All Star Break: The Evolution of the Floored Fantasy Baseball League

Michael and Dean took in a Braves/Astros game last week. Updates to the league’s running table of stadium’s visited is a bit of a landslide, but the most players watched is a tight race between Michael and Dean with around 8 each.

Over the last few years, the MLB All Star Break was a time for me take stock in my team, look at some league trends, and try to set up some player moves up for the second half. This year was different. This year I was more reflective in nature. I’ve been getting some negative feedback on the tone of the blog lately and I’m trying to wrap my head around it.

I’ve written before about how Floored got started, the personalities involved, the rule changes…all sorts of things. I haven’t written about the evolution of the league and fantasy baseball in general over the last decade; that’s right we’ve been doing this for a decade. When we started we had 8 people, no social media, very few fantasy baseball writers, and even fewer people in the world who had heard of or were using sabermetrics.

Now, there’s 11 of us with a continual flow of information available on Twitter, Google, and I hear that there’s a pretty sweet weekly recap blog that talks about fantasy analysis and new ideas. It’s a different game than it was back in 2007, but not everyone plays the game any differently than they did in the beginning. The awesome thing that has happened is the attention that the league draws now. Last year there were over 700 ‘Moves’ made in the league, and we’re on pace for over 1000 to be made this year; quite a difference from the 186 Moves in 2007. It’s pretty awesome. If I think back on it, Dave and I were perennial contenders and league champions for a 6 year run there largely based on the time we put into it. We could whiff on many of our Moves because there were still plenty of good players available since few people were grabbing them. We were the crazy ones for having 90 plus moves in a year…it’s not so crazy anymore.

Now, I’m the crazy one again. Dean opened my eyes to the use of spreadsheets and projections a few years ago and I haven’t looked back. They allow me to put numbers to personal feelings and find inefficiencies in rankings. It **is** a numbers game after all. The problem is it is a very inexact science. Projections don’t account for unannounced or underreported injuries (any time now, Miguel Cabrera), skill changes (hello, Aaron Judge and Trevor Story), motivation (you know you’re getting paid for this right, Ian Desmond?), or personal issues (rumors are that Manny Machado is stuck in his head about something). It’s sports, it’s unpredictable. So this is the craziness with which I currently find myself consumed. Projections and Sabermetrics won’t tell you that Adam Eaton will start off with a career year only to tear his ACL, but it can look at the year to date stats of Miguel Sano versus Mike Moustakas or Robbie Ray versus Lance McCullers for the first half and tell you which ones are more likely to keep up their paces for the rest of the year.

The moral of the story is, most of the league isn’t on board with the analytics, and I’m going to be at peace with that. It’s my bag, it doesn’t have to be yours. I’m the guy that likes to asks why and tries to start deep analytical discussions and debates, to a fault sometimes. From here on out the blog will be analytics free. It’s what the people want. The strength of schedule and luck factors of the head to head scoring will remain, because everything is so tight this year it’s only fair to wonder what it would be like in a rotisserie format. If you have someone you want to talk about, hit me up. I’m always down to chat baseball.

With that said, there is still a topic that I did some research on, and I don’t want it go completely wasted. So instead of long winded summaries of what I see, instead I’ll just run through the players I looked up and call-my-shot if you will on their second half performance…based on those damn numbers (yes I put a few players in two categories because I couldn’t make up my mind, and I bolded the boldest call in that column):

SELL HIGH	LEGIT	HOLD…EH*	HOLD BUT REGRESSION LIKELY**	BUY LOW	SELL LOW
Robbie Ray	Lance McCullers	Yu Darvish	Jose Berrios	Manny Machado	Johnny Cueto
Ryan Zimmerman	Zach Greinke	Manny Machado	Carlos Martinez	Kris Bryant	Justin Verlander
Giancarlo Stanton	James Paxton	Eric Thames	Aaron Judge	Miguel Cabrera	Gerrit Cole
Mike Moustakas	Alex Wood	Carlos Gonzalez	George Springer	Ryan Braun	David Price
	Jose Ramirez	Miguel Cabrera	Jake Lamb	Todd Frazier	Trevor Story
	Yonder Alonso	Kyle Schwarber	Corey Dickerson		Josh Donaldson
	Ender Inciarte	Hanley Ramirez	Justin Smoak		Rougned Odor
	Andrew Benintendi	Rich Hill	Logan Morrison		Jonathan Villar
	Andrelton Simmons		Justin Bour		Gregory Polanco
	Miguel Sano				Ian Desmond
	Eric Thames
*this means these players aren’t what they once were but are still valuable
**this means I believe there is a new skill here but they've been lucky and will likely regress to the mean somewhat