As we talked about the other day, it’s important to evaluate your team after your draft. In our quest for more data on this, we came across Travis’s blog post about his draft and decided to run his team through our draft tool. We hope you don’t mind Travis – it looks like you’ve got one of the more balanced teams we’ve come across so nice job. As you noted in your post, you kind of punted on saves and steals is a big question mark for you, but definitely look VERY competitive in 6 categories. Great job!

As we talked about yesterday, it’s important to evaluate your team after your draft. In our quest for more data on this, we came across Laura’s blog post about her draft and decided to run her team through our draft tool. We hope you don’t mind Laura!

Her team:

POSITION PLAYERS
BAL C Matt Wieters (12)
STL 1B Albert Pujols (1)
CIN 2B Brandon Phillips (4)
PIT 3B Pedro Alvarez (8)
TEX SS Elvis Andrus (9)
TEX OF Josh Hamilton (3)
ATL OF Jason Heyward (5)
CIN OF Jay Bruce (7)
MIL 1B Prince Fielder (2)
PHI 2B Chase Utley (6)
NYM OF Carlos Beltran (18)
TB 2B Sean Rodriguez (19)
PHI OF Domonic Brown (20)
KC SS Alcides Escobar (21)
ATL 1B Freddie Freeman (22)

PITCHERS
DET Max Scherzer (10)
ARI Daniel Hudson (11)
TB Jeremy Hellickson (13)
CIN Aroldis Chapman (17)
WAS Stephen Strasburg (14)
TEX Colby Lewis (15)
CHC Ryan Dempster (16)

And our evaluation:

Now, we have a bit of a deficiency when it comes to new players, so this evaluation of her saves isn’t exactly fair, but as she mentions in her blog post, Laura’s somewhat thin at pitching and is going to have to look after that pretty closely. From what we can tell, she’s probably going to have to punt on steals and might be able to trade from strength in the batting categories in order to shore up her pitching weaknesses. Laura, if you’d like to let us know about the details of your league, we can make sure this reflects the scoring categories and roster sizes more appropriately.

Feeling pretty good aren’t you?

Let me guess, you’re looking at your roster and thinking, “I’ve got Pujols, David Wright, Cliff Lee, A-Rod, Mariano and a bunch of solid guys, I had a pretty good draft..”

Wrong

Let’s face facts. Many of us fantasy baseball addicts are just eternal optimists. We “play” this sport for 6 months a year, watching our real teams AND our fantasy rosters on a daily basis, hoping to eek out a victory this week or to find that we’re rooting for this year’s SF Giants (Go GIANTSSSSS!!!)

But for most of us, it’s just hope. Endless hope. We’re hoping that our team will win more games. Hope that two randoms are going to start hitting and shock us. Hope that our late round “sleeper” that everyone else read about too actually pans out. Hope, hope, hope.

HOPE  IS NOT A FANTASY BASEBALL STRATEGY.

Tough love folks. That’s what we’re about here at DraftMVP. Data. Analysis. Ruthless calculation. Why?

WE WANT YOU TO WIN.

There, we said it. Your draft might have been ok. But most of you are just hoping it was good. Right now you’re sitting there talking yourself into John Lackey or J.D. Drew. We know you’re doing it – don’t deny it.

What you should really be doing is tough analysis and asking some simple questions of your roster:

• Where are you strong?
• What can you build on?
• What categories are you going to have to punt on?
• What kind of early season trades can you swoop in and make before anyone else realizes what’s going on?

Many of you have been using our draft tool (not signed up? go do it now) and are familiar with how we present data. But for those of you who didn’t draft with it, you can still make use of the analysis we provide. Instead of just HOPING that your team is good, you can take 10 minutes to analyze your roster, with your league’s scoring categories and rules taken into account.

In 10 minutes you’ll go from feeling “pretty good” about your team to knowing that you’re strong in 6 categories and weak in 4.

You think we’re exaggerating don’t you? Here, we’ll show you. We took Michael Stein’s roster from the Yahoo! Expert League, input it into our draft tool and assumed that it was a standard 5×5 scoring format. 5 minutes later (we’re fast), here’s what we see:

Michael Stein's Y! Expert League Roster

Michael, we hate to break it to you, but your team’s got some holes. You probably realized you were light on saves, but it looks like you’re going to need help at Steals, Runs, Wins and Strikeouts too (if these are your league settings* of course).

To the rest of you – we ask: do you have 10 minutes to shape your season? Go out and win folks. Go out and win.

*(Michael, let us know in the comments what the league specifics are and we can update the analysis quickly).

No?

We didn’t think so .

Can’t say we blame you – a lot happens over the off-season in baseball and right now is when most fantasy baseball players dust off the cobwebs, wake up their stats brains and start looking at what happened the past several months.

We’ll help you start off down the re-education path with some key information and recommendations:

1. Matthew Berry’s Love/Hate list – Love him or Hate him, his annual list is great for surfacing a lot of names and dispelling a lot of your mental myths. Remember, Jimmy Rollins is NOT a full-time player these days and Alfonso Soriano is not the guy you relied upon 5 years ago.
2. Razzball’s Best/Worst Value list is near and dear to our hearts – value is key on draft day folks!
3. The big offseason moves, courtesy of Fox Sports
4. The team at Fantasy Baseball 101 have been working on a great series for Head-to-Head leagues and how to think about ADP. You owe it to yourself to have an opinion on where the Average Draft Picks are off-base – you can pick up lots of value just by being prepped.
5. How to pair pitchers when drafting – can’t say we’ve used this strategy, but it seems to fundamentally rely upon portfolio theory to work.
6. Brandon Funston’s Big Board is always fun, if just for the comments.
7. Don’t be an idiot and draft Greinke too soon – he’s injured.

