Draftees Remaining in Country

After round 11, you are more likely to drop a player that you draft than you are to keep him.  Let's think about that for a second; there is a better chance that you will be wrong about how you rank more than half the players you draft.  You have chosen a full dozen players before a player who will actually be valuable to you.  That argument was incredibly flawed, but at least it wasn't a haiku, am I right here? Hey Now!
Also, note how, despite many players being dropped from the team to which they were drafted, a whole bunch of those were picked up and, at the end of the dayaloon, only about 32% of the rosters were populated by undrafted free agents.  In other words, other people's garbage remains more appealing than plain old garbage.  If it is good enough for someone else, it is good enough for me, as I always say.  Also, I am not averse to eating garbage, as I also say, though less frequently.

	FA	Drafted Elsewhere	Drafted
Picture me Rollins	4	6	14	24
Omar's Coming	8	6	10	24
The Super Upton Brothers	6	6	12	24
It's a Trap!	7	4	13	24
Total Lack of Morales	8	3	13	24
Vaya Con Bernabe	9	4	11	24
Texas Fooey	10	4	10	24
Rockford Peachz	7	5	12	24
Ronnie Woo Woo	10	2	12	24
Omar's Spent	8	0	16	24

 

Roto Standings by Week

The wheat from the chaff

Too early, the die is cast

Praise the King, Ackbar

Waiver Wire Awards

I have cracked the nut of the player transaction problem and have been able to draw some sweet gooey data out of it.  With his data, I have managed to draw some players out as stand-out free agents who, for whatever reason, have distinguished themselves.  Here they are!  Let them be happy!

The Eternal Optimist Award

When players are dropped from their teams, they sometimes laugh it off and say, "I'll take my 3 days off and then stay up really late to see whose team I end up on when I get claimed off of waivers at 4:30 in the morning."  4:30 comes and goes, and the player still remains available.  "Ain't no thing," he says, "Once the new week starts, I will make my way onto a good team and show them all how I do."  The comforting twilight of Sunday gives way to the harsh fluorescent sun rising on Monday morning and still, the player remains available.  Weeks pass and nothing happens; sure there may be a couple of interested teams looking at his stats, but surely there are better options available, maybe Julio Bourbon!  Some players see this and decide to hang 'em up for the season, but others, those rare few, hold out hope that they will eventually be playing again on a fake major league team.  And for a very few, their dreams come to fruition.

The winner of this first half season's eternal optimist, the player who has ridden the wire for the longest after being picked up and dropped, but then being picked up again is Chris Davis, the first baseman for the Texas Rangers.  After being drafted by the commish in the 11th round, Davis was dropped on April 14th in favor of high-OPSer Nick Johnson.  Davis languished on the waver wire for 87 days (and played in the minors) before being picked up again by the commish on July 10th over Russel Branyan.  As well as Davis' optimism helped him in getting back to the show, he waited only a few days before he was dropped again in a trade involving Kung Fu Panda.  Stay positive, Chris, maybe another team will take a chance on you.  

Runner Up:  Miguel Montero (Recovered from injury on the wire from 4/11 to 6/22, a layoff of 72 days)

Second Runner Up: Chris Coghlan (Roamed the wire from 4/14 until being picked up on 6/24, a layoff of 71 days)

The Channukah Award

Often, you pick up a player from the wire who is on a hot streak with the hope for a guy who will put up all star numbers for the whole season.  Very rarely, this actually happens, but much more frequently, the player will keep the flame lit for a few weeks and then cool off.  Some players inhabit the middle ground between these two extremes:  they keep their flames lit for far longer than you dared to dream, but didn't have the gumption to stick around for the whole season.  

The Channukah Award for the player who has been picked up and stuck around his team for the longest before being dropped again is Shawn Marcum, the pitcher for the Blue Kays.  After going through surgery and missing the previous season, Marcum was great from the start and was picked up by the commish right at the beginning of the season on March 24.  He managed to stay on the roster and contributing for 104 days before finally being dropped on July 6th for Madison Bumgardner.  That stink must be strong, though, as he was picked up again shortly thereafter by the commish.  

Runner Up:  Juan Rivera (Picked up by Judd on 3/24 over Lastings Milledge and dropped on 6/28 for David Ortiz, a tenure of 96 days)

Second Runner Up:  Dallas Braden (Picked up after pitching that perfecto game on 4/8 by Woo Woo over Aaron Harang and dropped on 6/21 for RA Dickey, a tenure of 74 days)

The Ugly Girl at the End of the Party Award

When one of your star players goes down and the time comes to search that waiver wire for a replacement, there seem to be a few players who are always there, just waiting to be picked up.  They are never good enough to be on a team for a long time, but they are good enough to be picked up for a short time; they are better than nothing, after all.  

