The Good, Bad & the Ugly roto categories

[AcidRock23]

In terms of categories, I do think that it is kind of absurd to say 'this stat is good' and 'that stat is bad' but I think that mathematically, in a (H2H...) fantasy season, that having more categories does have a statistical benefit of diminishing the value of any particular stat. By limiting oneself to 6x6 or 7x7, the tendency is to 'cherry pick' different stats, eg holds, to create value for a type of player, eg MR, over looked by the traditional 5x5 scoring.

By limiting yourself to adding one or two categories, I think that it overvalues holds a bit too much and weights things MORE in favor of MR which then, mathematically anyway, devalues a guy like Bonds who can hit a couple of HR/ game, get 10 walks a week and then you end up w/ the Bonds owner winning avg, HR, RBI and the Brendan Donnelly owner winning ERA and H. So the Bonds owner only 'wins' one category outright and only gets a slight edge out of Barry for that particular week. If you expand the stat base to a few other categories, you can enhance the value of a guy like Bonds who is a statistical monster but, at the same time, have some other cats to allow guys like Donnelly to have some value (if they don't catch any liners off their nose this year...)

We use: AB, R, H, HR, RBI, SB, BB, K, E, AVG, OBP, SLG, OPS for hitters and W, L, CG, SHO, SV, HR, BB, K, HLD, ERA, WHIP, K/9 for pitchers and have had different managers in contention both years w/ the same group of coworkers. Sure, some of the stats are goofy and Livan Hernandez led the majors w/ 9 CG last year but it livens things up and seems to encourage a lot of lineup tweaking and ongoing owner involvement. Which are kind of the goals that we have w/ our group. Sure, some people are more into it than others *cough cough* but everyone seems to agree that it works. So far anyway.

I do agree w/ bleach168 though that 'factoring' RP wins is an almost impossible task, more like a lottery than a scouting exercise. Perhaps there should be an additional stat...VW for Vulture Wins?

[Grouperman941]

I'm way over my head in talking about the sabremetric stats and probably even in trying to figure out whether or not stats are 'flawed', but ...

I think to have value, a statistic needs to answer a question, so all of them are meaningless without knowing the questions. If we are just looking for indicators of what happens in a baseball game, standard stats are fine. If there are deeper questions about what the numbers say about a player's skills, they are probably not so good.

Standard cats are easily visualized for the most part, which makes them seem easy to project and then follow throughout the year. I don't think it is because we are used to them. I think it's because they are pretty obvious while watching a game. I do not know about the history of this, and I would like to read the book you are talking about. I do know that when a player crosses the plate safely he has scored one run. I don't instinctively know how that run impacted any of his other stats. If I had to figure it out constantly, I have a feeling it would get old.

It is bad enough trying to figure out how to gain .02 in WHIP in August. I couldn't handle the math.

Empirically flawed or not, as long as the stats are agreed upon and followed (by someone counting them), they are all good. I tried to get Web Gems included in my league on the side to award a defensive trophy at the end of the year. Noone went for it but I still think that would have been cool. And not meaningless.

[Grouperman941]

All that and I forgot to say the one cat I hate is HR. It's just redundant. Take your hit, your R, and your RBI and be happy.

My leagues now use TB.

[AcidRock23]

Re pitching stats, there is an interesting chart at http://www.majorleaguecharts.com/mlc/mlbMisc_01.cfm that graphs K/9 vs BB/9 w/ dos (balls...) whose size note the HR/9 numbers for pitchers. Last year, somebody posted a link to it here and it was a bit more useful (or maybe someone figured out how to render it so the data was printable?) in that you could simply see where pitchers ranked in these categories which do seem like effective ways of measuring pitchers' effectiveness, particularly when you can see where the pitchers can be situated at a glance, right next to each other.

It also alarmed several of the people sitting by me at the draft simply b/c I had these numbers at my fingertips.