No, I’m not talking about the newest version of Madden.

Rather, I want to know, are your fantasy football players into fantasy football themselves? If so, maybe they care about getting stats for your team.

Don’t believe me? Check out Chris Cooley leading a fantasy draft for his Redskins teammates - Campbell probably is going to care how Cooley does now..

My favorite part’s at about 1:50 in when one of the guys picks a Cowboy and the rest of the team jumped on his back.

Technorati Tags: Fantasy Football,Chris Cooley,NFL Players playing Fantasy Sports

Last week I was scanning the HR leaders and Alex  Rodriguez, the perennial HR competitor leading the A.L. with 54 in 2007 was not on the list. What? Could the reality be catching up to the hype.

Say what you will about the end of the steroid era (see our post on if the Steroid Era really happened..) or the probability of an off year or the weakest Yankee batting order since the short and painful Garry Sheffield era… I know all these thoughts are going through your mind.

To address the most prestigious and recently tainted crowning achievement in all of sports, the HR record, we have to talk about pace.

Here is what I did. I plotted HRs/AB as the critical pace metric for Bonds, Aaron, A-Rod, and Pujols  - why not, right?

Take a look and draw your own conclusions. I want to hear what you think. Is A-Rod on track?

Technorati Tags: A-Rod,Home Run record,HR record,Baseball

Managers,
Yeah, I usually do a *Mid*-season report.  (last year i didn’t do one at all).  And this year I was in Guatemala over the All-Star Break.  Hey what can i say, better late than never, right?  But since I don’t have the time and patience to do this whole deal at once, and you guys probably don’t have the patience to read it all at once…I’m splitting it into 2 parts.  Real baseball awards this time.  And our fantasy league awards next time.

So MLB…feel free to comment/gripe/respond…

It’s been an interesting year.  Since Clemens and Bonds aren’t actively playing, we haven’t had to hear their names 250 times a day like we did during the pre-season.  And we’ve come across some new names…like Carlos Quentin?!?!  who is this guy?

With the exception of the AL West, all the division battles are feverish right now…..

Best Surprise Team:  Tampa Bay “don’t call them Devil” Rays
These guys win by a landslide.  First place in the AL East!!!  They’re 40-16 at home!  And they got a great bullpen…they’re 19-11 in one-run games (only the Brewers are better, thanks to Ryan Braun and not *their* bullpen).  No one should be asking whether these guys are for real at this point… we’re 110 games deep into the season.  Stacked when healthy, what’s scary is they could be even healthier, and imagine if Carl Crawford was having even a decent year.  Young players with huge chips on their shoulders, they’re pretty much a bunch of thugs.  Don’t know why the Red Sox and Yankees keep beaning them, cuz i sure as hell would be hiding behind the gatorade cooler in a fight with these guys, they’re ripped.  We’ll see if their inexperience starts to show down the stretch.

Honorable Mention:  The next tier is tough… a lot of surprises this year.  Cardinals and Twins are playing great baseball under the radar.  How do they keep doing it?  I’ll never count out the Twins ever ever again (i’ve said that so many times).  Cubs and White Sox are playing well, but they’ve got star power.  So I have to go with the Florida Marlins for now, who are only a game or two back in a tough NL East, with a bunch of no-names.  Unfortunately, it’s temporary….  their run scoring differential is -30!!!  The other teams on this list, and more importantly in their division, are all +50 or much more.  The Marlins are gonna be toast.  Well, it’s amazing they’ve been lucky this long.  I thought they’d be bottom of the barrel.

Most Disappointing Team:  Cleveland Indians.
The year started out with Detroit winning this category, but things have changed.  The Indians have become sellers!  I’m shocked.  I picked these guys to win their division over a Tigers team I predicted for 1,000 runs this year.  They have (or had) strong starting pitching but have no bullpen.  Offensively, I’m not sure what the problem is.  they’re just playing sub-par it seems.  As a team, their record is beyond disappointing.

