Category Scarcity

We often hear about position scarcity in baseball. I've believed in drafting and trading based on this scarcity and its helped me win leagues. Now I'm wondering if "category scarcity" is a better way of winning?

I ran the numbers for our league based on projections. Yes, projections are often wrong and often based on prior performance as opposed to skills, capabilities and leading indicators. What I found is that some categories are more variable than others. For example, the whip category has very little variance across all teams (less than 15% difference), whereas the loss category (which we added for pitching a few years back to balance the streaming strategy with the traditional strategy) has the largest variance. Sure, you're forced to put players in positions as a constraint, but the actual game is played in categories. I think maybe its a good idea to focus a little more on the most variable categories?

In our league, if the projections are half decent, the most variable categories are (for pitching, in order) losses, saves, quality starts, strikeouts, era, whip. For hitting, the most variable categories are stolen bases, strikeouts, hr, RBI, runs, batting average (in order).

I think I might focus on the most variable categories assuming that I can stay competitive in the "lucky" close categories.

Wish me luck!

Prep Time

I finally found a few minutes to start preparing for 2013 fantasy last night. I started with NCAA where I pulled out the Hovell Index xls and started filling it out. The first two columns are "week 12 rank" and "week 16 rank". Then there's a column to see the difference between those two columns. That helps me get a feel for which teams are hot and which teams are falling. Then I pull up the rosters and stats for each of the top 25. I'm looking at depth (which is the number of guys that play more than 10 minutes per game) and I'm looking at height of the starting 5. That's as far as I got last night. When it's done, I will have watched many games, listened to the experts and filled out the Hovell Index (which is on Wikipedia), to select my winner.

Then I moved to baseball. I'm so excited to try an auction draft this year! I pulled out my baseball template and I bought the exclusive pack on rotoexperts.com. I copied their projections and auction values into my xls. I started with 620 hitters and I took it down to 320, which is still way more than the 175 that I estimate will go in our draft. I deleted a lot of hitters because we use strikeouts as a negative hitting category and guys that have zero k's were jumping up too high in my ranks (be ayes they were leaders in one of six categories).

It was fascinating to see a few guys pop up higher on my chart than what any experts say. I'd put their names here but sorry I don't have my xls in front of me at the moment. I also created a position scarcity chart because I like to use that as one of my inputs. It looks like this year there are some clear tiers at each position, even in the outfield.

Next, I'll finish my NCAA xls with all of the team data and then I'll finish pitching on my baseball xls. Then I'll need to run some mock drafts and determine exactly who I'm targeting in the draft...

2013 getting underway!

We've decided to switch from "wins" to "quality starts" in baseball, so I'm starting my planning for that. We thought about switching from saves to saves+holds, but that didn't pass a league vote.

For NCAAB, I've started recording games and watching them, I don't have any early favorites yet, it seems to me that this year might be really hard to predict (which is great!)

Rules Call

We just finishing scheduling our annual "rules call" for our fantasy league. We use doodle.com to find a time when everyone is available. We've struggled for years as to which technology is best for holding the conversation (since we're all in different locations). This year we're going with freeconferencecall.com - I'd really like to use a google+ hangout, but I think the installation and the 'first time' for people might make it tricky for the whole group. We'll be discussing everything from 'do we still want to have 4 sports we compete in' to what the league costs/awards to the rules for each sport to anything else we can think of. Should be fun - not as fun as a draft, but still something to look forward to!

Lincecum

I'm beginning to hear player by player analysis, which is great! Most experts agreed that Lincecum would struggle last year and it turned out to be mostly true. Now I'm hearing that he might be a value this year. I think I'll agree because the numbers picked up in the second half and stayed fairly consistent. So, I'll be in on the bidding for lincecum this year and not staying away like I did last year.

Baseball Prep

I was listening to some of the recap of the FSTA draft tonight on Sirius XM Fantasy Radio. I found this link with the results of that snake draft - http://www.rtsports.com/SiriusXM - of course the analysis is the more interesting part. I heard some talk about 'stars n scrubs' vs the balanced approach, it appears that most experts prefer the balanced approach, which I do think I'll employ in our auction draft this year. I'll probably skip the magazines again this year and go with Scott Engel's rotoexperts predictions - http://rotoexperts.com/category/mlb/

NCAAB Strategy

Late January, right as the football playoffs are wrapping up, is when I start to dvr as many ncaab games as possible. I'll watch the first half at 2x speed and then I'll watch the last few minutes at regular speed if its close. I can usually get a pretty good feel for the top 25 this way. Then right after valentines day I create "the Hovell index" which is documented on Wikipedia. The Hovell index had a run of predicting the winner for like 8 straight years, but the last few years haven't been as good. The Hovell index has about 12 categories including strength of schedule, defensive rank, foul shot %, head coach strength, etc. I follow that index to the t and pick my winner. Lets see how it does this year!