Expecting Success: How do the top players rank at the end of April?

Reading Ron Shandler’s story at USA Today yesterday, Fantasy’s First Round Has Been Filled With Busts, I realized in my recent series looking back at how fast starters and slow starters in April 2013 performed over the whole year, that I never looked at how the best players might do (more…)

The April Earnings Spreadsheet is Posted

5×5 prices for hitters and pitchers for April 2014, along with Consensus preseason prices. How are your guys doing versus expectations? Find out here. Share this:EmailLinkedInFacebookTwitterMorePrintPinterest (more…)

LINK: A lesson in variance, as much as anything.

The Hardball Times is running a series of articles by their writers about what they learned doing a project. Dan Szymborski wrote about projecting player performance and Mitchel Lichtman wrote about defensive statistics. Very good stuff. A guy named Matt Hunter writes about creating a baseball simulator, which he has done, (more…)

Fast-and-Slow-Starting Cheap Hitters!

We’re looking at the April 2013 earnings of hitters. When we slice and dice the cheap guys, those who sank in the auction because no one felt the need to bid them up, we come up with 25 such hitters who earned more than $5 in April. These are guys who (more…)

Hot and Cold Starts for Hitters. Do they mean anything?

So, we learned that if you paid real money for a pitcher and he had a bad April, chances were pretty good he would bounce back to be the pitcher you hoped for in subsequent months (if not for the year as a whole). But if you didn’t pay a (more…)

More Fun With Monthly Charts and Starting Pitchers

So, the “trusted” hurlers who fail in the first month bounce back some of the way afterwards. They don’t continue to be so dismal, thank goodness. But what about the guys we didn’t trust that much in the first place? This chart shows the 15 starters who had the worst (more…)

Handling a Pitcher’s Slow Start

Rereading my post over at Shandler Park today, I was struck that it might be useful to look at the outcomes for pitchers last year who started the season off badly. That is, they had a bad April. But when I started looking at the spreadsheet my first impulse was (more…)

LINK: Month X Month Pitcher Volatility

Last year I started calculating month x month 5×5 values, in large part to see how much the plus-value pools of hitters and pitchers varied from month to month. When Ron Shandler debuted his monthly games last July there was another application for this information. Ron has published a piece (more…)

A Question of Value

Between updating the Patton $ projections and preparing for Tout Wars and the XFL 17 round reserve draft, and just a little bit of civilian life, time is speeding past. I wanted to talk briefly here about the idea of value. In Tout Wars I bought a team that is (more…)

Top 10 Most Misunderstood Fantasy Baseball Concepts: No. 1. The Salary Cap

$260 per team. $3120 per league. These are the bedrock facts of Rotisserie baseball pricing. The NL screwed things up for a while, when 16 teams led most roto leagues to play with 13 teams. $3380 doesn’t resonate quite the same way, but the principle is quite the same when (more…)