There are 4 recipients of the Ugly Girl award, players who have been picked up and dropped the most times (involved in 6 transactions each).  They are the always streaky David Ortiz, the potential all star youngster Buster Posey, the reliable former Yankee Austin Jackson, and the ugliest of closers who still has his job, Bobby Jenks. 

The Rotating Door Jammer Award

The waiver wire is a harsh mistress.  Often, when choo-choo-choosing a player, we throw common sense to the wind and pick up an player made of "old typewriter parts," who had been great before and could do it again, or a young player who has put up great minor league numbers and just may be able to carry it through to the majors.  More often than not, players who are picked up are eventually dropped and their spot becomes a rotating spot for whoever is doing the best.  Rare are the players who are picked up on the wire and remain there for the whole season. 

The winner of the Rotating Door Jammer Award, the player who was picked up the earliest and remains on that team, is Casey McGehee who was picked up on April 2nd by Sabo and has held his spot in the roster since then.  

Runner Up:  Placedo Polanco and Vernon Wells (Tie), both picked up on April 5th by Ackbar and the commish, respectively.

Second Runner Up:  Kelly Johnson, picked up on April 13th by Andrew. 

Why Carl Crawford is the Best Fantasy Player

As you can clearly see from this graphs, Carl Crawford is the one player who leads multiple unlinked quantitative scoring categories!  I mean, look at how he is the one big exception to the rules in those graphs!  Whereas his power peers are more chubby, like home plates, he is taller and more pointed, like an expecially angular shaped sperm shooting machine also known as a penis.  Miguel Carbonara may lead in the power hitting categories, but as it turns out, because there are so few steals each week, each one is precious and actually worth more than a HR, of which there are more.  I did many correlations of this that will not be shown here, but the benefits of hitting a whole bunch of HRs can be made up relatively easily by more plebian performance.  Moreover, it turns out that one of the strongest categorical correlations is a negative one between HRs and SBs, meaning that most of the time, when you get a guy to swipe them bagaloons, he does so at the price of HRs.  Carl, though, is able to hold up in both categories, meaning that not only do you get the speed upside, but you get no accompanying downside in power!  Amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!
What's that?  What methods did I use for this analysis you ask?  No!  You didn't ask!  There is no you!  There is only me.  In an empty room.  Alone with my beautiful numbers.  

State of the League

 

Look at that graph.  Look at those 60% transparent baseballs in the background.  Man (and Justine), that is a goddamn fine looking graph.  So colorful.  So easy to compare.  So actually conclusion suggesting.  Isn't it amazing how, after Oksana went to sleep before the Jacuzzi in weeks 6 and 7, the quantitative categories go down and the ERA and WHIP rise?  And then fell in tandem with the rising other categories?
I feel sadness that the league was in such a slump in those weeks 6 and 7.  I feel happiness that moves were made and the league is now as potent as it evar was.  I feel pressure that the league is doing its best lately.  I feel worried about how this week 15, where there will be a full week plus 4 post all star break days, will affect my statistical correlations.  But then I look at that graph again and I feel happy.

Materials and Methods:

Team totals were tabulated and the averages of each category for the entire season was calculated.  To calculate the individual weekly totals, a more complicated moving average was required to smooth out some of the noise in the data.  Thus, for the meat of the weeks, the team averages were calculated by multiplying the team's performance in that given week by 4, the preceding and next weeks by 2, and the weeks surrounding that 3-week period by 1, and then dividing that by 10.  For the first and last weeks, the same calculation was used except using 1-tail rather than 2 in the weekly tabulations.  To construct the graph above, all data needed to be scaled so that it could be accurately compared (40HR can't be compared to 0.300 average in the same units).  Thus, a variance-based approach was used where the weekly floating average was subtracted from the total average, and then divided by the total variation (the difference between the maximum weekly average and the minimum) to give values that range from 0.3704 (AVG in week 14) to -0.3198 (K/9 in week 7). 

Worst Week Evar!

The commish recently noted in his power rankings that Sabo's team was coming off of a bad week, and to now focus on moving forward. This got me thinking about what the effects were of an especially bad week and how badly they hurt your team's overall record. My initial thinking was that it was most important to limit your damage on a bad hitting week by pitching well (and vice versa), and that to make up any sort of good ground in the overall rankings, you would need to make your great weeks count by taking 9, 10, or even 11 categories.
I went through the scores of each team in each week and quantified how good or bad each week was, and how the overall score of that week ended up (See Materials and Methods at the bottom of the post). I will highlight a few specific cases, but check out the original results, find your team, question the data!
1.  The Peachz - Lemonade Makers
The Peachz have been frustratingly resilient throughout the years;  you see their draft and laugh, you see some early pickups and you laugh, you see their record after the first go-round in the league and you laugh, and then somehow, the end up in the playoffs. Perhaps a look at how they performed in their best and worst weeks would give a clue:

