Mid-Season Review

*Written Across a few Days so numbers and ranks could be slightly off**

Having just passed week 11, are officially half way through the regular season. So let’s step back and evaluate in the form of some midseason awards:

Best Hitter (Non-Keeper): Todd Frazier (Eddie)

Honorable Mention: Justin Upton (Eric), Jason Kipnis (Russ), Prince Fielder (Greg)

Perk grabbed Frazier with pick 32 of the draft, and he’s been great all season. Amongst drafted players, he has been the most valuable hitter in anyone’s lineup, he’s 3rd in the majors in home Runs and is no slouch in any of the 5 categories. He’s a huge reason why Perk is in second place. Justin Upton was the second overall pick so it’s no shock to see him on the list. Kipnis was the 49th overall pick, and is serving as a delightful Cano replacement thank you very much. Fielder was the 29th and wasn’t actually drafted by Greg, but the room. You’re welcome Greg.

Best Pitcher (Non-Keeper): Chris Archer (Pflanz)

Honorable Mention: Gerrit Cole (Richie), Sonny Gray (Eric), Jason DeGrom (Pflanz)

The 96th pick of the draft has been excellent through 11 weeks. With 10 Quality starts and some crazy impressive ratios, Archer is the #2 pitcher in the game right now, great steal by Pflanz. He’s one of only a handful of starters with a WHIP under 1 and a K/9 in the double digits. 44 picks earlier, Pflanz landed DeGrom. As usual, Pflanz shows some great drafting skills, that’s why he’s 26-16 in the pitching categories (not counting NSV). Richie’s 27th pick also shows up here, which maybe justifies his preseason dealing of King Felix. Sonny gray was the 20th pick, and is outperforming even his lofty expectations for Eric’s team.

Best Keeper (Hitter): Paul Goldschmidt (Russ)

Honorable Mention: Bryce Harper (Greg), Miguel Cabrera (Eddie), Anthony Rizzo (Andy)

Goldschmidt remains the #1 ranked player in fantasy. Two years after Pujols was removed from playing the anchor first base role on Russ’ squad, Goldschmidt has filled the void and more. He’s in the top 5 in the majors at every category except net steals, where his 8 still separates him from the other power hitting first basemen. With Cabrera and Rizzo also having great seasons, It’s no coincidence the top 3 teams in the standings are all represented here.

Luck Factor - Take 2

My stats department missed some critical components to the Luck Factor blog post a couple weeks ago.  When I presented them the idea, no one told them that you actually want and ERA and WHIP lower than the league average.  They didn't account for it and thus, the information was not accurate.  I fired the whole department.

In that blog post, Eric was pegged as having the worst ERA and WHIP, relative to the league average.  He actually had the best marks in those categories.  You can see how the further away from the mean you were, the more this affected the final output.  Eric, John, and Jeremy's luck was probably higher than it should have been, while Dan, Greg, and Brad's luck was probably a little lower than it should have been.

After the adjustments, here are the accurate numbers through week 11 (which just happens to be one full rotation through the schedule):

• Eric is the only one who has a legitimate gripe with his luck this year.  He's stuck in 7th place despite his team putting up the second best stats thus far.  

• Very important to note that Richie's team ranks ahead of Russ's team in projected winning percentage for the simple fact that it will make him mad.  Russ says "I don't care, I'm in third place asshole.  I wish I never invited you into this league" but he cares.  He definitely cares.

• Eddie's fast start is starting to catch up with him, as he slips out of first place for the first time in many weeks.  He is beginning to regress as expected but still has a good team and should make the playoffs easily if not challenge for a bye.

• I don't know what the record for worst winning percentage is, but if Brad was unlucky he would probably be challenging it (just the facts Brad, no hard feelings).  

• Most importantly, I can still say that I am super unlucky and if I had even a smidge of good luck, I'd be in the playoff picture.  Hold the line!  Steady!  Steady!  Regression is coming!

Fan Satisfaction

This is a spin-off of a really cool idea Richie had. I was just “lucky” enough that he told me about it so that I could write this post. Basically, I looked at the Franchise history books (2008-2015) and tried to gauge what it would be like to be part of the fanbase for each of our teams. Is your fanbase spoiled, tortured, or indifferent? How many times would you, as a manager, have gotten fired by now? How are your fans feeling about you right now? Are you on the hotseat or will you never have to buy a beer in this town again? Here’s the team by team breakdown:*

*As you will notice for the purpose of this column: A victory in the third place game is great but it doesn't count as a playoff win, nor does losing in the third place game count as a playoff loss. That matchup exists purely for standings and money, but because the chance for a championship is gone after you lose once, it does not reflect on one’s playoff record.**

**I had so much fun writing this, I completely lost myself. It’s very long. You might want to wait until you have a good poop chambered to read this.

