Investing & Maybe Fantasy Baseball

Today I wantedto talk about the importance of a first round pick in fantasy baseball drafts. If you read my last post, you would have seen a first round pick has the potential to add five or more points to your team against replacement level player. Below are tables of the past four seasons. The tables on the left show the top ten players taken in ESPN drafts based on the average draft position and the number in the parenthesis represents where the player finished on that seasons ESPNs Player Rater. The right side is the opposite.

We have a sample of 40 players drafted in the first round and only ten of them (25%) finished the year in the top ten. Seven finished between 11-20, two finished between 21-30 and one finished 31-40 on ESPNs Player Rater. So only half of the players finished as a top-40 player! On the other side of the coin, there were 16 players who were drafted after the 40^th pick who ended the year in the top ten on the Player Rater. There are two takeaways from this data: 1) you want to be extremely careful with your early picks and 2) draft high upside players after the 4^th round. Tomorrow I’ll discuss the players to avoid in the first round. 

I initially started writing a piece about how fantasy owners should wait to get their starting pitching because pitching is the deepest position in fantasy. However, as I started writing I realized I was being extremely vague; I was using more hyperbole instead of real analysis. So I decided to embark on an experiment. I wanted to see how much of an impact drafting a starting pitcher over a hitter in the first round would do in a 10-team 5×5 Rotisserie League (one catcher, five outfielders, one MI, one CI, one U and nine pitchers).

The experiment is based on the 2012 the season where a fantasy owner is debating whether to take Robinson Cano or Justin Verlander in the first round. I choose both those players because they were healthy and played the entire year. In order to show the impact of this decision the rest of the team will remain the same except for the last pick in the draft. If the owner took Verlander instead of Cano, the owner used the last pick of the draft to fill the vacant spot in the lineup left by Cano. In order to measure the difference in scoring I aggregated the season totals and compared them to the totals on the “Avg Roto Points Per Stat by Finish” from ESPN, which provides the average totals necessary to achieve a certain total by category. I agree this methodology is very flawed, but I wanted to see impact of this one decision on a team’s chances to win.

Before I move on to the analysis I wanted to show how much of an impact a pitcher and a hitter have on a fantasy team. On average a pitching staff will throw roughly 1,458 innings at the end of the year. If a pitcher throws 200 innings, those innings will comprise 13.7% of the total output. Someone like Verlander, who pitched 238 innings, will comprise 16.3% of the total innings, thereby making him more valuable. On average a team’s lineup will have 8,770 plate appearances; a hitter with 630 plate appearances will only comprise of 7.2% of the total plate appearances.

Below is the lineup with and without Cano. I choose Marco Scutaro because he was the only middle infielder taken in the last round of a 10-team league.

Below are the cumulative statistical 5×5 categories:

Below shows the fantasy points each category would provide. The total difference in scoring is five points.

Below is the rotation with and without Verlander. I choose Trevor Cahill at random among the starting pitchers that were taken in the last round of a 10-team league.

Below are the cumulative statistical 5×5 categories:

Time for the money shot; how much of an improvement was Verlander over a replacement level player.

The difference for both Cano and Verlander provided exactly the same value over a replacement level player. This doesn’t mean a fantasy owner should or should not take a pitcher early in drafts, but what I did learn is if you do take a pitcher early you won’t be at a severe disadvantage as you navigate through the rest of the draft. It does, however, mean the fantasy owner will have to compose a lineup with hitters who will exceed their draft day value. 

If read my fantasy guide you’ll notice I have Derek Jeter ranked as my 20^th rated fantasy shortstop. This low ranking may come as a shock because last year he led the league in hits and was 13^th in runs scored. However, that was last year. Fantasy owners are only concerned about what a player will do and not what they have done. If Jeter didn’t fracture his ankle in Game 1 of the ALCS he would be easily be ranked higher. Unfortunately, he did fracture his ankle and has yet to play in a Spring Training game and will end this season at the age of 39.

I’m not a doctor and I haven’t seen him play yet, so I’m going to downplay the injury angle and on focus solely on his age. I expect his numbers to decline because no matter how hard we fight against it, Father Time eventually wins in the end. In order to justify my hunch I wanted to see how much of a difference in performance Hall of Fame caliber players saw during their age 39 season compared to the five seasons prior. I choose a random sample of ten players and I looked at the percent differences in their slash lines.

Their batting average, OBP and slugging decreased 4.28%, 6.62% and 9.96% respectively. Jeter’s slash line the past five years is: .291/.341/.371. If his performance declines like these ten contemporaries he’s going put up a slash line of .291/.330/.369 with a substantial decrease in power. Jeter surprisingly hit 15 home runs, the most since 2009, which was aided by an inflated 16.1% HR/FB rate. Most of his fantasy value comes from a high batting average and scoring a lot of runs. If his slash line regresses and he only belts 6-10 home runs, you have a 15^th rated shortstop; on top of all that he will be six months removed from a broken ankle and has spent the entire offseason learning how to walk again instead of training.