Gotta have holds with rosters this deep. Otherwise saves become even more important and a whole plethora of middle relievers become unrosterable. I agree that they are awarded idiotically and they are suspect, but so are saves.
Absolutely agree and I’d love to see weekly lineups. I don’t think inning limits does anything to solve the problem, and rate stats have their own foibles. But year, weekly rosters. Hell, I’d love to go head-to-head but I’m sure this league would never have it.
Weekly lineups wreak havoc with some positions - Catcher, especially. Part of the fun of fantasy baseball, especially as this is done, is the knowledge that, rare cases of 12-RBI games you accidentally left your slugger on the bench aside, no one game is going to wreak havoc on your squad. I love being able (assuming I take the time to look at the team and park stats, which, mostly, I don’t) to be able to play either the “hot hand” or the guy who just plays really well at whatever ballpark he’s visiting. Plus, the first thing I do every day getting onto the computer is to figure out my lineup for that day, and I might tweak it as new events arise. Weekly transactions would make it too much like fantasy football for me, and really lessen my daily enjoyment of the game. I like my fantasy games to follow the real thing as closely as possible, and MLB managers just aren’t locked into playing one guy at one position for a whole week. If we instituted weekly transactions, part-time players wouldn’t be rosterable, which would really make this league, deep as it is, particularly difficult.
Isn’t that how it should be? Yes, the draft is extremely important. But it’s one day out of an entire season. Your success *should *be predicated on how well you manage your roster. I believe most people in this league are in other leagues- aren’t you checking your rosters there as well? And if you can only check once a week, aren’t you setting your roster for that entire week?
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Hell, I’d love to go head-to-head but I’m sure this league would never have it.
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Head-to-head baseball leagues are worthless, and in this particular league, would break it.
Yeah, but setting a roster for the entire week isn’t a very reliable system. Yahoo often undoes changes when you pickup a player. Plus even still, setting your lineup daily once a week really doesn’t allow you to always accurately predict starters when weather and injuries crop up. Unfortunately Yahoo doesn’t seem to maintain their expected starter role regularly or reliably.
The teams that seem to win in this league are the managers who have the time and inclination to micromanage their roster every single day. I don’t have either, and my weekly check ins often leave me with injured players clogging up spots for 2 or 3 games at a time and I often miss my starters scheduled starts when the rotation gets shifted back a day.
I’m sure the micromanagers in this league prefer their advantage, but I’m just never going to be that guy. Fantasy football is typically a superior experience to baseball because almost everyone participates almost equally in managing their roster, it’s rare that someone abandons a lineup. that’s not because people like football more, that’s because it’s a once a week commitment.
Making this baseball league weekly would greatly level the playing field. It would eliminate the ability to stream pitchers and it would make managers think more strategically. Now it’s simply a brute force attack where time invested = points.
We have holds because back in the mists of antiquity we collectively agreed that we’d rather have OBP and SLG as rate stats instead of AVG; we couldn’t agree on any of the other offensive categories to drop (RBI or Steals) and there was a concern that dropping a counting stat in favor of rate stats would tip things too far toward overvaluing guys who don’t play regularly, so we had 6 batting categories. To keep the balance, we needed another pitching category, and holds was the best of a bunch of bad options (and probably the only one that didn’t essentially double-count something else that was already included).
I could live with losing holds, but we’d basically have to decide to also drop RBI or Steals and make it a 5x5 league instead of the current 6x6 format. My vote would be for RBI, since it is to some extent already reflected in HR, SLG, and OBP, and because it’s a lousy statistic. Steals is reflected dimly in Runs, but not as directly as the other batting stats are in RBI.
The one category I’m always at the top in is number of transactions, so obviously I’m against weekly rather than daily roster/lineup changes. One of the great things about baseball is that you have to show up every day. This ain’t the NFL.
I guess there’s a place for head-to-head, but I’m glad that I’m not in that place.