Honorable Mention:  A bunch in the next tier again… Colorado, San Diego.  and until recently you had Detroit, Yankees, and Mets in this category.  But i have to go with a last place team…Seattle.  I’m sure many of you would disagree, but for me it’s the Mariners…even over the Rockies and last-place Padres.  I thought these guys would be up there playing ball with the Angels.  But I also thought they’d hang in there last year too.

Management to be Fired:  I have to throw the Mets in here.  cuz as much as I like Willie, he has to go…oh wait, he’s already gone?…when did that happen?  oh, they fired him at 3am while he was on a road trip?  real classy there, guys.  he didn’t deserve that.  that was so weak.  I thought GM Omar would be gone by now too (well, i thought he’d be gone last year).  So if i have to pick the next manager to be fired, i’ll just go with Dusty Baker.  he should’ve been fired last year too.  i’ll just put Dusty Baker in this spot every year, regardless of whether or where he’s managing.  i can’t believe anyone gives that guy money.  otherwise maybe the Braves really want to shake things up and move Bobby Cox out of town and fire him in the middle of the night on a roadtrip too.  But in all seriousness, Seattle management has really messed things up badly.  They will be in last place in the AL West for years to come.

Best Trade:  Yankees win with Pudge for Kyle Farnsworth?!?!  Yes Pudge is old, but they got him for a box of rocks.  And also getting Nady and Marte in another trade.  All without selling their future.

Worst Trade:  So the Red Sox give up 2 prospects to downgrade from Manny to Jason Bay?  i can’t think about that move anymore.  Although there’s a big defensive upgrade here.  And Jason Bay’s batting stats are very good this year.  So it will be about consistency.  Will it be the Jason Bay from 2007 or the good version?  There’s some risk here, although Manny is risky too.

Another trade I actually hate is the Angels move to trade Kotchman for Teixeira.  Yes, it’s a short-term upgrade.  But they already have the best record in baseball!  They’re running away with the division and guaranteed to make the playoffs!!  How much difference is this slight upgrade really gonna make?  Anything can happen in the playoffs.  Then what?  Are they gonna sign Tex long-term for $15 Million/yr?  he aint’ worth the super big bucks, but they pretty much have to sign him just to justify the swap.  while Kotchman, who is younger and less injury-prone, also the toughest man to strike out in the major leagues which works real well in their base-running hit-and-run offense, with so much future potential, makes so much less money.  couldn’t they use that money to… sign F-Rod maybe?!!!??!!  or Lackey?!?!!!  stupid stupid stupid.  they will regret it.

I was gonna do some predictions on MVP and Cy Young and stuff, but it’s too early.  I have no idea.

Pennant Race…
AL East:  Rays (they hang on)
AL Central:  White Sox (Twins drop off)
AL West:  Angels
AL WC:  Yankees (eventhough no moves for SP, they got better…while Red Sox didn’t)

NL East:  Phillies (sorry Mets fans, but all things being equal, Phillies made moves and Mets didn’t…they’ll quit again down the stretch)
NL Central:  Cubs (Harden addition is huge, takes some pressure off Lilly and Dempster.  they all go deep in games.  their bullpen will be fresh)
NL West:  Dodgers (Yes, Manny is enough.  it’s a weak division.  trade 2 prospects and get Manny. and now they get to blindfold Andruw Jones, drive him out to Nevada and drop him off somewhere.)
NL WC:  Milwaukee (CC and healthy Sheets.  dangerous in a 5 game series.  first time in the playoffs.)

Divisional (best of 5):
Angels crush the Yankees in 4.  Rays beat the White Sox in 5.
Cubs beat Brewers in 5.  Phillies beat Dodgers in 4.

Conference (best of 7):
Angels beat the Rays in one of the best 7-game series we’ve ever seen.
Cubs beat the Phillies in 6.

