Posts Tagged ‘Ask the Experts’

Ask the Experts #4: Are Spring Training Stats Myth or Reality?

Friday, March 27th, 2009

“Manny hits first HR of Spring Training!“

I was greeted by this ESPN headline today and it made laugh. No matter what I think – there are people that care and are clearly paying attention to spring training performances.

So what’s the deal with spring stats? We’ve been asked via Twitter (follow us here) and email whether spring stats are a valid predictor of regular season stats.  Without scrubbing years of stats to find the mysterious patterns, I did a quick experiment to see if we could learn something new.

Observe Exhibit 1. This is a table of the top 10 hitters by batting average in 2008 and their respective spring training stats:

top-10-picture

What do you notice?

How about the At Bats? 20-40 during spring as compared to 600-700 during the season. Wow. That’s quite a difference. Could we trust these spring stats as statistically significant? If there is any category where we could – it’s AVG.

According to the data, 9 of the 10 hitters batting over .300 in 2008 batted over .300 in the spring. Your MVP Dustin Pedroia is the one notable exception. So, either he is an outlier in this small data set or he had an abnormally good 2008.

Be careful all you people taking him as the 16th pick this year.

Now, being an analysis skeptic, I’m not entirely convinced, so let’s look at another piece of data – power. Enter Exhibit 2, a table of the top 10 HR hitters last year:

top-10-with-homers
Does it look different? Well, it should. There is no clear correlation. Manny only had one jack in the Spring of last year in his 30 AB’s. Quentin, Gonzalez, and Cabrera accounted for only one homer between the 3 of them!

Let’s keep our eyes on spring stats this year and see if we can find actionable patterns, but for the time being, I would say:

Don’t buy the spring training hype!

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Ask the Experts#2: How to use the Advanced Search capabilities

Saturday, March 14th, 2009

Our 2nd “Ask the Experts” question comes from Rob in Boston. He has a question regarding our DraftMVP tool, specifically the Advanced Search functionality:

“How do I use the Advanced Search to help me find players to draft?”


We’ve gotten this question a number of times, and I’d like to give an example of how I personally like to use Advanced Search. When used properly, it helps me decide on players that I’m on the fence about and occasionally, even helps me uncover some hidden gems.


Let’s set the stage:

Say that you’re in one of the earlier rounds of your draft and you know you need some RBIs. The obvious answer is to configure your Advanced Search for “RBI”. So, take a few moments and do that and you’ll get the following list back:

advanced-search-pic-1-rbis

You can see that you get pretty much the same list that everyone else has been targeting as well. Sure… Pujols, Ryan Howard, Miguel Cabrera, David Wright, Manny Ramirez… those are obvious answers but they’re not available later in the draft. That’s not the “gem” we’re looking for.

RBIs are very influential in how fantasy baseball sites default rank players. So if you’re looking to fill that stat, you need to analyze players in a different way from everyone else. RBIs can be unpredictable and very dependent on a player’s situation, lineup spot, team, etc. When I look to fill that stat category after the first couple of rounds, I have to find someone that’s not on the “obvious” list. So, I’m looking for power in general. And to me, the best indicator for power is HRs and Doubles.

The power of Advanced Search is really in the ability to sort across more than one category. So, go back to Advanced Search and configure it to return players who do well in both HRs and Doubles:


advanced-search-pic-2-configuration2

When I do an Advanced Search and rank by HRs and Doubles, I get a list of players that hit for power. Some of the players on that list are not quite who you expected because their actual RBI totals weren’t quite as high as some more high-profile stars last year. But hitting for power indicates that they have RBI potential. Sometimes that’s all you can ask for. A player that hits for power has the potential to get a lot of RBIs, and if the cards fall right, his RBI numbers should catch up. So let’s take a look at what kind of results we get from Advanced Search when we rank by HRs and Doubles:

advanced-search-pic-3-hrs-and-doubles

…and that’s just for the first 10 results. If we’d configured it to return the top 20 or 30 results, we’d have an even more interesting list of players with just as much RBI potential as the big names.

HOWEVER, these are guys who should these are guys who should be available long after Pujols and Miggy Cabrera are off the draft board. Now you’re talking about a meaningful in-draft advantage; identifying hidden gems that fill the needs of your evolving team. I encourage everyone to play around with the Advanced Search and to experiment with things like identifying speedsters through combinations of stats like Runs and Triples, instead of just straight up SBs. You might uncover some of your own hidden gems….

Be sure to send us a note if you have more questions about how to use Advanced Search and thanks for this week’s question Rob!


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Introducing our weekly “Ask the Experts” Column!

