How We Value Players, Part Four

After comparing Category Dollars with Standings' Gain Points in the four main different types of leagues, we'll take a quick look at how each player earns three or four different amounts at the same time.

Auction Leagues

As you've likely gathered from previous article, we strongly believe Category Dollars are superior to SGP in auction leagues. Both methods rely on some form of marginal pricing, but since you shouldn't incorporate future-season value into current-season prices, SGP loses a unique feature. We presented our case on why position scarcity doesn't really exist yesterday, and without that advantage, few reasons are left to still use SGP to determine your values.

Category Dollars are essential for keeper leagues as you can compute more accurate values for your remaining players. For non-keeper leagues, SGP and Category Dollars are close in effectiveness, but we believe the additional degree of risk in using projected SGP denominators outweighs any other perceived advantage.

Straight Draft Leagues

In leagues with straight drafts, neither our opinion of SGP nor Category Dollars really changes. While we still prefer Category Dollars for ranking players since the projection risk remains smaller, we use a form of position scarcity on a round-by-round basis.

We find it essential to secure talent at weaker positions in these drafts because you have very little control over the course of the draft. The most effective strategy necessitates drafting your preference of the ten players likely to be chosen before you pick again.

Several spring publications only print either straight value lists, numbering every player from 1 to 200 or however many players the feel like ranking. Others will list their "mock draft", but these are again normally publications who don't tell you what categories they plan to use. Occasionally they'll toss out a statement like "It doesn't matter since we're just ranking the players according to overall worth."

Such comments insult the intelligence of those of us that play in leagues using categories. Both traditional roto and challenge games use categories and basic recorded statistics to determine the league winner. Without the baseline knowledge of the categories and statistics used for ranking, these lists are absolutely useless.

We have consistently finished in the money in our straight draft leagues for the last five years because we take the time to rank all the available players by the dollars we expect them to earn. After we separate players into the positions in which they have the most use (first catcher, then shortstop, etc.), we have a nice, one page draft list of every player likely to be chosen. We can then easily see what positions have more talent than others and can react quickly to in-draft developments during both live and e-mail drafts.

The following is the quick and easy way of deciding whom to draft between two seemingly equal players:

1. Take the projected dollar values of the players you prefer at positions you need. For example, Phil Nevin and Jimmy Rollins both earned around $28 in 2001 and each has a good chance of repeating his performance next year.

2. Add the difference between each player's salary and the next best player at that position. Aramis Ramirez was the next best 3B at $26, followed by Jeff Cirillo and Scott Rolen at a couple bucks less. Placido Polanco and Orlando Cabrera, the next best SS, earned about $19. Add two dollars to Nevin and $9 to Rollins to determine their Straight Draft Value.

3. Rollins' SDV of $37 is significantly higher than Nevin's $30. If you believe Rollins will perform similarly next year, he becomes an easy choice over Nevin since you have a decent chance of getting a similar 3B in the next round.

The choice between hitters and pitchers remains more complicated, so we'll wait to discuss that in detail until our Draft Strategy articles in the spring. For now, you can see why we prefer Category Dollars in determining our draft lists, although some SGP concepts are relevant in the actual draft.

Simulation Leagues

As we have not participated in either Scoresheet or similar leagues in the past, we have little experience with determining draft rankings, prices, etc. We've read several articles citing Runs Above Replacement (RAR) and even Total Baseball's Total Player Rating as good methods for creating draft lists. Any single statistic that can measure offensive and defensive players against each other will likely work fine although dollar values remain difficult to determine.

A form of Category Dollars would definitely be a more effective pricing method than SGP since we don't know how RAR denominators could be used in sim pricing. We don't have enough experience to discuss this much more at this time, but we do plan on joining our first Scoresheet league next season and expect to have regular articles detailing our 2002 Simulation Adventures.

Challenge Leagues

Finally, we arrive at a type of league for which SGP is the most effective pricing method. Category Dollars fail here because the entire formula is based around a finite player pool and salary cap. One of the most attractive points of challenge leagues is that anyone can own any player, and therefore we need a method to rank players against themselves.

Using category denominators is likely the easiest way to accomplish this, dividing each projected player statistic by the amount in that category that the average player needs to earn to insure you finish in the top 100. You then divide the sum of those numbers by the player's listed salary to determine his point/dollar of salary ratio.

Justin Eleff, in Gene McCaffrey's Wise Guy Baseball 2001, provided the needed denominators for last year's CDM Baseball Weekly Diamond Challenge game. Using the concepts outlined in Gene's book, we finished 102nd out of over 8200 teams in our first year of participation. You can make a significant amount of money if you put some time and effort into these games, and if you plan on playing BBWDC next year, we strongly recommend you pick up Wise Guy Baseball 2002 in January.

If anyone has another way to determine player values in any format, please e-mail us with your ideas and we can discuss them in a future article.

Now that we've finished comparing SGP and CD, we need to briefly review why players can earn several different dollar amounts at the same time.

Draft Value vs. Actual Value vs. Total Category Dollars

Most roto leagues have a historical auction split where 65% of the money is spent on hitting and 35% on pitching. This split has increased slightly the past few years to the point that we used a 70/30 split for most of our leagues this past season.

Using the 65/35 breakdown in dollar calculations allows you to determine a player's Draft Value, the price at which he should be drafted at the beginning of the season in a given league. This also can help determine how much a player ideally should have gone for at the draft when you input a player's actual stats in place of his projects stats.

Actual Value differs somewhat dramatically from Draft Value since hitters do not actually "earn" their draft value under a 65/35 split. Hitter values are inflated and pitcher's values deflated due to the higher risk of injury and inconsistent performance that pitchers have historically exhibited.

However in looking back at a season, a 4x4 league automatically means that hitter and pitchers earned an equal amount of value. Actual Value recomputes prices based on a 50/50 split.

Good drafts involve selecting hitters below their Actual Value and pitchers below their Draft Value. Any player drafted this way should earn more value for your team than his salary would otherwise indicate, and a team with 23 $11 players following this philosophy will win every time. Of course, such a team is practically impossible to assemble, so using these concepts as goals instead of absolutes is more important in executing such a strategy.

Lastly, Category Dollars, as previously described, indicate how much value a player earns you. Most leagues will have more Category Dollars than draft dollars, which is why the numbers normally are adjusted downwards to determine Draft Value. The value of Category Dollars lies in the fact that a player can help your team and earn positive value, while simultaneously not be worth a $1 bid on draft day. Every league has teams that wind up with catchers like this, as well as players at other weak positions. Knowing that a player has positive Category Dollars also can help you during the season as you can know which of the apparent negatively-valued players to pick up as a replacement for empty roster spots.

Catcher Week begins tomorrow. I will review how catcher-eligible players actually performed this season. We will list both 4x4 and 5x5 dollar values for each one, as well as their Draft Value, Actual Value, and Category Dollars. In the following weeks, we will work our way down the defensive spectrum, covering players eligible at multiple positions where they were most valuable.

I hope you'll have the chance to take Your Daily Fantasy Rx this week, since we've found that reflecting on last season's performances can be a powerful instructional tool in gaining enough knowledge to predict next year's statistics.

Today's Fantasy Rx: Dig out your draft and keeper lists from this past season. Keep them handy for the next few weeks as we review what players actually earned this season. Finally, have fun watching the Bears beat Tampa Bay, the first time Chicago will be featured on national broadcast in a couple years.