JABO: How Real is Fantasy Baseball?
The fantasy baseball industry is more popular every day, but it sometimes seems rooted in yesterday. The statistics have moved on since it was invented in the seventies, at least. Is today’s fantasy baseball too far removed from real baseball? Is it just fake?
Fantasy’s traditional scoring system does seem arcane. That old 5×5 fantasy rotisserie game uses runs, RBI, batting average, home runs, and stolen bases as the key batting statistics, and many of those stats have fallen by the wayside as we attempt to better evaluate players. Runs and RBI, in particular, are not consulted at all when it comes to the modern stats of the day. They are just too context-dependent, since your teammates are heavily involved in both.
On the pitching side, the story is the same. Wins are one of the five categories, and a prominent numbers-savvy analyst has declared war on that statistic. Strikeouts, like home runs, are remarkably clean in that they require two participants and no judging from a scorer. But WHIP (Walks plus Hits over Innings Pitched) is full of noise — each hit is not only declared as such by a scorer, but it’s made into a hit through some nebulous combination of pitching and fielding as well.
But if that makes you want to pet fantasy baseball on the head, you might be surprised by how well those ten “old” statistics track with the more modern versions we have today.
Over at FanGraphs, we’re debuting a fantasy auction calculator and ranking tool today. The basic mechanism that powers the calculator is an attempt to look at the spread of certain statistics over a common baseline, look at a player’s production in each stat compared to that spread, and then adjust for position. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it generally follows the roadmap for Wins Above Replacement, one of today’s more sophisticated and complicated advanced summary stats.
If you compare the results of that auction calculator using 5×5 roto stats — batting average, home runs, RBI, runs, stolen bases, wins, ERA, WHIP, strikeouts, and saves — to the current WAR projections for next year, the two valuations are actually fairly close. In laymen’s terms, the ‘old’ 5×5 stats predict over three-quarters of the variance in WAR projections. That’s a strong relationship.
Here are the relevant correlations for a few different sets of scoring systems. (All p-values less than .0001, r value shown.)
With a phone full of pictures of pitchers' fingers, strange beers, and his two toddler sons, Eno Sarris can be found at the ballpark or a brewery most days. Read him here, writing about the A's or Giants at The Athletic, or about beer at October. Follow him on Twitter @enosarris if you can handle the sandwiches and inanity.
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