World Series:
Cubs beat the Angels in 6.

anyway, stay tuned for Part II at some point soon with comments and awards on our Fantasy League…

- Jason Chen

Meet my team. A prolific roster of 22 studs top to bottom. I’ve got power, I’ve got speed, I’ve got K’s and SV’s. Favored to finish in the top and likely to take it all.

Then the season started and the injuries started to mount. Of 22 picks during the draft, 16 have missed considerable time due to injury or complete inadequacy (i.e. Rich Hill). We have 6 bench spots in my league; so really, I’ve lost my entire starting roster (check out the body count at the end of this post). 

The result of this horrendous luck? I’m in 15^th place out of 16 teams.  I was convinced that I’d really angered the Fantasy Gods, and here at DraftMVP HQ, the guys were more than willing to make fun of my team. But as we started chatting about it, we realized that it wasn’t just my team that was weighed down by injuries. When Juan Pierre went on the DL for the first time in his career, we started to scratch our heads and ask “what is going on?” So, we dug into the stats and sure enough, there are some really interesting insights:

• 2008 is already an atypical year with a much higher injury rate than any of the previous 20 seasons

• Batters and Pitchers have been similarly impacted

• The “studs” – year in, year out top picks – have been absolutely decimated. Take a look at the top 30 injured players – huge names in there

So what should you do about it? If you’re like me and your team is at the bottom of the heap due to some nasty luck, you need to get your roster healthy.. FAST. Here are a few tips:

• Saving roster spots for guys on the DL is going to hurt you more than it has in the past. Several of your healthy players are likely to miss some time in the 2^nd half of the season and each bench spot saved for someone who isn’t a predictable backup is a bench spot wasted.
• You might want to hang on to guys like J.J. Putz, but for the most part, having a healthy player in hand is worth more than the player with potential. You need that flexibility in your roster.
• Entertaining trade offers for your injured guys is always worthwhile, but this year it might be the strategy that helps you climb out of the cellar. Knowing what we know of the injury patterns, it’s pretty safe to say that you might be able to weaken other teams in your league by sending them some of your long-shots. Don’t be too proud to win at the expense of your competitionJ. On the other hand, if you’ve got a team that’s avoided major injuries and is at the top of your league, you have some different choices to make.

Some things you should be doing as we approach the All-Star break:

• Take a hard look at your roster and figure out if any of your starters have a history of injuries and has thus far managed to avoid them. You should be thinking about trading them, right away.
•  If, in addition to having some vulnerability in your starting roster, you’ve also got several players on your bench who fit this profile, you really need to cut some dead weight and get yourself more reliable backups.-          Say no to bargain trades for injured stars. They’re going to take up a roster space and expecting the player to come back and stay healthy is just wishful thinking.
• Trade for solid backups. Depth at positions that are weak on the waiver wire (catchers, shortstops, second basemen) could be a good strategy.
•  Place a premium on multi-position eligible guys who are healthy. Whatever you do, don’t close your eyes to this season’s reality: players are getting injured more often and if you haven’t bought insurance against it, you’re going to end up feeling some major pain in September.  

Let us know what you think – we’ll be taking a look at more of the stats around injuries in order to try and get some more specific advice together. If you’ve got some ideas on what to look at or how you’d think this through, just share them in the comments or shoot me an email at: cyrus@draftmvp.com 

(as mentioned above, here’s how my draft has turned out for me) 

One man’s imaginary smack talk with Bud Selig *complete with graphs*

Now I may just be some skinny number-cruncher with a shiny degree from your average university with an abysmal male-to-female ratio, but I believe I may have caught some ground-breaking news that seems to have passed ole Buddy Boy by. So excuse me, commissioner Sir, if I fill you in on some of the things that have happened during your 1995-2008 beauty nap. Let’s see… well, we have a new president, grunge is dead, oh yeah and the game of baseball has totally changed.

How so you ask? Well take a gander at this here pretty chart.