I’d have to go back through the years to check (and it doesn’t look like we can do that anymore - Yahoo doesn’t support archiving transactions these days), but this seems to be the case in my smaller leagues as well. I didn’t win the Melting Pot (9 team AL-only) two years ago because I was 2 Wins and 2 RBIs away from the title. I have a history of missing quality starts (especially on Sundays, for some reason), so more diligence certainly would have been the deciding factor there.
Thankfully, this isn’t fantasy football, where 90% of success relies on the draft and dumb luck. I’d much rather a guy win because he logged in every day for 180 days over a guy who just happened to have a really good draft and logged in once a week over 30 weeks.
I’m the poster child for micromanaging, and at the same time a solid argument against the proposition that the guys who make the most moves win. Sure, I made nearly twice as many roster moves as anyone else last year and finished second, but I’ve been in the top five managers in roster moves every year since 2003, and have finished in pretty much every position except first and dead last. Last year, the top five finishers made 50, 85, 12, 19, and 13 moves each, while the bottom five made 13, 45, 19, 5, and 15. In 2010, it was 14 (one of the lowest totals in the league), 21, 78 (yours truly), 9, and 39 roster moves for the top five. In 2009, 25, 25, 68, 12, 19. No one has ever won the league while making the most roster moves. There just isn’t any correlation.
Now, granted, adding/dropping/trading players isn’t exactly the same thing as setting lineups, and it’s possible the guys winning the league with no more than 30 roster moves all season are still juggling their lineups every day, but I suspect that the guys who’re making the most roster moves are probably also more actively managing their lineups.
I guess I don’t understand why more effort invested leading to greater success is a bad thing. But then I don’t understand fantasy football (or NFL football in general) either, so I’m sure it’s some mental deficiency on my part.
I completely disagree with this assumption. Teams that make a lot of moves fall into 2 categories, those streaming pitchers and those riddled with injuries and/or who drafted really poorly.
It’s the day-to-day roster management that makes all the difference. You could almost certainly plot the proportion of points a players roster scored against the points that they got credit for in their scoring log and mimic the end results. Long story short, the teams that win this league are the teams that get credit for every pitcher start and avoid ever having a injured or benched player in his starting lineup.
Let’s face it, tons of teams platoon catchers and other position players against left handed pitching. It’s next to impossible to tell at a glance when a batter is facing a lefty. Managers who do the digging to uncover this info have a huge advantage and those people almost certainly finish at the top of the league. I could do this research once a week, I can’t do it every day.
It’s a valid argument to say that micromanagers should be rewarded. I think they will be rewarded in a weekly roster system somewhat, but at least this would give the rest of us an option to at least have a fighting chance without being so unreasonably dogged. Plus more people may micromanage if it were a weekly scheduled occurrence instead of a several times a day occurrence.
I’ll join the league if there are any openings left. Thank you.
I’m in one other league (with some real life friends) already. I usually like to play in two or three fantasy leagues each season.
Signed up today; hopefully last year was just a momentary blip. Or maybe I shouldn’t draft so many injury prone guys this year. Nahhh…
Comments on a couple of the other items:
Holds: Necessary evil unless you’re willing to drop RBI, in my opinion. Any such changes to categories might also necessitate looking at roster sizes or innings limits to go with it. I am in favor of the status quo if only because It Works, but I could probably be talked into a good enough alternative if there was one.
Trades: I have done fewer of these over the years, it seems; last year I sent out a few offers but I don’t think I completed a single one. I feel like they’re really hard in this league because many people are only comfortable dealing out of a surplus, and other than two or three teams, pretty much no one has a surplus of anything. Making your team worse at one position for an upgrade at another is more difficult for many people to come to terms with. I also think the quality of player evaluation relative to the stats we use has gone up every year.
Micromanagement: I have been on both sides of this in the past… I mean, the first three years of this league, I was still in college, talk about free time. It’s definitely an advantage to be able to spend 5-15 minutes a day on this league, pretty much every day. It’s not going to make or break anything, but it’s an advantage. Now, the difference between 0 seconds and 30 seconds every day is kind of a game breaker: pretty much the time it takes you to rotate pitchers (that are already on your roster, not streaming). I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, or at least not a worse thing than having to set weekly rosters would be. That said, I know I missed at least 5-6 starts last year from my ‘ace’ guys when work got particularly busy, and I know how much that sucks.