Indeed, the Peachz were able to compensate for their bad hitting in week 4 against the Fooeys with dominant pitching to take the week 7-5, and they were able to outslug the Moraleseseseses in their worst pitching performance in week 1 and take advantage of the former Andruses' equally poor pitching to take the week 8-4.  However, they were unable to convert their great power hitting numbers in week 9 against the Omars to more than an 8-4 victory, and did even worse when their usually dominant pitching was unable to outslug the Kurt Locker and were only able to eke out 7 victories.
What really stood out to me when looking over the Peachz records in these matchups was their consistency.  Despite poor performances, the Peachz were able to add wins regardless of whether they were slugging and pitching at their best or were strug-gull-ling.  In other words, the Peachz can win ugly or win pretty, but they consistently win, or at least don't ever drop an insane amount of games (except for this last week, where is Judd coming from?).  Indeed, that is the key to their dominance in the league:  they always manage to get just a few more victories than you do and scrape together wins in various categories each week even if they are unrelated.  If you average 7 wins per contest, you will do quite well in the league.

2.  The Bernabes - Follow the Guitar
If the overriding theme of the league and key to making the playoffs is to consistently win and inch your way into the bracket rather than win big occasionally and then lose the rest of the time, then the Vaya Con Bernabe team is the perfect and tragic illustration of what happens when you consistently lose and you fall farther and farther behind.  The Bernabes are an excellent collection of players with some of the best pitching in the league, but they just don't have that locker room chemistry that carries teams over the top. 

The Bernabes were not able to make up any ground with their ridiculous pitching when their hitting failed in week 8 against the Peachz, and they were unable to smash the ball when their pitching failed (but still won most categories) in week 5 against the Moraleseseseseses.  However, even when they both hit the cover off the ball and pitched the best that they ever had in week 10, they were unable to make up any ground against the Upton Bros, falling to them 5-6-1.  Looking at their weekly totals, it just seems like their great weeks don't match up with eachother:  when they get the most RBIs, they can't score any runs; when they steal the most bases, they can't get any ding-a-lings.  Even their vaunted pitching, so dominant, so many hitless and perfect innings, is unable to match up:  with wins come high ERAs; where Ks are to be found, saves have run for ze hills.  This team is a good team, they are just totally out of sync, which is causing them to drop games all over the place.  Like the Peachz, who consistantly win and climb in those standings, the Bernabe are consistently losing and are thus falling farther and farther off pace.
3.  The Complete Lack of Moraleses - All over the place
If the Peachz are climbing with consistent winning and the Bernabes are falling by losing the same way, the Moraleseseseses are all over the place.  One week, they are losing 1-11, the next they are winning by the same score.  Looking at how they have fared on their best and worst weeks, things become even more murky.

At their worst, they have dropped significant games.  They dropped a total of 21 games against Omar and Ackbar when they hit and pitch poorly, respectively.  Conversely, they took 8 and 8 against the Uptons and the Fooeys when they hit and pitched well.  Currently, they sit second in the standings, and the majority of their games are nice 7 or 8 victories.  They do, however, have these occasional but not rare major stumbles.  Indeed, these types of wildly inconsistent performances have lead the Moraleses to hang with both the Matsuis and Bernabes in the basement, but also to hobnob with the Ackbars and Omar on the rooftop.  How will this team play out?  Will they be able to level out or will they just flame out and leave their crushing victories as little more than footnotes in a wasted season?  We shall find out in about 10 weeks and, in the interim, all pray that we catch the Moraleses when they put their shoes on the wrong foot, rather than putting those shoes up your ass.


For most teams, the worst weeks come with about 4-5 wins, and the best come with 7-9 wins, but the common thread is that most of these performances are not the outliers; there are usually higher win totals when you perform worse, and lower win totals when you performed better.  The key that I found when looking over all of these performances is the best single-week performances are rarely coming from the teams that are doing the best in the rankings; rather, the teams that are at the top are winning most of their matchups by small margins, but winning often.  Just like the real sport of baseball and not this D&D version, teams that win 100 of their games 3-2 will end up going further than teams that win 60 of their games 15-0, but lose the remaining 100.

Materials and Methods - Each team's weekly scores were scored based on how they stood in the ranking of all of that team's scores.  The best performances in a given category were given a +3 score, the second best a +2, and the third best a +1.  The worst performances were given -3, -2, and -1 accordingly.  All other scores were given a 0.  The total hitting and pitching scores were tabulated (column AC "hitting" and AD "pitching" on the right in the "raw data" tab of the spreadsheet), and the best and worst performances for each team were isolated.  Analysis was followed by coffee, and then I concluded on the pot.

