How To Rank and Value Fantasy Baseball Players For Points Leagues – Part 8

6 Responses

  1. David
    David at | | Reply

    Hi Tanner, I am a new and happy customer – thanks for your work. Two questions:

    1) How do I account for Ottoneu style leagues where we have a deep bench? Specifically, my confusion revolves around # of hitters vs. # of pitchers — there’s no set formula that all teams have to follow.

    2) I am surprised there was no input for setting % split on $hitters vs. $pitchers. I think I can figure out how to add those functions into Excel on my own, but I was wondering why you chose not to include that.

  2. Tanner
    Tanner at | | Reply

    Hi David,

    Great questions. I’ve actually been thinking about the concept of bench players lately because it’s something nobody ever seems to talk about.

    I think my conclusion is going to be that you essentially set roster sizes as if they are the starting lineups only. Then you back $1 out of the team salary for each bench player you’re allowed.

    I’m not very familiar with the exact Ottoneu setup, but it looks like 22 players. I’m guessing that’s 9 pitchers and 13 hitters. So in a 10 team league, 130 hitters and 90 pitchers would be above replacement level.

    It also looks like you have 18 bench players. So you would allocate $18 of your team budget to bench players. If it’s a $400 team salary, that would mean you’d put $382 for each team budget (this is the easiest way to do it without massively changing things).

    I do realize that people will surely spend more than $1 on many bench players. So you could adjust those amounts some. Maybe say $2 per bench player or more.

    But this gets into another topic I like to remind people of. The first option above, with $1 bench players, is the closest thing to determining the true value of players. Players on the bench can’t earn points for the team. So one could argue that they’re not worth anything.

    The more money you send toward the bench players, the more you are trying to model what prices players will go for and not necessarily what their value is or what they would contribute.

    Of course, I’m being a bit extreme here. Bench players are going to play… SOME. They’re going to contribute… SOME. Some of them will turn out to be better than the starters. Some starters will get hurt. And such deep benches hurts your ability to pick anyone up during the season. So it’s difficult to decide exactly how to handle these. Hopefully this helps get you thinking.

    I’m going to leave another comment about your second question.

  3. David
    David at | | Reply

    Thanks for the prompt reply. Regarding your bench discussion — that segues a bit into a related topic: how to value players that in leagues that allow daily lineup changes (side point: this is an issue for leagues with deep benches as well as an issue for leagues that allow daily transactions). Our league mimics Ottoneu in featuring large benches and daily lineup changes, but it only allows transactions once a week.

    This specifically creates an issue with valuing platoon hitters, expected mid-season rookie call-ups, players returning from injuries and relief pitchers. Each one of these types will have depressed $ valuations due to insufficient playing time. In a league with no bench it is legitimate for their $ values to take a hit, but in a league that has very deep benches an adjustment is in order b/c you’re not going to get zero points out of that player’s lineup slot when your player is out. I was toying around with the idea of adding in expected replacement value (at that position) PTS for the games the player will miss — what do you think?

    I am more confused about how to value SPs vs RPs. The scoring system awards far more points to SPs than RPs because it awards 7.4 points per IP, but RPs score significantly more PTS/IP (there is a cap of 1500 IP/team). Given the deep roster sizes it isn’t unreasonable for a team to load up on quality relievers and maximize their point totals by maximizing the % share of IPs from RPs relative to SPs. Of course, the cost to this strategy is devoting more total roster spots to RPs and being a more active manager in rotating in relievers expected to play on a given day…but it seems like a very sound strategy. Back to the point: I think such leagues require separating SPs from RPs b/c otherwise reliever values turn out to be too low. What I am wondering is how to capture the PTS/IP component of this dynamic. It isn’t immediately clear to me how to do that. Any thoughts?

Leave a Reply to Tanner Bell Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.