I’ve won this league twice, and I’ve NEVER dug up lefty/righty splits before, and I always seem to miss starts. And while streaming can be a problem in many leagues, there just aren’t all that many options to choose from here that are palatable enough to make it a reliable, winning strategy.
Kiros - how much lefty/righty info do you typically dig up on a daily/weekly basis?
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you have a much higher usage rate of “available starts” for your position players than most everyone else. Last year I think I was something like -70 at my Catcher position and something like -35 at one of my IF spots and my Util spot because my players were being platooned and I didn’t have the bandwidth to monitor it and swap in my backup catcher on Sundays or after day-night back to backs or against lefties. You may not have been checking the splits, but I’m certain that you didn’t have guys putting up -/- for 70 games who weren’t hurt.
I came in 2nd in 2010 making 21 roster moves, and 15th last year making 45, putting in about the same amount of effort both years (actually a little more last year, because I had a laptop and a smartphone and didn’t have to make the effort to actually go TO the computer - I could set my lineup wherever I happened to be). I miss starts all the time, because I do most of my management in the morning, before I know what the lineups for the day are going to look like - it’s rare indeed that I look at the roster once the lineups are out, and I miss pitching starts all the time (missed either a no-hitter or a one-hitter last year - that ticked me off).
The most I do in a righty/lefty split check is looking at the star ranking on the player’s popup about how he does in any particular situation. Half the time, I don’t even pay attention to where he’s playing. But I still prefer daily moves to weekly. I like the flexibility and the knowledge that, if I miss a start, it’s my own damn fault.
It’s possible - but I do know that I’m always bad at Catcher. That’s usually around -50, since I NEVER have a second catcher. I don’t think it’s worth it (I did draft Posey last year to counter that, and that didn’t turn out well!). I’ll also end up with with at least one or two other spots taking big hits, since I’m happy drafting a platoon player or two who I know will do well because the actual manager is managing the lefty/righty splits. In a league this big, you have to weigh the value of such players versus someone with worse rate stats who plays every day.
I don’t look at lefty/righty for my ‘normal’ guys, but a few times I have picked up people that I could very predictably platoon, for that specific reason. Particularly helpful if those guys were on the Sox or otherwise easily trackable, and it’s not something I’d really spend ‘research time on’ by any means. Varitek’s days off were always when Wakefield pitched, which made it pretty easy to get a 30-40 game advantage at C over anyone else if I had a roster spot available for a backup C; since I follow the Sox, I know who’s pitching tonight, and when to make that move. Dave Roberts single handedly made me respectable in steals at least twice, and I don’t think he started a game against a lefty in his last five years in the league; if I had a decent bench OF, I’d throw that guy in on occasion.
So basically I’d never spend 20 minutes agonizing between platoon advantages for my 4th and 5th OF on a given day if they were both playing, but if there was an advantage to be gained from something that I could very easily maintain, I might go for it.
My average check-in is between 30 seconds and 5 minutes a day, and has been pretty steady at that since I got out of college and couldn’t spend an hour figuring out 8 different trade possibilities at once any more.
Edited to add - I did have a couple periods where I dropped below that last year due to stuff going on in Real Life, and it made it really hard to keep up. On the other hand, it’s easier to put that 5 minutes in than ever with stuff like mobile Fantasy apps.
Nice - we’re already at 17 teams!
The problem for me is that it isn’t about well you manage your roster. It is about how much time you have to manage your roster. Last year I worked overnights throughout the season, which meant very often I wasn’t even awake before most games started. This left me often at a decisive disadvantage as I couldn’t make changes based on pregame lineups. This year I’m back to normal hours so I can make last minute changes. I’m likely to do much better this year despite nothing changing other than my schedule.
