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Looking Back: Some Hitter Profit and Loss Charts for 2013

In recent years Mike Gianella has done exhaustive reviews of the previous year’s fantasy prices and compared them to what actually happened on his site Roto Think Thank. One of the features I liked was that he included my bid prices in the review, so I could see how I (more…)

2013 Earnings By Position

The spreadsheet that follows shows the amount of earnings by players at each position last year. The idea is to give some idea about the depth of talent that’s out there, so I also show the number and percentage of players who earned more than $15 in 2013. The dollar (more…)

Comparing OBP and BA Earnings for 2013

Using On Base Percentage instead of Batting Average, as Tout Wars is going to do in the AL and NL leagues this year, changes hitter values. As you might expect, hitters who walk a lot or get hit by a lot of pitchers, go up in value, as we see (more…)

Top 10 Most Misunderstood Fantasy Baseball Concepts: 10. Position Scarcity

In shallow draft leagues position scarcity is definitely a factor, but in deep leagues much less so. And there nearly everyone calculates it incorrectly. How important is position scarcity? In auctions position scarcity isn’t a pricing issue. Even in shallow auctions. The key is making sure that the pool of (more…)

A new project this year: Month by Month Roto Prices

Since April, at the end of each month I’ve been posting roto prices for all players. You can find the end of June prices here. Prices through the end of the year in a spreadsheet are here. These prices are scaled so that the Top 216 pitchers and the top (more…)

Can’t Anyone Here Play This Game?

Since we started Tout Wars in 1998, three leagues involving 470 participant seasons have vied for 36 titles. That’s 36 winners, for those scoring at home, and 434 losers. Consider the number of multiple winners and the situation is further distilled: Larry Schechter: Five Mike Lombardo: Three Ron Shandler: Three (more…)

Blast from the Past: My 1996 Crystal Ball

The first bit of real writing about fantasy baseball I had published was a long story accompanying my baseball projections in the 1996 edition of Peter Golenbock’s How to Win at Rotisserie Baseball. It has a lot to say about projecting baseball stats, not all of it up to date (more…)

Projections are Not the Same as Prices

Winning at playing fantasy baseball has two obvious components: 1) Good Player Projections, and 2) Accurate Player Pricing. It is, one assumes, most helpful to have the best projections, because they tell us what players are going to do. The best set of projections would give you the best idea (more…)

What is a projection?

When I was growing up an astrologist named Jeane Dixon was famous because she had predicted that President John F. Kennedy would be assassinated before he actually was. She was a popular author and newspaper columnist who regularly published her predictions of what was to come and many people bought (more…)