Help me out-Billy Beane my fantasy baseball league!

po822000 — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 07:06:34 -0800

How do I appropriately valuate players in my competitive fantasy baseball league? I just took over a horrendous team in a very competitive fantasy baseball league. I'm very familiar with sabermetric stats employed by real-life GMs, but it occurs to me that those same stats are not necessarily going to be helpful to me in fantasy baseball. (Especially because so many of the stats we score on are non-sabermetric in nature.)

To wit: real-life GMs use sabermetric stats to find players who avoid making outs (hitters) or get outs most efficiently (pitchers). In my league, I'm looking to maximize or minimize the cumulative results in specific statistical categories across my lineup.

To that end, I'm trying to put together my own valuation system for players, but it's been awhile since my econometrics and statistics courses in college. Can you help me put together an appropriate formula - or point me in the direction of how I should be analyzing/comparing the statistics - to properly valuate the players in my league?

The details: I'm in a weekly head-to-head rotisserie league based upon the following statistical categories:

HITTERS
Runs
Singles
Doubles
Triples
Home Runs
RBI
Walks
Strikeouts (lowest total wins this category)
Stolen Bases
Batting Average

PITCHERS
Walks (lowest total wins this category)
Strikeouts
Complete Games
Wins
Losses
Saves
Holds
ERA
WHIP (lowest total wins this category)
K/9

I'm not sure if any other parameters are needed, but any help you might be able to provide would be most appreciated.

Baseball statistics newbie!

pdb — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 10:19:32 -0800

Help me find statistical benchmarks for sabermetric baseball stats. I run a website that’s about the successes and, more accurately, shortcomings of a baseball team. I have loved baseball since I was about 6, but I am not a stats guy. I am reasonably proficient at understanding common statistics and placing them in context, however, I do not possess (but am trying to gain) the knowledge to contextualize a lot of the sabermetric stats that are out there, without some assistance.

So, with that in mind, my question is, is there somewhere on teh interwebs where I can find a definition of what a “good” value is for a given statistic? Baseball Prospectus and Hardball Times both have exhaustive glossaries, and they even get into how stats are calculated, which is very helpful. But a glossary’s not quite what I’m looking for – I’m looking for easily grasped benchmarks.

To greatly oversimplify, I know from my years of watching baseball that 18 or more wins in a year is a good year for a pitcher, or that .300 or better is a great year for a batter; what I don’t know is what would typically be considered a “good” OPS, K/BB rate, and so on. Any ideas as to where I could find such a thing?

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Help me out-Billy Beane my fantasy baseball league!

Baseball statistics newbie!