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.
you just blew my mind
It’s still real to me dammit!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvTNyKIGXiI
eh, i kinda disagree. the reason sabr points aren’t much better than 5×5 is that neither consider defense. it’s not like projections where the deviation is mostly random: fantasy baseball has systematic biases against certain players.
if you factor in a naked bonus for position scarcity, something generally already done in fantasy (a SS with the ability to go 20/20 is worth more than an Of that will do the same). Past just giving a positional bump, we are then only talking about D value while on the field. That still only makes up a small fraction, and just looking at Gordon last year, the scores used in most modern versions of WAR still have major issues.
To continue james’s point, one could infer that many “stats” are kept in our heads that point us in a direction. So the 20/20 SS is much more valuable than the 20/20 OF because… well because we know there are more OF who hit that in a given year than SS. Yet that still took a long time for people to realize that we should quantify it and evaluate the truth of it.
The more one learns, the more background calculations go on in that grey blob in the skull, oftentimes without the owner of that skull even aware its occurring. The next revolution in statistics will likely happen when we can figure out a way to actually measure the “instinct” or “gut” calculations occurring with scouts, GMs, and other observers of the game. When we find a way to measure the personality and behavioral aspects of a prospect or player and how it impacts their game, variability, resilience, etc., then a complete picture of any given player will begin to emerge. Until then, we are really just measuring outcomes without really knowing what the inputs are.
But defense in fantasy will have the same biases. Players are valued today for fantasy on the basis of playing time; ones who are defensive specialists often times ride the pine until the latter third of a game because there is a lesser fielding option who can create offense. So rate or counting stats that could be used in fantasy baseball for defense will probably still favor those who get regular playing time because they can also hit. Just like real-life baseball.
Good advertisement for the Auction Calculator to the masses Eno, assuming people read those articles. Based on the comments it is hard to tell.
A good tool to get a pre-draft ranked list of players, but as we all know in a real fantasy baseball auction draft you need to account for inflation and how many positions have yet to be filled by various teams in your league.