Luck Factor

Kolten Wong, Kris Bryant, and Gerrit Cole are having the breakout seasons many guessed they would have.  Andrew McCutchen and Brandon Belt are coming on strong and are top 12 ranked over the last month.  Chris Sale is a beast, and most of the rest of my roster has been perfectly complimentary to these guys.  And yet, I am stuck in 10^th place, staring at a dismal .425 winning percentage and a 7-3 deficit this week which would push me down even further.

The fuck?

So I looked at the league totals and put together some “raw” power rankings to see how unlucky I was.  I calculated them by awarding 12 points to the team that has the best total in each category, 11 points to the team that has the second best total, etc.  If there was a tie for first, each team would get 12 points and the team with the third best total would get 10 points.  It’s an imperfect system; not only is the tie thing weird, but it’s not weighted. 

For instance, let’s look at the HR category.  1^st place (Eddie) has 77 HR through week 8, leading the league and earning 12 points for that category. 2^nd place is 14 homers behind – a wide margin – and gets 11 points in the power rankings.  3^rd place, however, is only 3 HR behind 2^nd and would get 10 points.  With this point system, we’re not giving Eddie enough credit for dominating the HR category.  We’re saying the gap from 1-2 and 2-3 is the same.  It’s still an indicator of luck, but not a great one.

I tried to come up with a weighted power ranking system but I couldn’t connect the dots.  Having to find one system that could handle both the counting and ratio categories proved difficult.

My new idea is to compare our numbers to the league average.  It’ll yield a number that won’t mean much at first, but it will at least give us weighted rankings that tell us how our numbers stack up against the league average. 

Let’s go back to the HR category.  When comparing team totals against league averages, we get the following:

1) Eddie +34% vs league average

2) John +10% vs league average

3) Dan +4% vs league average

Now we’re working with something.  First place Eddie’s dominance in the HR category is accurately captured with a 24-percentage point difference over second place John, vs second place John’s 6-percentage point difference over third place Dan. 

If we push this out to the rest of the categories, we get the following results:

Ok, theres a lot to digest in there. All you have to keep in mind is that 1.00 is the league average.  Anything above 1.00 is above league average, anything below 1.00 is below league average.  I also threw in some colors to easily identify areas of notable and extreme variance from the league average.

So after all of those words and boring math talk, here’s what you came here for:

Perka is justified in his first place position.  He’s clearly been the best team this season, by any measure.  Way to go buddy.  Musto, Russell, and John have been the luckiest thus far. Dan, Greg, and Richie (vindication!) have been the unluckiest.  Brad and Scanlon, I have draft picks for your good players because you have not been unlucky and you just plan suck.  Yes, I just managed to open and close trade talks with two teams in one sentence.

Let’s push this thing into overdrive.  Go back to the examples from earlier with the HR category.  Remember how the weighted categories more accurately depicted the gap between our totals?  Let’s keep running with that idea. 

It’s easy to say that Russell has been luckier than Musto because he is 5 spots higher than his predicted spot, while Musto is only 3 spots higher than his predicted spot.  But I think we can quanitify this to see who’s actually the luckiest and unluckiest.

If the 1.00 figure is the league average, that would stand to reason that 1.00 equates to a .500% winning percentage.  So if we take the weighted totals and subtract .500 (I think that’s how it works):

Boom.  Here is your quantified luck so far from luckiest to unluckiest.

The Variance column is how far off of your expected winning percentage you are.  Russell's winning percentage is .109 higher than it should be, while Greg's is .060 lower than it should be.

First of all, nothing makes me happier than seeing that name at the top of the list.  Look at that projected winning percentage.  Gross.  That’s like a whole .009 below an acceptable winning percentage.  You should be embarrassed. 

Second and not surprisingly, we can see that the top four spots in the standings have been the luckiest teams, while the three unluckiest teams are not currently in the playoff picture.  Brad’s in 11^th despite his good fortune - imagine if he was as unlucky as Scanlon or Greg? Dan is in 5^th and has gotten the shit end of the stick - imagine if he was getting Russell luck?

Finally, was it worth writing three pages of garbage just to come to the conclusion that despite being unlucky this year, my stats are still not playoff caliber?  You may have a point.  But I just made up for the 6 weeks of bloglessness with this monster.  I’ll check back in at various points in the season with the updated numbers (maybe leave out the words) so we can either make fun of people for being unlucky or make fun of people for not deserving their success.