Forecasters Challenge 2010 – Mid-Season Results

Remember when Fangraphs readers were asked to put in their player forecasts? Well…

In this competition, each Pro forecaster is put in his own league against 21 average forecasters (Joe). In order to make the apples-to-apples comparison, the Pro faced off against the same 21 average forecasters, from the same draft spot. So, when Marcel drafts first against Joe1 through Joe21 in the Marcel Draft1 league, then Chone also drafted first against Joe1 through Joe21 in the Chone Draft1 league. Each of the 22 Pro forecasters followed the same pattern. In addition to that, Marcel then drafted second against 21 new Joes (Joe22 through Joe42). And so on, and so on, and so on.

In the end, each Pro ended up in 22 leagues, each facing identical competition.

Where did these Joes come from? That was the fun part. Fangraphs asked their readers in the offseason for their forecasts. So, what I did was this: for each team, I took the 21 fans that provided the most number of forecasted players. For the Yankees, I’d have Reader1 through Reader21. For the Redsox, I’d have Reader22 through Reader42, and so on. I then randomly selected one fan for each of the 30 teams and called that collection of readers Joe1. Of the remaining readers, I repeated those steps, until I ended up with 21 Joes, from Joe1 to Joe21. I then put them into the competition as noted in the earlier paragraph.

I then did the same thing for Joe22 to Joe42: randomly selecting one fan from each team. In this way, I am able to mix-and-match 630 (21×30) fans’ picks into 21×22 collections (462 Joes).

This model, I believe, should represent a reasonable group of average Joes that you would find in a Fantasy League.

We now come to the results, as of the All-Star Game break:

fan points wins value fan
108 968 20 227 Chone
115 960 19 224 John Eric Hanson
105 921 18 218 Brad Null
118 967 17 203 Steamer
116 929 15 198 KFFL
299 917 15 192 Consensus
112 904 14 189 FantasyPros911
113 897 14 184 FeinSports.com
126 890 13 184 Bloomberg Sports
129 858 12 163 Wells Oliver
132 898 12 163 Fantistics
120 895 11 155 Razzball
127 859 9 143 Future of Fantasy
131 832 8 129 Fangraphs Community
217 841 6 115 Marcel
109 828 6 109 Chris Gehringer
102 801 6 100 Ask Rotoman
125 797 4 75 BigScoreSports
111 757 1 35 Fantasy Scope
106 751 0 32 CAIRO
130 689 2 29 Baseball Info Solutions

If you want more details, explanations, etc: Full Explanation & Results