Share your favorite recap and re-intro articles in the comments and we’ll add them to this post!

Especially when they blow their tops. With the football playoffs about to start, it seemed appropriate that we share these favorite NFL coaching blowups with you.

Make the playoffs!

As we reach the last weeks of the fantasy football regular season, we know that many of you are anxiously checking the waiver wire, looking at your bench and making important roster decisions. More than any other sport, every week in fantasy football is important and every extra point matters. We’ve all had to watch one of our benchwarmers put up the points that would have made the difference between winning and losing and it’s damned frustrating, isn’t it?

Not all players are created equal, even if their points are

Here at DraftMVP, we’ve got a particular emphasis: giving you the tools to analyze players statistics to make better roster decisions. In doing the analysis of player data in football, it’s clear to us that simply looking at a player’s total fantasy points is a woefully inadequate approach to putting together your most competitive roster. Some players are consistent contributors, getting routine touches and requiring little handholding (with the downside being that they’ll never put up major points). Others are absolute meteors, putting up 2 touchdown, 25 point performances one week and 2 points the next. You start them hoping for a stud performance but kick yourself when they put up a goose egg.

To give you some concrete examples, here are 4 players, using some relatively standard scoring conventions:

Let’s look at Kicker #1.  Olindo Mare has been either one of the highest or one of the lowest scoring kickers on a week-to-week basis, sometimes 3 points, sometimes 15 points.  With a high average deviation, he is what we would call a “high variability” scorer.  What the numbers tell us makes sense.  Mare gets a huge proportion of his points from FG’s.  Seattle has a streaky offense that has trouble moving the ball for consistent stretches, they’re just good enough to put themselves in position before stalling in the red zone, thus creating a lot of FG opportunities.  But at other times, they cannot put together drives for scoring opportunities at all.

In the other extreme, Kicker #2 Mason Crosby is a solid performer every week, with little variability.  He will almost always get you a solid 7 to 9 points.  His average deviation is low, making him a “safe” start, but he has a lower ceiling than Mare has.  And again, this makes sense.  Green Bay is one of the highest-scoring and most consistent offensive teams.  They sustain TD drives on a regular basis.  A higher percentage of Crosby’s points come from PAT’s.

So Mare or Crosby?  Their total points are very similar.  But their statistical distribution are not.  Before we answer the question, let’s go to our next comparison.

WR#1 Larry Fitzerald is a low variability scorer.  He is one of the only blue-chip pass catchers on the Cardinals team, he will always get his touches.  WR#2 DeSean Jackson is a high variability scorer.  His points rely on big plays, giving him a high ceiling, but missed connections may mean a much lower-than-average performance.

Yeah, you may have already known this about Fitzerald and Jackson.  They are two of the most high-profile stars.  What we’re trying to show here is that the numbers support the theory and the gut instincts some of us more experienced players already feel.  Now, in addition to the superstars we all know about, the numbers can also be used to point out the scoring characteristics of lesser known players, like your #2 or #3 WR.

What’s important to note here is that by thinking about your roster more analytically, you can make conscious decisions about what type of risk you’re willing to accept on your roster.  Are you facing an opponent who’s got Adrian Peterson, Philip Rivers, Arian Foster, Brandon Lloyd and Antonio Gates? You’re probably going to want to roll the dice a bit and make sure you’ve got the Olindo Mares and DeSean Jacksons of the world starting.  Shoot for the moon, hope the high variability players pan out, give yourself a chance! Yes, maybe some stars have to align.  But that’s what’s fun, is the gamble.  And sometimes you win and take down your opponent.  The key is giving yourself that chance and not giving up before the games have even started.

Or maybe you’re facing an opponent who has more volatile players and no real stars – in that case, you’re probably going to prefer starting a lineup that is more consistent and dependable. The safer, low variability scorers. Why risk starting Mare when you know Crosby should get you the 6 to 8 points that you need?  You’re confident knowing that as long as none of your players put up a goose egg, you SHOULD beat your opponent.

With that in mind, here are some players you should take a look at:

Now, this list is just a start, but it should be a helpful way to identify some of the folks that might be on your rosters or on your waiver wire and if they’re worth sitting or starting. Leave us some comments below and tell us what you think of this approach and how we could add to it to help you win your league!

Yeah, I know I’m a biased Red Sox fan, and Kevin Youkilis is one of my favorite baseball players.  And I know that Youk is also one of the more despised players out there today.  But despite his much-ridiculed ever-changing facial hair, does he really deserve to get passed up for the All Star Game?  Cast aside by Yankees manager Joe Girardi for Paul Konerko?  And passed over by the fans for Nick Swisher?  Well, thank goodness someone more eloquent and more qualified than I spoke up about this recently.  One of our solid favorites, Joe Posnanski, threw it out there, along with a revisit of the WAR stat.  I’ve been starting to see WAR pop up more and more recently.  Although it’s more valuable for evaluating “real world” baseball value than fantasy baseball value, it would be interesting to do some evaluations DraftMVP-style using WAR.

Here’s the article, check it out:

http://joeposnanski.com/JoeBlog/2010/07/11/war-what-is-it-good-for-picking-all-stars/