7.16.2007
For You Head-to-Headers in the Audience
Even though I was fortunate enough to attend last week, there's just not as much to say about the Home Run Derby as I'd hoped. The derby itself is fun to watch naturally, if you can stomach the pre-packaged Product Placementalooza that tends to accompany hype-driven events like this. (Even more grating than product advertisements, which we expect and understand by now, are what I'll call the Personality Placements. At one point between rounds there was an interview of Cal Ripken given by Jon Miller and broadcast over the PA system; Ripken has no connection to San Francisco or to the Home Run Derby, Miller had no real questions to ask that would hint at why Ripken needed to be interviewed, and Ripken had nothing interesting to say whatsoever. Naturally this elicited one of the biggest ovations of the night, and I honestly cannot say why. I actually felt myself stifling a gag reflex.)
In the end this year's edition will be more remembered for a weak final round (Alex Rios only mustered two pokes in his last go, leaving Vlad the Impaler with not much chance for dramatics), a complete lack of balls hit into McCovey Cove (never has a bigger fuss been made over the possibility of hitting a ball into a body of water), and the fact that Barry Bonds could have given us the best Derby storyline of all time by joining in the festivities...but chose not to. All of which is to say, this Derby isn't going to be remembered at all.
So in lieu of that, allow me to veer into the minutiae of fantasy baseball for a moment. Despite my ongoing and even deepening fantasy baseball love affair I've shied away from discussion of it in any forms. It's a conversation-killer, a business to be conducted privately through email and the written word rather than over lunch as three of your female coworkers roll their eyes in boredom.
That said, fantasy baseball rules my life regardless and thus the All-Star Break is an unwelcome interruption to my daily fix of box scores. This was the case last year too, when I got to fiddling around with Yahoo's Head-to-Head Stats page and bemoaned the fate of my underachieving team, The Oddibe McDowells. Anyone familiar with head-to-head fantasy baseball knows the pain of putting up a solid week of production, only to be overwhelmed by a team having the best week of its life and limp out with a 10-2 defeat. In this case, I realized that if our league had been of the roto variety I would have been leading the league in OPS, but instead I had gone only 6-8-0 in that category head-to-head.
Seemed pretty unfair, right? Well, it turns out I am the type who will go the extra mile when it comes to making excuses for lackluster performance, so within a couple hours I had devised the Lucky Bastard Factor and calculated it for each team in each of my three head-to-head Yahoo leagues. The LBF is not a remotely rigorous stat to be held up against the likes of VORP or WXRL, but it can be a fun little toy to kill some time during the All-Star Break doldrums.
Here's how it works: The Oddibe McDowells were #1 in overall OPS but only went 6-8-0 in that category, the seventh best such record in the league. (1) - (7) = -6, or an unlucky bastard in OPS. Conversely, a team that manages the fifth-best record in stolen bases despite putting up the tenth-highest SB total will be (10) - (5) = 5, or a lucky bastard in stolen bases. Add all the categories of your league together and you have the team's total LBF. In the case of ties always round up, so if four teams tied for fifth at 7-5-2 than they all get credit for fifth. This will make the numbers skew positive a bit in what would otherwise probably be a zero-sum game. Exact totals and ranges will vary according to the specific type of league (# of teams, # of categories), but usually the fickle nature of a head-to-head schedule will leave you with a pretty decent snapshot of some luck and unlucky teams.
Your team's LBF says less about the performance of your team per se than it does the variance in the competition you've faced. If you've played right to your expected spot in the standings based on your theoretical rotisserie score, your LBF will be zero. If your LBF is in the negatives, then you can expect your head-to-head record to improve in the second half without making any changes (assuming constant production from your players, naturally a big if). But should your LBF be particularly high -- and this doesn't always correlate with the teams in the top half of the W-L standings either -- then you've been overachieving and should probably make some moves or at least conjure up some improvement from somewhere, lest you risk dropping off.
As it happened, the Oddibes had the lowest LBF in the league at the break: -14 in a twelve-team, twelve-category league. And aside from landing Brett Myers in a fortunate steal of a trade, there were no wholesale changes or panic moves required to lift the Oddibes from tenth place to a lofty third by season's end. I'm just sayin'....
In the end this year's edition will be more remembered for a weak final round (Alex Rios only mustered two pokes in his last go, leaving Vlad the Impaler with not much chance for dramatics), a complete lack of balls hit into McCovey Cove (never has a bigger fuss been made over the possibility of hitting a ball into a body of water), and the fact that Barry Bonds could have given us the best Derby storyline of all time by joining in the festivities...but chose not to. All of which is to say, this Derby isn't going to be remembered at all.
So in lieu of that, allow me to veer into the minutiae of fantasy baseball for a moment. Despite my ongoing and even deepening fantasy baseball love affair I've shied away from discussion of it in any forms. It's a conversation-killer, a business to be conducted privately through email and the written word rather than over lunch as three of your female coworkers roll their eyes in boredom.
That said, fantasy baseball rules my life regardless and thus the All-Star Break is an unwelcome interruption to my daily fix of box scores. This was the case last year too, when I got to fiddling around with Yahoo's Head-to-Head Stats page and bemoaned the fate of my underachieving team, The Oddibe McDowells. Anyone familiar with head-to-head fantasy baseball knows the pain of putting up a solid week of production, only to be overwhelmed by a team having the best week of its life and limp out with a 10-2 defeat. In this case, I realized that if our league had been of the roto variety I would have been leading the league in OPS, but instead I had gone only 6-8-0 in that category head-to-head.
Seemed pretty unfair, right? Well, it turns out I am the type who will go the extra mile when it comes to making excuses for lackluster performance, so within a couple hours I had devised the Lucky Bastard Factor and calculated it for each team in each of my three head-to-head Yahoo leagues. The LBF is not a remotely rigorous stat to be held up against the likes of VORP or WXRL, but it can be a fun little toy to kill some time during the All-Star Break doldrums.
Here's how it works: The Oddibe McDowells were #1 in overall OPS but only went 6-8-0 in that category, the seventh best such record in the league. (1) - (7) = -6, or an unlucky bastard in OPS. Conversely, a team that manages the fifth-best record in stolen bases despite putting up the tenth-highest SB total will be (10) - (5) = 5, or a lucky bastard in stolen bases. Add all the categories of your league together and you have the team's total LBF. In the case of ties always round up, so if four teams tied for fifth at 7-5-2 than they all get credit for fifth. This will make the numbers skew positive a bit in what would otherwise probably be a zero-sum game. Exact totals and ranges will vary according to the specific type of league (# of teams, # of categories), but usually the fickle nature of a head-to-head schedule will leave you with a pretty decent snapshot of some luck and unlucky teams.
Your team's LBF says less about the performance of your team per se than it does the variance in the competition you've faced. If you've played right to your expected spot in the standings based on your theoretical rotisserie score, your LBF will be zero. If your LBF is in the negatives, then you can expect your head-to-head record to improve in the second half without making any changes (assuming constant production from your players, naturally a big if). But should your LBF be particularly high -- and this doesn't always correlate with the teams in the top half of the W-L standings either -- then you've been overachieving and should probably make some moves or at least conjure up some improvement from somewhere, lest you risk dropping off.
As it happened, the Oddibes had the lowest LBF in the league at the break: -14 in a twelve-team, twelve-category league. And aside from landing Brett Myers in a fortunate steal of a trade, there were no wholesale changes or panic moves required to lift the Oddibes from tenth place to a lofty third by season's end. I'm just sayin'....
Labels: fantasy baseball, stats