The HR stands for homeruns, and that bouncy red line? You guessed it. Now, if I may direct your attention for one moment to the spike in 1987, which just so happens to be the year Mark McGwire broke into the big leagues with an eye-popping 49-homerun rookie season, and thus in the process planted the seed for the “Bash Brothers” era.

What? Aren’t doubles a better, more consistent indicator of power-hitting? Well, what do you know, I’ve got a chart for that too. Let’s take a look…

Wow, power-hitting really began to peak in 1998 didn’t it? Well, my friend, 1998 happens to be the year that the “Homerun Record Chase” captured the hearts of Americans everywhere. McGwire vs. Sosa, it was a beautiful thing. And great for baseball too, wasn’t it, Bud? Almost made me forget about all that nastiness back in ‘94. Instead of players banding together against the MLB owners, they’re back to ripping each other’s heads off in the batter’s box, all amped up on er… competition. What baseball strike? 70 HR’s! You must have been so relieved.

Now Mr. Commissioner, I’d like to tell you a story about our friend, little Bobby Spitball. One day little Bobby begins to notice that all his friends are looking kinda “different”. All of a sudden Barry B. has got a neck the size of a rabid pit-bull, and the bulging veins to boot! And Sammy S. from down the block has come down with a bad case of ass pimples. And what’s more, they’re knocking them out of the park. With his friends all talking like sopranos on helium, and taking a “swing-for-the-fences” approach, little Bobby has a choice to make. He can either keep doing what he’s doing but do it in the minor leagues, or he can unleash everything he’s got. So little Bobby thinks to himself “I’ll either strike him out, or kill the guy sitting 5 rows behind home plate”. Take a look at the results…

*Tear* there goes little Bobby’s rotator cuff. If only there was something he could take…

So much for the art of the complete game! (Someone please notify Dusty Baker!)…

So what does this mean to fantasy baseball? Quite a bit, depending on your league’s stat categories. First of all, this season could be the beginning of a trend, as numbers begin to compensate in what is hopefully the post-steroids era. Last year was a major “down” year for homeruns, producing the lowest homerun totals in a decade. Maybe a sign that power-hitting is beginning to normalize. The number of 20-HR players has remained fairly constant the last couple years, but the number of players that hit 32+ HR’s has dropped drastically from 32 to 16. 40+ HR hitters have dropped from 11 to 5. The performance curve for homeruns has flattened out. While the majority of starting batters in most fantasy leagues will still hit 15+ to 20+ HR’s, with most players topping out below 32 HR’s, there will be fewer of them hitting 35+ HR’s, and chances are you will have just one of them. So… with so few of them, does that make top HR hitters more valuable?

In a way, sure, having A-Rod or Prince Fielder last year would’ve given you one of only two 50-HR guys. But this year you will be paying a premium for HR’s in the draft. My feeling for the upcoming season is that HR-hitting as a stat category has to be devalued a little bit, at least in Head-to-Head leagues. The homerun-hitting field has evened out, and except for a lucky few owners, most teams will hover around the same homerun totals.

The days of building your team around HR’s is over. We’ve gotten used to the power-hitting of the last 5-10 years, when having a team full of big boppers guaranteed a consistent stream of HR’s that could take you to the championship. Well, guess what? Homeruns are hard to hit! Especially without HGH! These days, it really is a “feast or famine” stat category. And unless your team has more than two or three 30+HR guys, you don’t have enough of a safety net to even out the performance peaks and valleys from week to week. Bottom-line, sticking to the slugging strategy this year is going to be a major crapshoot, and I just don’t think it’s going to pay off. Most of us will have to learn to suffer through the HR peaks and valleys and adapt accordingly to winning or losing that category in cycles. Even if you invest your top resources in accumulating high HR’s and are lucky enough to get good returns on your HR investment, every A-Rod and Prince Fielder sometimes go a week without hitting a homerun. And you better hope it’s not during the playoffs.

