I say F**K YOU Jobu

So, I've tried to write a lot this in blog, at least before my personal big move. In the last few months, I've spent most of my writing on baseball time preparing updates for the fantasy leagues I manage, which I find much more interesting as of late (perhaps because I'm doing well in those leagues and the teams I follow are, um, not doing as well in the real standings). It has been just over a month since my last entry and there's a good chance this will be the last post.

I knew when the Indians traded Cliff Lee there was a chance that Victor would go next. I decided to deny the inevitable and think that saving money on Cliff Lee would give the Indians enough money to pay Victor Martinez after the 2010 season (or perhaps an extension before the start of the 2010 season).

Trading Martinez was, on a gut level reaction, the last straw for me. Being a roaming fan, I have to make an active effort to watch Indians games, which I have still done despite the Indians being no where near contention. That is largely over, and I have, more than once, asked friends for advice about changing allegiances. The truth is, I no longer have a regional connection to Cleveland, and I spent a lot longer time period in Cincinnati. I have always followed the Reds, but not nearly with the same passion and attention that I have followed the Indians over the last 9-10 years. I never felt like a bandwagon fan in following the Indians because it was mostly based on where I was in life and the availability of Indians information. Not to mention, I started following the Indians in the first season they missed the playoffs in several years. I've only seen the Indians in the playoffs twice, once for a cup of coffee in 2001 and a great run in 2007, which now seems like ages too far away.

In those years, I've enjoyed seeing players develop and rooting for new faces, but at this point, the rebuilding is just too much for too little gain. I watched 6 years of rebuilding result in one good season, and I don't think I should expect this rebuilding effort to have any greater level of success.

In short, I spent the most on Indians apparel and such within the last year that I ever have and the same can be said for the amount of money spent on Indians related items for me. Which is even sadder for me, because I would feel stupid bothering and stupider for having put any money, much less time and interest, into the team and its well being.

I've watched as my brother's adopted team, the Red Sox, has won two world series, one at the direct expense of the Tribe. I have made several (I was going to say countless, but that's not true as the count is either 4 or 5) bets with my brother on the head to head matchups between the Red Sox and the Indians and each time I have come out for the worse. Just a few days back, I told my brother, who has often referred to the Indians as the Red Sox's farm team, that I would never forgive him if the Sox traded for Martinez. My brother assured me that wouldn't happen. I said I knew, meaning that I would eventually forgive him, but he assured me that the trade was unlikely to go through.

A few days later and I can't blame my brother, so I don't. I can come close, as he's more upset about his favorite player on the Sox, Varitek, then overjoyed at getting my favorite player. I don't blame him and at this point it would be worthless to blame him (I guess at any point really). What I am, however, is completely uninterested in the Indians for at least the rest of this year, which I've never been before the end of September. Not only that, I'm not sure that I will gain any interest in the next season, as the GM of the Indians, Mark Shapiro, has already publically stated that the Indians are unlikely to contend in 2010 and have only a remote possibility for 2011.

So if I ignore the team for a season and a half, what reason would I have to come back?

If anyone still checks this, write some suggestions on other teams I should follow and why.

Team Salaries

Finally taking a look at current team salary estimates.

First, here's a graph of the projected team salaries.

There are some surprises here (to me at least). Everyone knows that the Yankees are the highest in salaries, but I was surprised to find the Red Sox a lowly 4th. I suspected the Mets were up there, but didn't realize how high the Cubs payroll had gotten.

On the low end, I am amazed by how extremely low the Marlins total remains. 8 of the players on their 25 man roster are making the league minimum ($400,00) and another 7 are making less than $1 million.

Beyond that, The Padres remain quite low as well, especially considering Jake Peavey makes $11 mill and Brian Giles makes $9 mill. Add in Chris Young at over $4 and you have half the payroll in 3 players.

For a point of reference, the Yankees paid about $34 million in luxury tax in 2005, or just $3 million less than the Marlins actual payroll this year. This year, the Yankees are likely to be the only team over the "luxury" cap of $162 million. As the evil empire has broken the cap more than 3 years, they get charged the max rate of 40%. I believe that is on just the portion over the cap. If so, the Yankers can expect to pay another $16 million this year.

I digress, since I mean this as a scathing indictment on the Marlins, not the Yankees (who I will talk about later). MLB has a revenue sharing system of some sort, but they haven't released numbers on how much is shared and where it comes from or where it goes since 2006 (2007 numbers were partially leaked, but not readily available).

At that point in time, the lowest teams (Marlins and Rays w/Devil) were receiving over $30 million. Assuming that number has gone up or at least stayed the same, than the highest paying teams are paying no less than 80% of the Marlins payroll. Why doesn't this franchise work? I know they've won two world series, but they have no fan base, which is that much worse considering they have won two world series in a little over the past decade.