The 8-pitch limit

There has been much talk (well, some talk.  Not as much as a David Wright gay post gets.) about the teams that go over the 8 start limit.  I decided to look at this problem from a more statistical point of view and see what the real effects are of going over the start limit.
First, I simply wanted to see who committed this most foul of sins most often. There have been 22 instances where teams have gone over the start limit, and 16 times where one team has gone over while the other has stayed within the limits (3 matchups where both teams went over).



Sabo is weighing in as the most starts over the limit with 5 instances over the limit and 11 total starts over the limit.  Sabo started 11 against me (as well as 11 against 1 other person, and 10 against 2 people), and I actually emailed him earlier in the week and he reveled in his limit-busting roster.  As a lawyer, I think that Sabo goes with the idea that if the law allows it, it is legal, which I guess is sort of true.  Loopholes are legal.  Don't hate the playa, hate the game.  I rest my case on your face, councilor.  Good job Kurt Locker, Ackbar, and Andrus, you are going to fantasy baseball heaven.  
It is all well and good for us to demonize the people who go over the limit, but was it really so bad to go over?  To answer this question, I had to look more specifically at the effect of going over the limit.  I went in with a number of assumptions:
- The more starts, the more Ks, and the people who went over the limit would be winning that category more often than losing it.
- Same with wins.
- Because you have so many more starters, you should not have as many closers and should thus be punting saves.  
- Because you are throwing out more guys, the chances of you starting a crap pitcher or having a poor performance should go way up, so the ERA should be higher when you go over the start limit.
- Same with WHIP.
- Same with K/9.

I looked at how many times a team that has gone over the start limit has taken a category when their opponent has stayed within the limit.  The results were not what I was expecting.



First of all, the way that I read these results is that the extra starts would be said to have an effect on a given category if there was a significant shift away from 50% wins, 50% losses.  If half the time you won and half the time you lost a given category when doing something, it makes sense that that something would really not have an effect on how well you do in that category.
So as you can see, when you went over the limit and your opponent did not, you won or tied Ks and Wins much more often than you lost (75 and 68.5%, respectively), meaning that the extra starts definitely strongly affected these two categories.  However, these extra wins did not seem to come at any cost, as I had initially predicted.  Teams that trotted out all of these extra starters did not sacrifice any of their relief efforts, and the ERA and WHIP remained steady in the face of so many extra innings pitched.
So it seemed like Ks and Wins were the only category that were responsive to these extra starts.  To confirm this, I normalized these categories and saw what the effects were.  I thought it unfair to simply cut out the best performance or the last pitching performance of the week, so I simply found what the average start of the week was for these teams and averaged them over 8 starts.  As expected, Ks and Wins fell into more randomized ratios, where teams won half their games.  


Indeed, had these people followed the rules as they were, they would have given up a bunch of wins.
All of this got me thinking about the effect of extra starts.  Indeed, it seems like if you start more guys, you get better results.  However, if you stay under the 8 start limit, is there anything wrong with that?



Apparently, the winning strategy is just to load up on starting pitching.  The more starters that you trot on out there, the greater the chance of you winning those critical quantitative pitching categories, and seemingly, there is no detriment to the average pitching categories.  Indeed, it is questionable whether having extra bench hitters to fill in on those Mondays and Thursdays will have nearly the benefit of having an extra starter, regardless of quality.  Even if you say that more starters means less quality, you will still be able to rack up those innings and absorb a bad pitching outing more easily than if you had pitched fewer innings.  
One of the interesting conclusions that I came to when looking at this data was that these extra starts are often accumulated at the ends of the weeks, after you already know what your pitching line will look like.  If you had stunk up the joint and your WHIP and ERA is already raising the roof, and not in a good way, or that your opponent's is, then it is very easy to push those starters out there to get Ks and Wins without worrying too much about their actual performance.  I think that we have all been in the odd position when you are happier to have a guy hit a homer than to ground out, simply because you already have sealed up that category.
In the end, I agree with the decision made by the commish and support further the notion that we should just drop all upper pitching limits.  We always make the decision of whether the extra Ks or Wins will be worth the chance of giving up a million more runs, the only crux is that at the end of the week, these averages all set up and the team that is ahead in ERA and WHIP has much more to risk by sacrificing one precious move, a player who they probably wanted to keep, and the sanctity of those low average categories for the marginal benefit of beating your opponent in those two critical quantitative categories.   We may think that it is cheap for a guy who has a 6 ERA and a 2 WHIP on Saturday to pick up a bunch more guys to win Ks and Wins, but it is in fact the same calculated risk we all make except for the fact that a bad outing will not be nearly as detrimental.  Hindsight is 20-20, and most of these decisions are made on the cost-benefit analysis that we all run before the starts.  It seems like you simply have to make the decision that we all knew intrinsically, that you will be getting a few extra Ks and possibly a win, but you are running the risk of a bad outing.

