Strategy

Posts involving ways to become a more strategic fantasy baseball player.

What Is The Ideal Spending Allocation Between Pitchers and Hitters?

What Is The Ideal Spending Allocation Between Pitchers and Hitters?

This topic came up recently and a number of well-respected fantasy experts discussed and debated the topic.  I’m not here to rehash what they said, but hopefully to offer some points I didn’t see made in the discussions.

If you want to catch up on exactly what has previously been said:

Before Twitter, we didn’t have this kind of access into theoretical discussions about fantasy baseball.  It’s great to see this kind of back-and-forth and hashing out of ideas from a knowledgeable and respected group of fantasy writers.  So what can I offer to this?

Cherry Picking

I will pull two specific tweets out of the discussion.  Let’s start with this one from Kreutzer:

A lot of explanations were thrown out to explain the popular 70-30 hitter allocation, but I think this makes the most sense. Kreutzer gives very specific figures in Part 1 of his explanation of this topic, and specifically mentions that the average return on investment for all hitters in expert leagues was 88% (or a loss of 12%). For pitchers the return was 32% (or a loss of 68%).  Keep this in mind.  We’ll come back to these figures later.

In Part 2 he discusses the concept of “free loot”, or valuable fantasy stats that were not drafted but find their way onto rosters in your league during the year.

Alright, I’m starting to understand the reason for hitters to be allocated more money.  Why try to buy pitching stats during the draft if value from pitchers is difficult to predict accurately and if I can just wait until the season starts to pick up valuable players on from the free agent pool anyways.

But Is 70-30 “Correct”? (more…)

Strategy Tip - Widen Your Frame

Strategy Tip – Widen Your Frame

You are in the middle of the pack in the league standings, with your biggest opportunity to gain rotisserie points being in HR and RBI.  Your other offensive categories are solid, but you recognize that the batting average category is tightly contested.  If your team batting average were to drop a few points it would cause you to plummet in the category.

You have received this trade offer:

You Give Player A:  projected for .290 BA, 80 R, 16 HR, 65 RBI, 15 SB

You Get Player B:  projected for .245 BA, 80 R, 26 HR, 85 RBI, 5 SB

Trades like this are difficult to evaluate.  Are the additional 10 HR and 20 RBI worth the 45 point decline in BA?

The proposed deal looks great from a HR and RBI perspective.  But you have concerns about the batting average aspect.  You believe the points you will gain in HR and RBI will be canceled out by the loss in batting average.

So you reject the deal.

Framing

Enter the concept of framing, or the lens through which you view and evaluate decisions. In the scenario above, this decision was made strictly under the assumption that this was a one-for-one trade.

While the offer was a one-for-one trade, you should not treat it that way.  This is a narrow point of view.  Your decision making can improve dramatically if you widen your frame.

Back To The Example

It’s short sighted to believe that this would be the only transaction you would make to solve your HR and RBI problem.  Whether you accept this trade offer or not, your next step is probably to evaluate your bench players against the free agent list and take action there to add HR and RBI potential or to protect yourself in BA.

You’re not going to cut Player A.  It will be someone else on the chopping block.  Someone like Bench Player X.

Bench Player X:  projected for .260, 60 R, 18 HR, 65 RBI, 5 SB

And let’s assume there are two interesting free agent candidates available:

Free Agent Y:  projected for .295, 60 R, 12 HR, 60 RBI, 10 SB

Free Agent Z:  projected for .250, 65 R, 22 HR, 65 RBI, 5 SB

Player X (and the free agents) should be included in your analysis of the trade.  Widen your decision making frame. (more…)