Well since the baseball season is right around the corner, it's time to start thinking fantasy baseball. It has been a struggle over the last few years. I've been good at picking pitching but can't seem to get an offense together. Anyway bought this book last year but since fantasy ball was already in play I decided to skip it. Anyway classic story about the ups and downs of fantasy baseball. I was glad to see that others go through the same insanity. Although spending $50,000 on coming up with a team seems a bit excessive. I have been a big fan of the simple computer fantasy 5 x 5 league althought Roto seems to be a better more personal version.
Anyway I did have some issues with the book especially Ron Shandler's gripes with SABR. Being a member of SABR I don't think there is any problems with doing fantasy research. SABR is certainly not some high and mighty group purposing leaving a researcher out of the mix. Plenty of SABR researchers do consider projections to be in the realm of baseball research. It is too bad Ron didn't feel welcome. Perhaps he should give us a try again.
As I have thought in the past and what Sam says and I quote, "...51 percent of the final outcome. In other words, avoiding injuries and picking up sleepers was, at least in this league, more then half the battle. To Sig, this proves the that the Tout Wars championship turned heavily on one factor: luck. No matter how bright you are, he says, nobody on earth can routinely predict these extreme statistical deviations."
Finally Sam discusses a good analogy to the world of fantasy baseball especially between the statheads and the scouts. It is a football story detailing how the football is placed on the field after the ball carrier is tackled. The "spot" always seems to be a roll of the dice but then when the chains come out a 10 yard chain (is this why the US will never change to the metric system?) that isn't a finelly calibrated instrument is used to determine to a millimeter if the ball has past the first down marker. The analogy (or is it a metaphor) is that scouts preach the value of a good spot while the statheads are convinced you just need a more accurate chain. Neither of these two will ever truly get it right...you actually need to have them both get it right. "In the end, baseball is a game that turns on human tendencies, and human tendencies are fluid."
Final thing that made me go hmmm was that at the end of the season he gave teams a roto scoring and compared how they would do and what do you know the teams finished pretty closing in order of their records...so maybe us statheads aren't completely off the mark!
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