Week 13: What good is volume, anyway?

Josh is enjoying his move back to the 561 seen here with Brian and a bunch of bros out on the water. There are certainly worse places to live. Josh might could use some sunscreen, though.

Year to Date Power Ranks
TOTAL			HITTING			PITCHING
1	Dean	3.79	1	Dean	2.25	1	Arthur	3.50
2	Max	4.64	2	Dave	3.88	2	Michael	4.17
3	Michael	4.71	3	Max	3.88	3	Brian/Josh	4.50
4	Dave	4.79	4	Michael	5.13	4	Paul	5.00
5	Arthur	5.00	5	Matt	5.25	5	Cory	5.67
6	Paul	5.36	6	Paul	5.63	6	Max	5.67
7	Matt	5.79	7	Keith	6.00	7	Dean	5.83
8	Brian/Josh	6.36	8	Arthur	6.13	8	Dave	6.00
9	Keith	6.64	9	Brian/Josh	7.75	9	Matt	6.50
10	Cory	6.93	10	Cory	7.88	10	Keith	7.50

Dean is maintaining his lead atop the ranks. Right around now is the historical test for his team. Elite first half teams in years past either fade (a la Michael in 2018, Dave in 2016, Michael in 2015 or Josh Waring in 2013), or…well…there actually isnt much precedent for team running away with a whole year of the power ranks. Nearly every year the best team in the first half falls back into a tussle with a second place team or is completely overtaken down the stretch. We’ll see what happns. Arthur is the up and down team this year; off a historic week this week where he set the all time batting average record at .386, he jumped up a full point in the year to date power ranks. That’s the biggest jump this late in the year we’ve ever seen, most closely matched by a 1.2 point jump by Dave from week 10 to week 11 in 2014. Dave has been on a slow slide lately and is searching for who his team is going to be; while Matt has been letting his team fall into oblivion since he was the number one team in the league, 4 weeks into the year. At the bottom of the ranks are Brian and Josh, Keith, and Cory who are running out of time to make their move.
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Volume is the easiest thing to control in fantasy baseball. Ensuring your lineup is set, your pitchers are in the active roster, and that you have bench hitters available to fill in on planned team off days and player rest days is the most controllable facet of one’s fantasy baseball team…but what is that worth? We changed some league rules that had the possibility to completely change the priorities in our league. We took away a volume-dependent category, hits, and replaced it with a ratio, slugging percentage; and on the pitching side we took away a volume-punishing category, earned runs, and replaced it with a volume-rewarding category, Quality Starts.

First, I’m going to explain the statistics with an easy one, correlating Yahoo league winning percentage to Power Rank. We all know its not a one-for-one catch all, but generally, the teams atop the power ranks will be the teams atop the winning percentage.

I’ve added a trendline and the R_squared value to show you the correlation, note that an R_squared over 0.2 is considered a strong correlation. You can see here a team’s Power Rank is strongly correlated to it’s winning percentage.

Now lets look at Offensive Power Rank and compare it to team total At Bats. I have plotted here both last year’s and this year’s data, both through 13 weeks, to show what may have changed with our changed rules (note if you click the image it enlarges):

What you see here is a not-strong correlation. This one was somewhat surprising to me. Even more surprising is that this year the correlation has gotten slightly STRONGER (from 0.048 to 0.076) even as we changed the offesive category from a volume-based to a ratio-based category. Nonetheless, it's still not a strong correlation. So we shrug our shoulders and move on. Arthur and his league-trailing At Bats can keep on competing.

On to the pitching, I ran the same type of analysis, is there a correlation between total innings pitched and your resulting team Pitching Power Rank?

Alas, all is right with the world. What we see here is a strong correlation. In 2018, the R_squared value was 0.43 and in 2019 the R_squared value is 0.37. Interestingly, it has always been beneficial to pitch more innings, perhaps Dean will run a far more detailed analysis of the last decade of data, but for now, this serves our goal. One observation is that the data was much flatter last year, all teams were within 200 innings pitched of each other. This year, the most innings pitched team has over 500 runs above the fewest innings pitched team.

This one is for those of you still rocking the 4 and 5 man bullpens, volume is your friend. Maximize your bench spots to be able to maximize your innings pitched, either through full-time rostering Starting Pitchers or by streaming the last roster spot on your team. It’s a great strategy!