Great Performances - Part 2: Pitching

While individual hitting performances may have not had the transformational effect on the overall weekly score, surely amazing pitching performances would be more important.  After all, we are (in theory) limited to 8 starts and even in this frontier league, it is rare that we get more than 12 starts.  It is reasonable, then, to assume that one of these 8 or so starts being so great would have a heavy influence on the score, right?  Wrong!  For the pitching, I calculated the final score based on the premise that the pitcher had been on the bench that day, but also on the premise that the pitcher had turned in a more pedestrian performance to the tune of 6IP, 3ER, 5K, 4H, 4BB. 

1.  Roy Halladay pitches the 20th perfect game in 123 years of MLB history.

Doc Halladay was dominant against the Peachz over Memorial Day weekend, but his performance only lead to a 1 game swing in the standings.  Perhaps not surprisingly, this swing came from the change in WHIP, but the 9 scoreless innings had no effect on the final standing.  However, even if Doc had scattered 6 hits throughout his 9, the Bernabes still would have had enough of a benefit to take the category.

4.  Josh Johnson strikes out 12 and wishes Vaya Con Dios to Bernabe

Not only did Johnson's 4 baserunners in 9 carry the WHIP category, but his high K total was enough to turn the total K category.  Had Johnson gotten only a single K per inning, which is a nice line to begin with, the category would have resulted in a tie rather than a win for Omar.  In this league that rewards Ks above all else, a dominant K performance is the most important factor in the overall scoring.


5.  Ubaldo Rises to national prominence by no-hitting the braves. 

The no-hitter is, in my mind, the most overrated of fantasy achievements.  Despite giving up 0 hits, Ubaldo gave free passes to 6 batters which, though small in number, was still large enough to add to the W + H total and leave Bernabe a bit behind.  Had Ubaldo given up a single homer in the game rather than walking 6, WHIP would have gone his way that week.  I remember this matchup and, after the no-hitter, Tim was ahead in many pitching categories, but Gavin Floyd's poor pitching the next day erased all good that the no-hitter had done.
The average pitching swing that these great performances had was 0.8 games, less than the 1 full game that a great hitting performance had.  I think that the final line under all of this is that, because there are more easily attainable quantitative hitting categories that are spread over a larger amount of players and opportunities than pitching categories, the great hitting performance ends up mattering more than the great pitching.  Also, bad pitching can be so much worse than bad hitting because of the damage that bad pitching can do; 8 ER in 3 IP is much worse than 0/5.  I also think that it is worth noting that, without fail, the "alt" pitching performance of 6IP, 3ER, 8BR, and 5K is just as good as no pitching performance at all.  Perhaps that will figure into the currently ramping up argument about the 8 starts limit. 

Great Performances - Part 1: Hitting

Perhaps one of the most heartbreaking moments of a fantasy week is when, after being away from your computer for a while, you check how your matchup is going and you see that your opponent has pulled far ahead of you. Looking more closely, you see that one of his (or the Peachz'z) playerz has accounted for most of that damage through a monster day.  Especially when those performances are early in the week, you feel like someone has just punched you in the stomach and, while you are bent over with no breath, made sweet love to your spouse.  I have been in the dugout for my precious Ackbars when I saw Adrian Beltre go yard twice, and when I saw Ubaldo rise to national prominence by pitching his no-hitter in April. At the end of both of those matchups, though, I found myself comfortably winning, leading me to question the value of those single great heart wrenching performances.
Rather conveniently, ESPN has put together their 20 best single game pitching and hitting performances of the year.  I looked at these performances and came up with how much of an effect they had on the final weekly scores in our league.  I should note that, of the 20 pitching and 20 hitting performances, our teams only owned 9 of each when they went berzerk, perhaps highlighting how exceptional these performances are and how anyone can have an amazing day any time regardless of whether he is routinely a good enough player to be noticed by the league.  I will highlight a number of performances, but you can click here to go to the spreadsheet yourself where all 18 of the performances are calculated.  The sheet totals what the team's numbers were with the great performance, without it, what the opponent's numbers were, and what the differential is assuming that the player went 0-fer for that day.  Also, on the right, you will notice the amazing performance and the amount that they contributed to the overall numbers with dOBP, dSlg,  and dOPS being (as scientists and mathmagicians know), the difference or "delta" of those categories:


1.  Adrian Beltre goes yard twice and knocks in 6 against the Ackbars.



As you can see, if Beltre had gone 0/5 instead of 4/5 with all those extra numbers, there would have been a 2.5 game swing in the final weekly total.  It is interesting that all of the categories that Beltre's performance had an impact on were the quantitative categories rather than the average ones.  With the average categories, your other players have a much greater effect than they do on the quantitative categories; the great hitter can carry your team with R, HR, RBI, and SB while the rest of the team slacks off, but that slacking will have a much more drastic effect on the Avg and OPS.  Truly, Beltre was the life preserver for this week for Woo Woo.