In pondering the HR issue, I’ve also realized how impossible it is to predict HR’s this year. I’m calling it the “20/40 rule”. Would you be surprised if Manny Ramirez hit 20 HR’s? I wouldn’t, in fact that’s what he hit last year. Would you be surprised if he hit 40 HR’s? I wouldn’t, he hit 45 just a few years ago. I feel this way about many of the good players out there. I wouldn’t be surprised if they hit 20 or 40 HR’s. I find that crazy! Well, that’s what happens when baseballs aren’t getting slammed hundreds of feet over the fences. As batting performance becomes more realistic, we will begin to notice once again that sometimes there’s almost no difference between a double and a homerun other than sheer luck…

I think we have successfully reflected this attitude and strategy in our drafting tool. Based on last year’s stats, you can only worry about homeruns so much this season, and nothing’s guaranteed. We’re not saying not to draft big homerun hitters, you still have to do that to compete. Just don’t stretch further for one-dimensional HR hitters because you think the decrease in power-hitting means you have to overspend. It’s the same with complete games and shutouts, if your league uses those categories. With the trends we’re seeing, complete games are becoming increasingly rare and random. You couldn’t even chase them if you tried… But you could overpay for them.

So Back to you Mr. Commissioner… What can explain these drastic changes in statistical numbers? Well, I can’t pretend to know anything about standing in the box and trying to actually swing a round bat at a round ball, while trying to hit it square. But I think I’ve come up with an explanation which will please everyone.

It’s the baggy uniforms. Really it is, check this out…

Look at former All-Star, NL MVP, and Silver Slugger Keith Hernandez:

Yes, it’s a tight uniform, and it’s also worth about 12 homeruns a season. The year McGwire stumbled into his 49-homerun rookie season, was the year Keith Hernandez hit his career high 18 homeruns.

Or look at former 15-time All Star, Silver Slugger, NLCS MVP, and 2002 Hall of Fame Inductee Ozzie Smith:

…and of course, there’s Barry

- Jason Chen

Tags: Baseball Stats, Stat Trends, Steroid Era, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire

Teamwork.  That’s where we started.  Roey, Jason, and myself, talking baseball as usual.  Talking about how no matter how much we knew when draft day rolled around, we just ended up in a blur, struggling to keep all the names and numbers in our heads and wondering which players would work best with our teams.  Jason, our numbers guru, marveled at how undervalued Eric Byrnes was, since he strengthened teams in so many ways.  We needed to pick the combination of players who worked best together for our particular league, that’s what we recognized.

So, we stopped complaining and decided to do something about it.  Last year, in a few short weeks, we put together a tool that helped us observe how the portfolio of a team changed as it was drafted, how each player picked affected the team as a whole.  Despite the short timeframe and web design reminiscent of 1998, over 100 of you used our Beta version.  We had no expectations, but the response was overwhelming.  The majority of you told us that the portfolio approach made sense AND your teams were succeeding.

We surprised ourselves - and immediately we began thinking “what’s next?”

We started planning this year’s product and got other talented folks to round out our team.  You can see the results of that with this year’s version.  The site’s faster, the product’s more intuitive, and we think it looks a whole lot better!

But that’s not all.  In studying the stats, we came to the conclusion that portfolio management was just the first step in making smarter decisions.  This year we’ve focused on furthering a new innovation in drafting:

I’m happy to introduce our improved DraftMVP Targets.  While the portfolio view that our charts enable help you see your team as a whole, it also raises the question:  exactly where should I be in each category?  In response to this, we’ve improved our distinct category targets based on your league settings and, of course, a mountain of historical data.  These targets are not meant to always be exactly dead-on, but we’re hoping that you can use them as a tool to make better sense of the immense amount of data available to you when drafting this year.  As the year progresses we look forward to your input as we continuously work to refine our targets.

And with that, I’ll close our opening blog post.  Stay tuned for more analyses and thoughts throughout the season.  We’re excited for you to use our product.  Tell us how we can improve it, share it with your friends, and most importantly, go draft a stellar team.

Thanks

Cyrus