Friday, March 6th, 2009

Welcome to our very first “Ask the Experts” blog post. After receiving requests from a number of you over the past couple years, we’ve finally given in and decided to devote some time each week to answering questions about draft strategy, specific players and statistical analysis. If you’ve got a question for us feel free to email us at experts@draftmvp.com or just comment on a blog post.

Our first ever “Ask the Experts” question comes from Erik in Boise, Idaho, who asks:

“Is Matt Holliday a 1st or 2nd round pick this year? What should I think about him after his move to the A’s?”

At DraftMVP, we LOVE questions like this because we can use statistics to really dig into the player and his change in home stadiums. Let’s break this down:

First, a little recap:

Matt Holliday PictureFollowing a very strong 2006 season, Holliday was projected as a solid 2nd round pick and his monster 2007 rewarded scores of owners who got him on the cheap. In fact, according to our super-secret DraftMVP ranking system, his 2007 stats made him the 2nd most valuable batter in baseball (note, this is without taking position scarcity into account).  That 36-HR/137-RBI/0.340-AVG performance easily pushed him into the 1st round last year.  We don’t need to tell the ’08 Holliday owners out there: 2008 was a disappointment. His power numbers dropped quite a bit. But, there was one bright spot: his surprise 28 SB’s gave him added value in standard 5×5 rotisserie leagues and in the process, confused most of the fantasy universe in evaluating him for ’09.

Will Matt Holliday continue being a stealthy stealing machine with the A’s?

It’s no secret that the Oakland A’s do not like to run risks on the base paths. Just take a look at the numbers:

Oakland A’s Team Stolen Bases
2000:  40 SB         (last in AL)
2001:  68 SB         (2nd to last in AL)
2002:  46 SB         (last in AL)
2003:  48 SB         (2nd to last in AL)
2004:  47 SB         (last in AL)
2005:  31 SB         (last in AL)
2006:  61 SB         (10th in AL)
2007:  52 SB         (last in AL)
2008:  88 SB         (7th in AL)

Yeah, we were just as surprised as you that they were in the middle of the pack last year but don’t be fooled!  The A’s had the lowest scoring offense in the American League with a young team that had trouble scoring runs.  Without someone able to knock in runs, they had to resort to an un-Oakland like offense and rely more on SB’s.  Their 1st half versus 2nd half splits also support this… as their RBI’s tanked along with their team SLG% after the All Star Break, their SB’s went up in a last ditch effort to get runners home.  With off-season moves for Holliday along with Jason Giambi, I think that the modest SB numbers for Oakland last year were an outlier rather than a trend.

The Bottom line: Don’t count on Holliday’s recent stolen base production. I think Holliday’s SBs are going to drop back to the 10-12 SB level. If he’s anything like the 2007 Shannon Stewart pickup, the A’s will let him run a bit and he won’t fall all the way to single digits.

Fine, enough with the baserunning, how about his power, is it coming back?

Even with last year’s power drop, Holliday’s stats still put him in the top 20 for batters overall (and top 10 for OF’s). However, a move from the hitter-friendly confines of Coors Field forces us to evaluate his home/away splits. Unfortunately, they don’t forecast well for his slugging numbers.  Take a look over the last 3 years:

2006 – 2008 Batting Splits

AB R H 2B HR RBI SO AVG OBP SLG OPS

AWAY 869  147  257  58  33  120  184  .296  .370  .486   .856
HOME 908  199  328  75  62  219  156  .361  .430  .669  1.099

Holliday may well end up a .300 hitter next year, with 40 doubles, 20-25 HR’s, roughly 100 runs and 80-90 RBI’s.  (runs and RBI predictions in “new team” cases are notoriously unreliable, however)  That would end up being pretty similar to 2008′s power numbers.

What does this all mean in fantasy?

Re-calculating my custom rankings puts him right on the edge of being a top 30 batter with stats strikingly similar to OF Nick Markakis.

In a fantasy draft, that puts him in the 35th – 40th pick range.

If the decision were between Holliday and Markakis, I would give a slight edge to Holliday since he doesn’t have to face the AL East Bos/NYY/TB pitching staffs for 57 games (and gets 19 games against the Texas Rangers!). Thinking about my own draft gameplan, I wouldn’t pull the trigger on drafting Holliday in the 3rd or even 4th round knowing that I can fill that OF spot with other near-equivalent guys a couple rounds later.  Holliday is just not a good value in early rounds this season, especially if it looks like you’ll still have a chance at players like Nate McLouth, Curtis Granderson, Bobby Abreu, and even Torii Hunter later in the draft.  I’ll gladly let someone else draft Holliday in the first few rounds and plug another position instead.  But if I’m looking for a well-rounded stat contributor and he’s still available in the 5th round, then I might be excited for a little Holliday…

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