4.  Miguel Cabrera rings the bell 3 times against the Orlandos/, /ICU last weekend.



Miggy's amazing performance against the Orlandos was entirely wasted, unfortunately, as even if he had come up hitless, the pre-Kendry-disaster-Andruses would have still walked away with all 6 of the offensive categories that week.  Judd's team had built up a large enough lead in all of the offensive categories that, while dealing a psychological blow, had no impact on the final numbers.  It is interesting to think about how if I had said that Miggy was on the bench that day, Judd would have surely been cursing himself, but in the final reckoning, it would have made no difference.

3.  Albert hit 3 bong-bong-bongs to celebrate the armed services against Woo Woo.



Albert Pujols was coming off of a rough May, but finished strongly with these 3 dings.  While his performance that glorious Sunday was terrific, the overall swing in the score for that week was only 0.5 games, coming from the 3 runs that he scored as a result of his Hamas.  It is interesting that, while I was initially quite excited when I saw on my iPhone MLB at Bat that "A Pujols Homered off of J Grabow," the fact that none of my scoring categories turned over tempered that feeling.  Indeed, Adam Wainwright's win in that same game was the more important stat.  I would have easily traded all of those moon shots for a few more runs on singles by my team throughout the week. 
The average differential with and without these great performances was 1, which is much less than I was expecting.  Of the 9 total games swung with these 9 performances, only 2 were in the "average" type category highlighting how little one performance can affect your averages.  With between 250-300 ABs per week, it is not so surprising that 5 or 6 would not have a huge effect, but I would have thought that the matchups were in general close enough that 3 or 4 runs and 2 or 3 ding a lings would have a big difference on the final numbers.  Hmmmmm, average margin of victory.....that sounds like a good future topic!
Great pitching performance analysis coming, shorty.  I mean shortly.

Tin Can Alley

Reading the commissioner's unnecessarily mean power rankings from this past week (hey, he is my friend, what am I supposed to expect? Friends are mean to each other, right?), I noticed that he said that his team had hit a string of tough week with teams putting up their best numbers against him.  This got me thinking about how a team can really put up great numbers against one team one week, and then stink up the joint the next.  I had previously tabulated the totals of all of a team's opponents and then ranked which team had come up against the greatest cumulative buzzsaw (Omar's opponents had been the toughest in total, followed by the Peachz and FuE, with Andrus' team facing the easiest competition, followed by the Ackbars and Woo Woo).  This week, however, I came up with the list of which team has put up the best numbers in the league in a given week, which team was their opponent, and against which team teams put up their best number.  The results are given below (Click here to go right to the spreadsheet and look at the raw data yourself.  Make sure to check out the tabs). 



The first column, "Best of the Week" shows how many times a given team has put up the best totals for any given week.  As you can see, the Ackbars have put up the highest numbers in a week 19 times, many of those coming in the "Steals" and "Saves" categories.  Conversely, the ICU has only put up the best numbers of the week 5 times.  Given the injury history, this should hardly be surprising as the team has not yet started to fire on all cylinders.  It is interesting to note, though, that despite never killing a given week, this team is still in contention, showing that you don't need to be the best during the regular season, just good enough to beat your opponent.  Most surprising to me was the fact that the Fooeys and the Matsuis have put up the best numbers in a week 9 times each, but yet remain in the cellar in the overall standings.  Perhaps there is a good explanation for this...
The second column of the data, the "Unluckiest of the Week" shows how many times a team has been facing a team that puts up the best numbers for that given week.  For example, there have been 14 times when the Bernabes' opponents have put up the best numbers of the week in a given category, and 12 times when the Fooeys's opponents have dominated the week.  Bernabe's numbers are only slightly ahead of the rest of the field, though it seems that the sight of their unis send their opponents into the white hot rage of a thousand suns.  Conversely, the underperforming Andrus's (AKA the Lack of Moraleses) have gotten pretty lucky in that their opponents have only put up week-dominating numbers 6 times. 
The third column, the "Punching Bag" column shows how many times an opponent's team has put up their best numbers of the season against them.  For example, the Car Wash (or Super Upton Brothers, as they are known these days) has been the subject of opponents putting up their career best numbers in a given category 19 times.  The difference between this listing and the previous one is that this listing measures when an opponent puts up the best numbers of his career, while the previous one only measures when an opponent puts up the best numbers in the week.  Because there are 12 categories and 10 teams, there are 120 chances that a team can put up their best numbers against you, while there have only been 8 weeks with 12 categories, leaving 96 chances to be the subject of a team mauling you by putting up the best numbers of the week.  The bottom line from this analysis is that the Car Wash's opponents have been the strongest against him, and that the Woo Woo's opponents have not been particularly strong against him.

