Week 10, An Update to What Volume is Good For

 

Dave, Jenn, and Tyler enjoyed their Easter out and about (yes the blog has a long backlog of photos). Tyler is reportedly preparing to tank his dad’s season to get the bounce back Acuna with the #1 pick in 2025 to bring respect back to his family name.

2024 YTD Power Ranks
TOTAL			HITTING			PITCHING
1	Arthur	3.64	1	Max	2.00	1	Dean	3.17
2	Michael	4.43	2	Arthur	3.75	2	Arthur	3.50
3	Max	4.43	3	Brian/Josh	4.00	3	Michael	4.00
4	Dean	4.86	4	Michael	4.75	4	Keith	4.33
5	Brian/Josh	5.00	5	Paul	5.25	5	Robert	5.00
6	Dave	5.93	6	Dave	5.75	6	Cory	5.17
7	Robert	6.29	7	Dean	6.13	7	Dave	6.17
8	Keith	6.50	8	Robert	7.25	8	Brian/Josh	6.33
9	Paul	6.57	9	Cory	7.63	9	Max	7.67
10	Cory	6.57	10	Keith	8.13	10	Paul	8.33

·        Arthur fell back to the pack a bit, at least on this chart. He had a great week, a handful of other teams just had better weeks and caught up YTD in tight categories

·        Max’s pitching ‘strategy’ is making me think. Max hasn’t thrown over 50 innings for 3 straight weeks. Yet over that time he is still .500 in the pitching categories on the scoreboard despite being far behind in innings pitched to his competitors. More on this in the following section.

·        Dave skyrocketed out of the basement. He cuts all his rookie stashes and good things happen, imagine that. I have a new stat to quantify how good his week was relative to every other week ever tracked, but that will have to wait for a future blog. We call that a tease.

On to the next…so what?

I’ve tried for years to try to crack the code of what stats to chase to find reliable or over-achieving players. Using statcast expected stats? Mixed bag. Using more classical sabermetrics like Fielding Independent Pitching or Batting Average for Balls in Play? Good, but still not quite there. Ok what if we go more basic, and what if we try to find a fantasy league scoring inefficiency instead…

What about volumes? Remember on draft day that Michael was projecting well-behind in Plate Appearances and Max was lacking in innings pitched. Well. One of those things has panned out:

Year to date controllable volumes:

Manager	PA	IP
Michael	3023	994
Arthur	3031	1001
Paul	2936	822
Robert	2842	882
Keith	2807	837
Max	3106	480
Dean	2843	837
Cory	2840	693
Dave	2964	824
Brian/Josh	3065	780

Soooo what? You say. I examined these numbers a few weeks ago to look one month backwards after the draft pick and keeper edge should have started to fade out.

 

What you see here is that generically, one’s power rank improves (gets lower) as your volume (Plate Appearances or Innings Pitched) gets higher, however this correlation is actually stronger right now for Hitting than for Pitching. This is the opposite of how it has historically been. These correlations come out to 0.80 for hitting and 0.49 for pitching (the closer to 1.0 a correlation is, the stronger it is).

I looked again this week in a Year to Date perspective:

I checked again for year to date and the correlations are even stronger: 0.95 for hitting and 0.62 for pitching.

This would reinforce what the Max outputs are showing us, you don’t have to maximize pitching volume to maximize your production. Intuitively, this jives with the Net Win category being as important on the  scoreboard as the SaveHold category as the ERA category. With how deep our pitching rosters are, with us being able to roster upwards of 130 to 150 starting pitchers, there are going to be more inconsistent SPs that are really going to drag down 1/2 of the pitching categories (ERA, WHIP, NW) and innings pitched volume has little to no impact on SVH.

HOWEVER, what this data also shows us is that maximizing plate appearances DOES help your hitting values. There is far more direct benefit to 6/8ths of the hitting categories to just throw as many PAs at the game as you can than there is to worry too much about the AVG and SLG ratios which are more affected by bad PAs. Robert, Keith, Cory, and Dean should take notes and bump up those PAs.

As with any statistic, outliers exist, Arthur has the best pitching power rank right now and has ALSO thrown the most innings. It must be hard to make this look so easy. Conversely, Max has the second worst pitching power rank despite having the fewest innings pitched. Even though fewer innings can improve one’s power rank, having TOO few innings and not being able to keep up in the counting pitching categories with the other 9 teams will show up more in the Year To Date power ranks more than it will show up in a head to head weekly matchup. In other words, Max’s ‘strategy’ will work better in the Yahoo Standings than it will in the Power Ranks.

None of this is to say what Max and Arthur are doing won’t continue, it is just to say that they are doing things the hard way (Arthur by finding more good players than the rest of the league which is boosting his performance relative to his volume and Max is taking advantage of the head to head nature of the game which is creating a divergence between his Standing and his Power Rank).