FanGraphs: The Game 2013!
Good news everyone! You can now make your picks in FanGraphs: The Game for the 2013 season!
For those of you who played last year, you will be able to change the team of any of your players up until you first spend money. So, if you want your players to be on new teams, I advise doing it before you make any picks. You can do this on the settings page.
In addition, your player will keep all of his stats from the 2012 season and continue on to year two of his career.
Lastly, if you had autopick set last year, it has now be unset. If you want to keep playing with autopick on, you will need to make your autopick selections again.
And for those of you who are rookies to FanGraphs: The Game…
FanGraphs: The Game is our daily fantasy game, and allows you to create a player and make picks each day to build your player’s stats over the course of the season. Whatever statistics your pick of the day accumulates are then added to your player’s totals.
All of your totals will be tracked on your very own FanGraphs player page and your player will show up on the leaderboards, so you can see how well you’ve performed compared to others throughout the season. (These show last years stats.)
Because each player you create is assigned a position and is affiliated with a specific organization, you have the chance to crack the starting line-up and hold bragging rights over your friends and others who are gunning for that same spot. You can also win awards (weekly, monthly, half-season, and full-season), achievements, and track your hitting streaks.
At the end of the season, the player with the highest WAR at each position will win $100, and the player with the second highest total at each position will each win a FanGraphs T-Shirt. Please see the full game rules for further details.
Click here to create a player and make your first pick. You can make as many as eight players or as few as one – it’s all up to you. And, since you’re only going to be making one pick per day for each player you create, this is the fastest and easiest way to enjoy fantasy baseball. And best of all, it’s entirely free.
We’ve created a twitter account where you can keep up with accomplishments, leaders, and various news from FanGraphs: The Game, so follow @fgthegame now, and use #FGTheGame to communicate with your friends and others on Twitter each day.
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
Any changes to the pricing? Do you still have to take backups eight times to take a star once?
Pricing remains the same. The WAR totals from last year worked out pretty well, so things appear to be working as intended.
And 8 backup players to take 1 star is not exactly true. It depends on the price of your backup player. A $6 player is projected to be average at that position.
Eight times was an exaggeration, but the ratio of good players to bad players still bugs me. Below average starters cost $3 or $4, with stars in the teens (all data from beginning of last year, when I stopped playing). So if the average is $6, and you go $7 over by taking a $13, then you have to take a $3 player twice and a $5, still below-average player once just to get back even. Whatever, we talked about this last year and the game is obviously popular. I still just don’t get it.
The way that I see it, when you make a $3 selection you’re just hoping for a single hit and/or some walks to “break even” for the day. When you select your $13 all star, you expect big numbers from your guy that day. If you look at match-ups, you’ll skew both odds in your favor and get some additional value each day, even if it’s only incremental.
$3 guys can go 4/4 with a double, and $13 stars can go 0/5 with 3 k’s (ouch!). You can look over numbers and match-ups to make an educated guess who will be the best value that day, but you will still need a bit of luck no matter what.
Also wanted to add, sometimes the best pick is no pick at all. Feel free to skip a day if you don’t like any of the choices.
Jaejo, what I don’t like is that the “cheap” selections save you much less than the “expensive” guys cost you. It’d be one thing if you could take a top player 25% of the time, an above average starter 50% of the time, and a low-end platoon guy 25% of the time, but if the star is $6 over average and the above average starters are $2 over average and the platoon guy is only $2 below average, you don’t get to play the whole season.
Now, it seems like this is necessary to get realistic WAR numbers at the end of the year, and it sounds like everyone but me is happy with it, so I get why it’s not changing. But I’m not interested in taking Tulo once and Brandon Crawford four times, nor in playing substantially fewer than 162 games. It’s that you have to take the bad players SO MANY TIMES that bugs, me not that you have to take them at all.
How many players actually play a whole season though. The list of players who showed up for 162 games is tiny. You can play multiple positions if you don’t like taking a day off.
Welcome to the wonderful world of playing guys with platoon splits. Lots of guys under $6 who have good match ups each day.
Yay!
Any possibility of changing individual player names?
Any possibility of incorporating defensive WAR?