Transactions

Despite the restriction on transaction number and the resulting paranoia about saving some of those precious pick-ups for the final play-off run, we have still made 133 transactions through the first 8 weeks of this season.  For me personally, I like to fret and worry over a transaction before finally pulling the trigger in the morning, regretting it all day, and waiting to see if anyone picks up my playa off waivers taking advantage of my poor managerial decisions and over reactions.  I decided to look more closely at the transactions and see if there were any trends that I could pull out for our league.  I began by looking at the players that were picked up and dropped thus far. 

By and large, it seems like our teams are maintaining their makeups throughout the season. The positions with the greatest turnover are 2B and 3B with teams having 62.5% and 60% of those positions that they did at the beginning of the season.  LF and SS, however, have been the most added with 123% and 140% of the roster spots that they had at the beginning of the season.  With Placido Polanco having all sorts of hand problems, I have been in the market for a 2B and know that the position is quite sparse, so it makes sense that this position has been dropped so consistently, while the SSs that could fill in in the MI position have all been taken!  I was most surprised that the relief and starting pitchers have remained pretty consistent throughout the year.  Given that there will be at most 30 closers during the season, it makes sense that there wont be a mass exodus of closers.  The amount of moves for the RP and SP positions have been the highest of any position, though.  Also of note is that there have only been 9 waiver adds, which to me shows that there have only been 9 moves that others consider stupid enough to take advantage of.
Beyond the actual transactions, I wanted to see if the timing of our transactions had any trends.  I began by looking at which days we made transactions.  I went into this analysis with the thought that the most transactions were made on Sunday (to stream in those starters and get those extra Ks) and Monday (when the new week is starting and you can grab a 2-start starter or just get a fresh player).

While there were a lot of transactions made on Sunday and Monday, the most transactions were made on Wednesday and Thursday.  I suppose that by the time Thursday rolls around, you have a pretty good idea of how the match-up is going and you can make adjustments when you think they will actually have a real effect.  Next, I wanted to look at what times our transactions were made.

Aside from the 4:30am waiver-clearing time, it seems like the most transactions are made right around noon and then at around midnight.  Because we are only allowed to have a player play on the day he is picked up when the transaction goes through before the first pitch of the day (usually 1:05 or 2:20), it makes sense that we would want to scrunch those transactions in right before the deadline.  At night, after out players have let us down for yet another day, we like to go out and replace them in a highly spiteful and angry moment.
It would be interesting to see if these trends would hold up if we had unlimited transactions rather than capping then at 50.  I would assume that we would make many more impulsive transactions and the average time that a picked up player remained on a team would plummet, but I imagine that the trends regarding when and who is picked up would stay pretty much the same.  Thoughts?

For Your Consideration

Trends

When I think about my beloved team, The Ackbars, I often slip into the dream and actually believe that my team is a real team.  I find myself saying, "I am going to give Alex Rios a day off to rest that knee," or "I hate to drop Alberto Callaspo, he is such a great locker room guy."  The most frequent uttering to myself from myself in a world with only myself is, "My team is finally coming together and the guys are really clicking together."  Of course, these guys are all on real life teams and have nothing to do with eachother and, beyond the ten of us, are a completely boring agglomeration of playaz.  This week, however, I looked to see whether there was any truth to any of my notions that my team was "coming together" and if any of the categories were actually showing a trend upwards. 
I got the data together for each of the weeks for each of the teams and then performed a linear regression.  If a line that best fits the data had a positive slope, my thinking went, my team would generally be trending up in that category.  When I first did this, I actually did the graphs and, suffice to say, the "best fit" data was pretty far in left field when compared to the actual data point.  I got the R-squared for each of the data points and filtered the best fit lines through this measure of how well the line fits the data and only took those lines where r-squared is greater than 0.5 (on a 0 to 1 scale).  Those categories where, by this interpretation, the data had actual relevance are highlighted in nice calm blue.



