Half Way Home!

The players making winners and losers of you and me

Late last week the major league season passed the midway point. I pegged that to July 2nd, but you could have gone a day or two earlier, or a day later, and made the point that we were halfway through. Whatever. For our purposes, a day or two doesn’t matter.

What does matter is understanding how our teams are doing, and why. That’s where the profit/loss lists come in. You can see the hitters and pitchers lists here.

Most exciting? The most profitable hitters, of course.

What surprises me a little is that the two most profitable hitters in the first quarter got better in the second quarter. And while some names fell off this list (Yermin Mercedes!) many have persisted. Does this mean Mullis is a $40 player going forward? probably not, but we do have to take these guys seriously.

These are the players most likely to be driving winning teams. In Tout Wars second-place Colten-Wolf have Mullins and are just two and a half points behind Chris Liss (who has Isiah Kiner-Falefa and Adolis Garcia).

On the pitching side, much the same.

John Means, our first-quarter leader, is gone after injury knocked him out in early June. Freddy Peralta, Carlos Rodon, Kyle Gibson, and Trevor Rogers, surprises all, remain up near the top, evidence that an excellent pitching staff can be put together cheaply.

Probably not a surprise that No. 1 Kevin Gausman is owned by second-place Derek Carty in Tout Wars, though Derek is miles behind first-place Fred Zinkie, who hasn’t rostered any of the most profitable pitchers this year, and only Brandon Crawford among the hitters. Go figure.

If those names explain why your team is doing okay, these names explain why not.

Ouch. Read ‘em and weep.

And the hitters?

A reminder that disaster isn’t necessarily destiny. Howard Bender bought Eloy Jimenez in the Tout AL auction and sits in fourth place in that league. Tout allows teams to “redeem” DL players and receive back their draft salary x $10 in FAAB, so Howard has had some money to spend. But his decent standing owes more to his nice pickups of Vladdie Jr, Myles Straw, Trey Mancini, Lance Lynn, Cole Irvin, and Framber Valdez.

You can find the complete lists by clicking here. See you in six weeks with the latest.

More Meta Than Ever!

Maybe I should say More Mea Culpa Than Ever!

While putting together this quarter’s report I discovered some oddities in the pitching pricing. Not huge errors, generally, but big enough in some cases that I noticed them.

At first I thought this had to do with all the relief wins this year, which definitely screws up the pitching formula sometimes, but a closer look showed me it wasn’t that. It seems that a certain amount of cruft had crept into my pricing spreadsheet. If you’ve noticed discrepancies with past reports, they’re fixed in this latest version.

When I built the spreadsheet I created a few different formulas to calculate prices for AL and NL only leagues and mixed leagues of different sizes. Over the years, however, I’d moved to simply pricing a 24-team mixed league, because those prices were very similar to 12-team only leagues, and that got rid of the issues interleague trades introduced. And because the two leagues have become increasingly similar statwise because of interleague play, the differences between AL and NL prices were mostly negligible. Still, as I moved forward all the other formulas lay hidden and not so hidden in that spreadsheet.

What I did this week was get rid of everything but the 24-team mixed league formulas for $260 teams, and repriced the first and second quarter stats. The result are clean, fresh prices for the top 216 (or so) pitchers, based on 35 percent of the budget, and clean, fresh prices for the top 336 (or so) hitters, based on 65 percent of the budget. These prices are better at comparing player performance to draft expectations than they are at explaining everything about how a team is doing. That’s because useful players in these prices will have negative values.

As I’ve noted before, the formula is for 5x5 Batting Average league stats, though it will also generate 5x5 OBP stats with the flick of a switch and a new sort. I’ll publish those sometime soon.

Also, remember that Stolen Bases and Saves are valued at 50 percent. Those adjustments reflect the fact that big stolen base guys and closers can outrun the field, making the value of each SB or Sv less, and teams can opt-out of competing in those two categories, reducing demand and prices. Those two realities are generally reflected in draft-day prices.

Finally, these prices are not cleaned up by position eligibility, so in the top 336 hitters there are not 24 catchers. Doing that clean-up is not a pleasant task and I don’t think it’s that important for these interim reports. If you want to know how your regular catcher is doing, Salvador Perez is doing very well while Will Smith is hanging in there and Yasmani Grandal is taking too many walks. That’s all reflected in the prices.

For the rest of them, scroll down to $1 players and you’ll find a lot of them bubbling under.

Let me know if you have any questions about any of this. And look for another report in mid August, with the third quarter’s results added.

Sincerely,

Rotoman