Your player name is your user “display name”, you can change it by going here: http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/wp-admin/profile.php and then editing your display name publicly as option.
I can’t see incorporating defensive WAR into The Game anytime soon. It’d be neat, but we don’t have game-by-game advanced defensive metrics and they change anyway, so it could create issues when giving out weekly, monthly, … awards.
I just don’t get something here. What is the impact of choosing a team for a position? Doesn’t that just lock you into whomever the team is playing that day?
It’s just cosmetic and used for awards. Doesn’t really matter which team you choose in terms of game play.
Oh, okay. thanks. So why do the directions say this? “Once you create a player, the player cannot be deleted, so choose the team your player is on carefully.”
Why is it important to choose the team carefully?
Well, you can’t change your team (for the rest of the year) once you start playing, so it’s a somewhat permanent decision.
With the way awards are set up, you have Best Overall, Best at Position, Best on Team, and Best on Team at Position, so it will impact what awards you are eligible to win.
Got it. Thanks.
Rookie here, So for SP there is still a 162 game cap but your stats are divided by 5 or is the cap lower?
any plans to pay out the winners of The Game: Football?
Apparently not.
Yes, I will get this rectified by Tuesday.
What bugged me the most was I would latch onto a “below average” player (at least with a below average salary) take some thumps for his play accordingly, but then when he finally starts to heat up, his salary jumps to an above average salary & there’s no incentive for “discovering” thus player.
I feel like if you start riding say a minor league call-up & it takes him a few games to find his stride you shouldn’t be penalized when you continue to use him in your lineup.
Just my two cents.
Also wish you could make picks at least a day in advance. It is very difficult to make picks after 4:00 am & before the start of the first game (often 1:00 pm), even 7:00 pm games are difficult to make picks by depending on our schedules. Some of us actually have day jobs, families, etc.
Don’t really understand how auto-pick works either. Tried to use it once last year, and I didn’t make a pick for the day.
The problem with making picks days in advance is that the value of the player could change in that day.
If you have autopick off, you can make a pick in any game up until it has started, so you could conceivably make your pick at about 10pm ET for the west coast games. If autopick is on, you are not allowed to make a pick after the first game of the day started. This is to avoid gaming the system using autopick (it would be possible).
Autopick works the following way. If you set it at $10, it will randomly pick the highest valued player at $10 or below. So, if there are no $10 players, it will then look for $9 players, etc… If you set it too low or there are no cheaper players less than or equal to the autopick price you set, then it won’t make a pick for you.
Perhaps an auto-setting to select a specific player so long as he is at or below a certain price?
If you latched on to a low priced player and you play him every day and he eventually goes up in value, you most certainly got above average production for that player’s price, (which is kind of the point of the game).
I would just consider that a job well done, and then move on to the next guy you think is under valued.
I’ve gotta say, this is 100% inaccurate. I’ve noticed many scenarios where a player’s value changes completely independent of what they’ve done on the field.
I don’t remember any specific scenarios from last year, but already this season, I picked Joe Nathan in the RP role for $5 on the opener Sunday Night, in which he didn’t play. Now for today’s game his value is $8.
How does this make any sense?
There may be some fluctuation in pricing early on in the season based on pitcher baselines. I will take a look into that, because that does seem weird.
So, there is some weirdness going on with the FIP constant for this year (small sample size).
This will even out probably by week 2 of the season. There is some chance that a player will change value because the average price at his position will change without him playing.
This is how a player’s WAR / wRAA, or anything that has an average baseline can change without him playing.
But, the basic premise I stated above still holds true.
Oh yea! I’m ready to take my top spot again.
Hey Dave can you give me access to fangraphs+ 2013 like you said you would after I placed top 2 in my position last year?
Thanks,
Pirate_in_the_Bay
You should be all set now!
Thanks!
What happens if the player you pick plays a different position, e.g., I pick Cano at 2B, but at the last minute the Yankees decide to DH him? (Similar question if a guy switches positions during a game).
It doesn’t matter where the player actually plays in the game as long as he was initially eligible for the position. It works similar to general fantasy league eligibility.
Loved playing The Game last year, even if I only started in the second half.
I think a good strategy might be to use cheap players/no players except to get the minimum number of ABs/IP before splurging on stars.