tiers within each position. While the Big Board will help you see them, it’s another thing to plan for them and make sure you avoid the biggest dropoffs in each position on draft day

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The Hit/Pitch Split (2016)

February 15, 2016

As one of the literally tens of readers that has visited this site this year, you’ve surely downloaded the Big Board by now (or at least the demo). And upon opening the ‘Settings’ box for the first time, you’ve come across this seemingly innocuous box entitled Hitter%:

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Breaking Down the /r/fantasybaseball Mock Draft

February 5, 2016

Mock draft season is here! After sadly missing out (damn you, pacific time zone) on the /r/fantasybaseball mock draft put on this Wednesday for the /r/baseball crossover day, I figured it’d be fun to at least take a look at how everyone did. As always, we’ll look to the Big Board, which will be used to produce every image and bit ‘o analysis that follows. It is the best tool around for finding all the answers to who had the best draft, who drafted the best sleepers, and who just couldn’t resist drafting Blake Snell to piss off /u/fawkesmulder.

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New Feature: Aging Curves (2016)

January 5, 2016

A question that tends to pop up around this time of year: “When does fantasy baseball season start?” Of course, we all know that fantasy baseball season never ends, especially for those of us in keeper and dynasty leagues. To wit, Brad Johnson’s “Keeper Questions” thread posted just yesterday at FanGraphs is now sitting at 350 comments and growing. As we all collectively count the days ‘til spring training and opening day, one of the most oft-discussed and most subjectively-answered topics is “Who do I keep?” Fantasy baseball players intuitively understand the idea of aging, at least qualitatively. Older players are less valuable, given that their performance is more likely to decrease due to both injury and ineffectiveness. But how much is age worth, really?

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Changes to FG projections…

March 9, 2015

The @fangraphs depth chart projections, combining ZIPS/Steamer with manual playing time forecasts, are now sortable. http://t.co/4xe4BNj7eE — David Cameron (@DCameronFG) March 6, 2015 Trying to figure out which playing time estimates to trust now… stay tuned. Update 1: Jared’s explanation of where Steamer IP/PA currently come from. @RyanEBrock First, we should have the same GS

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Breaking Down the BIGz Equation for z-Scores

March 2, 2015

z-Score: a statistical measurement of a score’s relationship to the mean in a group of scores. A z-score of 0 means the score is the same as the mean. A z-score can also be positive or negative, indicating whether it is above or below the mean and by how many standard deviations. 

After throwing around the terms z-score and BIGz somewhat haphazardly on this site, I figured the time has come to explain where it all comes from. For the math-inclined individuals among you (and you play fantasy baseball, so I’m not sure why I have to qualify that), this will hopefully satiate your need to understand where all the numbers in the Big Board come from. This is also going to theoretically empower you to create your own Big Board, but hey, save yourself some (read as: A LOT of) time and buy the one hosted on these very interweb-pages. More generally, this breaks down one of the more popular methods for creating player rankings and dollar values, sometimes referred to as ‘FVARz’ for Fantasy Value Above Replacement z-scores as popularized by Zach Sanders of Fangraphs.

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First Mock Draft of the Season

February 3, 2015

The Super Bowl is over and that means one very important thing – baseball is almost here! I may have spent all offseason playing around with the Big Board, but it’s been quite some time since I last busted out the spreadsheets and got down to drafting. I wasn’t sure what to expect out of Howard Bender’s (@rotobuzzguy) Mock Draft Army but I have to say I was pretty happy with my team after going up against a draft room of experts. What follows is a breakdown* of my team from the Mock Draft Army #3 last Tuesday. I had the first pick. First thing’s first – full draft results available here. *One thing to note is I’ll be referencing ‘surplus value’ throughout the post, which I’m defining as the difference between the $ value of any given pick (e.g. pick 24 is worth $27) and the projected $ value for each player as determined by my ‘Big Board’ (e.g. Felix Hernandez is worth $36)

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