Week 8: A look back at the draft

Arthur and his wife on date night a few weeks ago 

Paul training for his marathon cross country bike ride this summer

TOTAL			HITTING			PITCHING				Manager	Team
1	Dean	2.929	1	Dean	2.500	1	Dean	3.500		Max	My Story Begins
2	Arthur	4.571	2	Arthur	3.125	2	Dave	3.833		Dean	Ender's Game
3	Keith	4.929	3	Brian/Josh	4.125	3	Matt	4.167		Arthur	DOMINATION
4	Michael	5.071	4	Michael	4.875	4	Keith	4.833		Paul	South Florida Gators
5	Brian/Josh	5.143	5	Keith	5.000	5	Michael	5.333		Dave	I Hate Fantasy
6	Dave	5.714	6	Paul	5.750	6	Max	5.500		Cory	Hebrew Nationals
7	Max	6.143	7	Max	6.625	7	Cory	6.333		Keith	Bourbon Street Blues
8	Matt	6.429	8	Dave	7.125	8	Arthur	6.500		Brian/Josh	Alternative Stats
9	Paul	6.714	9	Cory	7.500	9	Brian/Josh	6.500		Matt	615 for the win
10	Cory	7.000	10	Matt	8.125	10	Paul	8.000		Michael	Pic'em Pelham'ed

Dean keeps pushing his way up the rankings. We’ll get more into this in a minute. The rest of us are pretty tightly packed. The upper tier has shifted downward with the rest of the league as Dean moves upward. There is some slight separation of Arthur, Keith, Michael, and BJ from the pack. Max has slipped out of the upper tier even as he has avoided the Mike Trout injury.

Seeing as we are 2 days removed from last week’s matchups thanks to the holiday, I’m going to focus more on the intro and the week’s awards. We are 8 weeks into the season: enough time for some normalization of luck and bad starts, but of course not enough time to close the book on the year. Whose draft set them the most up for success and who’s draft blew it? I took some time last week to find some data to answer that question.

I compared each team’s drafted players and those still on their team (note traded or dropped players did not count in this data). I compared their pre-draft default yahoo rankings with their current rankings and put players into four bins (note these ranks were as of May 24^th):

Draft pick ‘hit’	Pre-draft inside top 200, current rank improved by 50 or more
Draft pick ‘miss’	Pre-draft inside top 100, current rank loss of more than 50
Draft pick ‘good’	Pre-draft inside top 150 within 50, current rank within 50 of that rank
Draft pick ‘bust’	Pre-draft inside top 100, current rank outside top 300

	hit	miss	good	bust
Michael	2	8	1	7
Matt	1	6	3	5
BJ	4	4	4	4
Keith	2	5	3	4
Dean	3	2	7	2
Cory	1	8	1	3
Dave	2	6	5	3
Arthur	1	6	4	2
Paul	3	5	3	3
Max	2	7	4	4

So, what conclusions do we draw from this? A couple are possible:

1)      It is dumb luck. Fifty ranking slots is a lot, for players to move outside of this range is quite a move. Think about it, for all the…say…Miguel Cabrera…haters that may not have taken him in the first round, if he was there in the 2^nd round or 3^rd round, any of us would have taken him. Well…he has killed Cory’s team ranked in the 400s. On the flip side, should Michael be praised for grabbing Eric Thames as the last man on his bench? No. Sometimes we pick upside guys for one reason or another and they work out like gangbusters, its fantasy. Sometimes we get lucky and players outperform our wildest expectation. To this end though, to win at fantasy you’re **gonna** need at least a few of these guys to outperform to give you a leg up on the field.

2)      It is skill. Should Dean be given credit for a vastly un-proportional amount of his top 150 picks working out? Sure. I can attest to the good science that Dean puts into his pre-draft process. It has all the logic in the world and over time, he is going to draft players that are under valued when compared to their draft ranking thus setting him up to pick good players. But guess what, I used the same tools with a difference in pitching philosophy and you can see from the chart above how good my draft was….maybe I should just use his pitching strategy.

The point is, there is way more unknown to fantasy than any of us would like to admit, and I’ll be the first one to say that I lose sight of that sometimes. Play the game your way and we’re all going to be wrong far more often than we’re right…unless you’re Dean apparently.

There were a few headlines I wanted to get to from last week’s matchups:

Dean topped Keith in the heavyweight matchup of the week. This matchup was one of only two where both teams moved up in the Power Rankings, Keith moving into the upper tier and Dean moving to the rarified air of the above 3.0 club (he is now ranked 2.929). Keith was the first real test Dean has had in close to a month but just wasn’t able to muster enough R/HR/RBI/BB despite hitting .330 on the week to top Dean. Dean’s team continues to spit in the face of sabermetrics and career track records. Mike Leake and Ervin Santana are having breakout years well into their careers each outperforming their FIPs and xFIPs by over a run and their projections by about 1.80 runs (for Santana he is actually outperforming his FIP and xFIP by 2.3 and 2.9 runs respectively, DAMN). I can’t fathom this continuing but I said that a month ago. The performance of these two has really pushed Dean to where he is now.

Arthur pounded Michael after one of the greatest pitching days that I can remember. Arthur started 4 pitchers when it really wasn’t a good fantasy matchup strategy but came out of it with 26 innings, 36 strikeouts, 4 wins, 1 save, and a 1.73 ERA. This propelled him to a huge win even though he only hit .227 on the week. Michael had an inordinately low total of 20 RBIs despite a .290 average and just couldn’t overcome Arthur’s pitching, despite having a pretty good overall week.

BJ also pounded Max who is really scuffling right now. Neither of these teams played particularly well with averages below .260 and ERAs above 4.4. At least Max has Anthony Rizzo and Josh Donaldson now.

Dave handled Matt (lot of blowouts this week) though he too didn’t have a week to write home about. Matt’s was let down by a Kershaw outing on Sunday that could have propelled him to a much closer matchup.

Cory topped Paul in a matchup of two more teams that could use some tuning. Each team was below .250 AVG with ERAs over 4.7….at least Paul hit 14 HRs? Paul only had 11 walks, that’s pretty crazy.

OK back to the fun stuff:

Max of the week: we have a two-for here. Max made what is probably going to be the luckiest move of the year ditching Mike Trout for two elite players right before Trout tore a thumb ligament. This is great….except Max forgot to get Donaldson back in his lineup the first day Donaldson came off the Disabled List. Well Played. BUT WAIT! Matt also put an equivalent stake in David Price on draft day. It too was well-publicized when Price would be rejoining the rotation on Memorial Day…but Matt didn’t get Price back into his lineup. Neither player had a huge day on their first day back, but it just makes you shake your head. M and M boys, Maxes of the week.

Monster of the week: I’m tired of giving it to Dean, so we’ll give it Arthur and those ‘Balls of Steel’ he named his team this weekend when the results came in from Saturday and his pitchers had performed well. It was a dominant day and final matchup score for Arthur. Enjoy your Monster status.