Ummm, I am really in heaven right now. There is nothing clever to say and no jokes to make, I am just simply in heaven. I woke up this morning to a newly updated spreadsheet from John Thornton sitting quietly in my mail box. Little did I know it was going to be the most amazing thing I had ever seen. For the last few days we have both been working on linking an excel sheet to all the leagues so that we can monitor and pull data without having to do it manually. Why? Because it gives us a massive sample of stats and we can do all kinds of research. OK, I know I am a stat nerd but I just cant wait anymore, so onto the baseball…
STREAMING DOESN’T WORK...I GOT THE PROOF BABY...
It is something that we all should have known, but up until now all I had was anecdotal evidence. Once I got all the numbers in my hands this was one of the very first things I started working on. Before we go any further, I think maybe I should set this up just a little more. Since we have only had the numbers for a few hours this isn’t fully developed research and we will be honing our results for a long while. Also, since we have over 250 teams in the system, it is inevitable that some are dead. In order to make sure inactivity doesn’t inaccurately skew the results, we have removed teams below a certain activity score. OK, now we get to the fun part...
After examining the whole system and adjusting for activity we found that straight “streaming” (filling your roster each day with hot new free agents) like you normally find in H2H leagues is pretty rare, which is to be expected. What isn’t rare is the idea of riding hot pitching hands, rather than using a steady rotation, and going over IP limits. It’s really interesting to see the effects this has on ERA and WHIP. Despite what you may think, it is not possible to keep an ERA and WHIP under control by playing the waiver wire. There is a direct correlation between high ERA/WHIP and the number of games started ("GS"). We indentified 45 active teams that have been using this strategy and not surprisingly there average league rank was barely 6th place. Of those 45 teams, only 14 have an ERA under 3.90 – which is actually better than I expected. In the average league that ERA would get you about 5 points and WHIP stats follow the same pattern. Those numbers don’t make me want to vomit, but really that isn’t going to cut it. One thing we are looking at is how this overuse of SP innings affects your ability to maintain solid Holds and Saves numbers. From what we can tell, you make yourself average AT BEST in all but strikeouts and wins. Getting straight 5’s in ERA, WHIP, holds and saves would be very difficult to recover from. Can you win while streaming? Maybe, though it is extremely unlikely. The only player that is currently winning with the "streaming" strategy is Team Knapton in a very unimpressive Northwest League. As of today’s update, that league is in the lower quarter of the system and that is probably the sole reason Knapton has gotten away with the strategy. Based on our 2009 leagues it seems pretty clear that overuse of GS leads to victory less than 2% of the time and honestly that’s generous in my opinion.
ITS ALL ABOUT ACTIVITY
We also wanted to see what made a winner? What made some teams so much better? The answer so far is simple – activity. It is amazing that, in the end, trying really hard seems to win out across all levels. Below I have pasted a chart with a breakdown of average transactions for each spot in the standings across all leagues. As we discussed in last week’s BOC – P/D is Pick-up to drop ratio, and is a demonstration that you are picking up more players than you are dropping. This is usually either due to IR (Injured reserve) usage or trading more people than you receive (ie 2:1, 3:2 type deals). There is a lot of interesting stuff here and we intend to spend a lot more time on this data in the future. The first thing that jumped out to me was the IR usage. It is completely counter-intuitive to think that the more injured players a team rosters, the higher the teams position, but it is evident that there is a correlation. All the 1st place teams are using all their DL spots to stash players, achieving full utilization of the roster space available. This is a sure sign of attentive management and seemingly a harbinger of success.
We will have much more in the days to come but for now I am still just having fun and trying to get familiar with everything. Tomorrow we will have a little bit more time to expand and delve deeper.
TG...Things that make you say Hmmm...great insight and I like the evaluation of streaming and agree with your assessment for the most part. The Punishers started the season with Webb, Bedard, and Kuroda as the cornerstones for SP that resulted with a -200 innings pitch pace in June. Streaming was used to bring IP back on pace to get K's & W's up to league level but in doing so it crushed WHIP & ERA. To make pitching matters worse I didn't draft a closer and found no interest from the other managers to deal one away. This left me in the very unfortunate position of punting saves. So far this strategy has kept my team in the hunt for a title. With that said, I was wondering if many other teams have used a punting strategy.
I'll close by including this abnormal stat from the PCL...There has only been (3) trades total all year. For some reason our league just didn't gel in that regard. Even with this deficiency the league has had decent power rankings all year and I think its because of managers that are very active on a daily basis. At the end of the day the power rankings come down to what league has the most "Best" players active in their daily line up.