My main league uses weekly lineups and FAAB for transactions. Thus you only really need to log every other day or so to not be at a disadvantages. I probably log on several times a day anyway, since I’m obsessive like that. I understand though that not everyone has that level of free time and everyone has a job they can log in to work from. I want to win because I did better at running a fantasy team, and not because my schedule is more conducive to logging in ten minutes before games start to check who is playing.
There is no rule that says you need the same number of offensive categories as pitching ones. The league I have run for the last decade in fact has a 6/5 split. I like it that way as it more accurately reflexes rosters (more hitters than pitchers) and actual player value (hitting is 50% if a team’s success while pitching is closer to 35% with defense being the rest)
I wouldn’t dump rbis. It isn’t a good stat for determining player value but it is a fun stat to root for. The problem with holds is that along with being a poor actual stat, they are terrible to root for. Come on bring my reliever in to protect that 3 run lead in the 7th. Okay he got an out, take him before he can blow the lead.
If we want to remain 6-6 though I would suggest adding another rate stat, like perhaps K/BB, which top relievers tend to do better at than starters. That would also encourage teams to get top relievers and not just situational lefties who managers like to use in the late innings.
This might just be a fundamental disagreement. I prefer the player to win who drafts the best, makes the best trades, picks the best free agents and makes the smartest roster moves, rather than the person who is most able to log on every day 20 minutes before games start.
See I find weekly leagues much more about playing matchup. I should start this guy this week because they face four lefties or have 6 games at home in Texas. Daily leagues I find are more about just if a guy happens to be playing today or not.
I don’t think fiddly pre-game matchup management is of great value in this league. I’ve been weirdly consistent, never in the bottom half and never near first at the end of the season, and over 8 seasons that covers from just about to graduate college to boring office job to law school to lawyer. I’m throwing up in my mouth a little as I reflect on it, but you won’t get a better example of a decline in available roster-dickery time.
I’m positive that when I was working a cubicle job, I looked at my roster like six times a day and had the best information possible about that day’s lineups as of 5 PM, but I didn’t do any better in the standings. The last couple of years I’ve missed a bunch of starts from aces - to the point where I really believe Yahoo’s little caret indicator is actively fucking with my head - and sometimes left guys with injuries in my lineup if they were only out a week or so, and I finished right in my sweet spot, 4th and 6th. I think the draft is far and away the thing that’s determined how I’ve done every year.
I’ll also admit to the much less defensible position that holds actually are fun to track, or no less so than saves and steals, at least. I’ve been super-interested in late-game Padres baseball the last few years. Tell me what else could accomplish that. As I think I say every year, the correlation between really good relievers and really good holds guys is decently strong, anyway, so it isn’t like you’re shooting yourself in the foot if you want to focus only on Ks and WHIP from your relievers.
I think Hawkeyeop very nicely articulated my opinion on the weekly versus daily rosters. Call this a +1. Plus, we’ve always done daily lineups, I think there’s a strong case to be made to change things up and if it doesn’t work out we can always go back, it’s not like we’re married to the change forever. We’re all getting older and most of us are probably getting busier, so I think this change does a pretty decent job of attempting to account for that without undermining the original premise of a really deep and onerous league for us gluttons.
Similarly, Jimmy Chitwood makes a very strong point about Holds that I agree with. Everyone can agree that it’s a deeply flawed stat, but the same can be said of many other counting stats. And it’s the least redundant of all the pitching stats left over. I think having a 6x6 league is really ideal and I’d rather compromise on a fiddly Hold stat than on the balance of the league’s scoring WRT a 6x5 league or adding a rate stat to replace a counting stat. And maybe I’m a fool, but I find I somewhat enjoy chasing Holds on the FA wire in the same way I do Steals come August.
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I’ll join the league if there are any openings left. Thank you.
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Any update? Is there room in the league?
Anyway, holds, saves, wins, and losses are very arbitrary pitching stats since they depend what the pitcher’s own team does on offense. I do understand the value of holds and saves in fantasy leagues of 12 or more teams in order to make relief pitchers useful.