The first thing that will stand out to you is that, really, there are very few trends for each of our teams.  The average for each week doesn't have any trends of significance, and even before the r-squared filter, the slopes of the lines were very low, showing that if there were any trend it would be very minor.
Second, I was heartened to see Omar's general offensive upward trend.  While I am happy for Omar and all of that, I was more pleased to see that, with his homers, his RBIs, avg, and OPS also were trending up, meaning that in general, this type of analysis works.  In the actual league, it appears that Omar is raking as of late, and his recent surge in the standings isn't simply the product of weaker opponents, as previous analyses have demonstrated. 
Conversely, I was disheartened to see that the Peachz'z pitching is generally staying pretty stable, with the exception of K/9.  The Peachz'z pitching has been dominant thus far into the season, and, unfortunately, it seems like it wasn't just a hot start. 
Other than that, my team the Ackbars, Woo Woo, and the Andrus Reclamation Project all seem to be pretty stable, which I know for my team is a mixed blessing; our hitting has been pretty good thus far, but the pitching has been very hit or miss, and it looks like it is going to be a long summer of hoping that with each start, the ERA and WHIP will go down, but after a few tenths, them just rising like my schlong when I see a picture of that Chelsea Clinton.  Hubba Hubba, Baby!

Batter than Average - UPDATED

One of my biggest issues with the H2H format is the so-called "Dallas Braden Effect," where your actual performance each week is not really important except as far as your single opponent's performance goes.  Rotisserie scoring takes care of this, but the problem is that after a certain amount of time, things will probably become pretty separated and the league will no longer be great to follow.  Moreover, being able to push the reset button at the end of the week is quite liberating; you need only worry about Trevor Hoffman's 6 earned run week for 7 days and then its gone like Keyser Soze.  I have thought about how things would look in a week-to-week roto league, and those results are interesting (and coming in the future), but not what I am looking at today.
No, today, we will examine what happens when your opponent for the week is the average of all of the other players.  This type of scoring is interesting because it actually changes the value of each metric; a home run a nice for you, but it also increases the average of homers, so it only has 90% value.  Conversely, when you hit a homer, you help yourself with that 90%, but also end up hurting not only your opponent, but all of them!  I can imagine how all over the country, people would be groaning when one of the numbers reached the critical threshold to turn over.  How sad would you all have been when my Dason Bay hit those two dingalings last night?

UPDATE - Something about the string of 0s and 1s was deeply unsettling to me, so as I was running, I decided that for anything to show up on this type of analysis, one week wouldn't be enough of a sample size.  Thus, I went back and applied this meathead to the entire seasons stats and the results were a bit more satisfying.



The most striking parts of this analysis is the overinflated record of Woo Woo and the underinflated record of Omar.  I have spoken previously about Omar and his horrible luck, but I thought that Woo Woo would have performed closer to his actual record than he did.  Also, I was surprised that Bernabe and Andrus could be any worse than their real record are, but alas and alak!
One of the things that I noticed about this analysis is that, unlike the real records, where each win must come at the price of a loss from another team, with the averages, you can have more wins than losses if there are a few bad apples who drag down the entire average.  In our league total, for example, we have a total record of 411-429 against the mean, which means that the mean was actually artificially inflated by a few awesome performances, and that there were more instances where we performed below the mean than above.
Once again, though, I feel like this would add a delicious twist to the overall scoring.  When you are ahead on homers, hitting another few and finishing 11-5 in that category doesn't really help you and, in fact, probably hurts you if you believe in the gambler's fallacy, which I think is more apt in baseball than other sports.  However, if this were the scoring system that we used, each of those additional dingalings would help to put your opponents farther and farther behind you by raising the overall average against which all teams are measured.

ESPN's Top-300s

As you may have noticed, ESPN recently released their Mid-May Re-Rankings for the top 300 playaz.  Seeing these sweet gooey numbers in front of me, I decided that I would see how each of the teams' power was stacking up.  Below, you will see listed the average power of each team in the league (the lower the better, like Pujols is a 1, Hanley is a 2, etc).  There are a few caveats to this analysis.  Notably, some of us have playaz on our teams who are not ranked in the top 300 by these ESPN fellows, in which case they were marked as "Weaklings" and assigned a value of 300 in the tabulation of power.  Furthermore, not all teams have the same number of playaz as some teams have DL spots occupied while others do not.  Because the power numbers were tabulated for the entire team, I figured that I should include everyone, active or not.
I was also interested in how the free agent wire figured into the teams' makeups, so I calculated how many playaz on each team was actually taken in the draft (whether for your team or for someone else's), and how many undrafted free agents populated each roster.
I find it interesting to note that, seemingly regardless of number of acquisitions, each team seems to have pretty much the same number of undrafted playaz on their teams (5-7).  I guess that this means that, once we find our good players, we stick with them and adopt a "last to come, first to go" type policy when picking up new guys.  Furthermore, each team has pretty much the same number of weaklings, showing that we, as a league, are doing pretty well in working that wire, as our commish says, "like a stripper pole."  Finally, it is interesting that these power numbers come fairly close to the standings, at least at the top and bottom.