Anyway...

Since I have been obsessed with normalizing things lately, I converted the salaries to z-scores and made a graph to see if the salary structure resembles a normal or bell curve.

Overall, there is a somewhat normal shape to the payroll distribution with a few expections near the very top and mid to bottom. The Yankees are an extreme upward outlier, which is no surprise. Their z-score is 3.4, nearly double the next team's score (Mets at 1.77). In the current situation, the Yankees are the only technical outlier, but there seems to be a bigger issue. While the Yankees stick way the hell out there, it is not easy to notice the other teams creeping up. I figured the crazy high outlier was pulling the entire curve to the right, but it turns out that the Yankees are not the only actor here.

The Mets and Cubs are not outliers when the Yankees are in the calculation. If you either take the Yankees out of the equation completely, or give them a average payroll around $80 million, then the Mets (extremely) and Cubs (barely) become the outliers.

There are no negative outliers in either case, but I believe this is because there are a 3 teams (Pirates, Padres and Marlins) under the $50 million mark that are grouped within $12 million of each other though they remain at least $12 million under the next tier.

Looking back at the top, the differences between the almost top tier (Tigers are #5 overall at $115) and the next teams are much higher yet no where near each other. The Red Sox at #4 are $16 higher, the Cubs are at #13 higher than the Sox, the Mets are another $13 above the Cubbies and again, the Yankees are an astounding (to beat a dead something) $54 million higher than the Mets.

The difference from 1-5 is over $85 million, which is the larger than the difference from 5-30. Ignore the Yanks for a moment and look at the difference between 2-5 ($32). Take the same difference below 5 and you end up at 14 . Take $32 off again and you go from 14 all the way to 27.

I do not mean to say who is right and who is wrong (yet, that will be another post). But the differences here are almost unfathomable.

Especially given that when I regressed payroll versus number of wins, it only explained about 10% of the difference between winning and losing, with no real clear cut correlation between money and wins.

More on Standardized Scores

(click for full pic, its a wide one)

Thought I would keep looking at standardized scores, so here is the would be standardized scores for another one of my fantasy leagues, this one a head-to-head league.

So, as discussed below, I standardized the point totals within each category to see what would happen. A lot of the standings remain unchanged, but 2 teams would move much higher in the standings while 1 team would plummet.

As highlighted in green, there are 5 relative outliers (anything higher than an absolute value of 1.96). It is interesting that all 5 outliers are negative (remembering that ERA and WHIP are reverse categories, so the best teams are below average in those categories).

An extreme difference lies between the top two teams (above average in 9 of 10 categories) and the bottom team (below average in all 10 categories). It is truly amazing that the Pawn Shop Ninjas are so far above average in all five offensive categories as well as strikeouts and wins.

Well, I'm an idiot

So, in my last post I did some work with standardizing scores. I'll leave it up because I'm an idiot.

When I was adding up standardized scores, I didn't take into account negative categories, where lower is better than higher (Losses, ERA, WHIP) so my rankings got all switched around.

I started playing with this idea because the (wrong) results were pretty cool and caught my mistake today.

Here are the same tables from the last post in their corrent form. (Again, click links to see the full pic).

Basically there was no movement in the standings except a few people who were close in the standings would flip. Whoopity-do!

Also, my all Steals, no pitching idea would flop horribly.

The no pitching would actually not be the horrible part. Because there are 3 negative categories in the league, I would be on the good side of an outlier for those, but would be on the bad side for the three positive categories (W, K, SV). If I dropped my pitching stats to 0 in the above league, I would have a +.86 combined z-score for pitching as opposed to the -.75 I currently have. The overall swing would be 1.61 or so and would jump me from 6th to 4th.

On the hitting front though, any gains in SB, even if I managed a standardized score over 3, would be more than counteracted by losses in RBI and HR, not to mention the OPS we use in that league.

What a failure of a day and post.

Standardized Scores

So, the past few weeks I've been mathing up the couple of fantasy leagues I manage. Mostly, I've been converting weekly head-to-head play results into rotisserie league scores. In the league I've been in the longest, we are already rotisserie, so converting to head-to-head isn't all that easy or informative so I didn't do it. What I did think about was the ranking system.

In most rotisserie leagues, your accumulation of a certain stat is ranked against your peers. You are then assigned a number to go along with that rank, but the current system does not account for incremental changes at all. In a ten team league, the person with the best whatever gets 10 points and the next gets 9. If doesn't matter if the person in first is ahead of the next place by 1 run or 200 runs, they can only get 1 more point than the second place person.

I decided to look at what would happen if you gave out points based on standardized (z-scores) instead of ranks and here are the full results (click pic to see full pic).

And here are the much more managable summary results (no individual categories) (again click for full somewhat readable table).

First, it is amazing how much movement there would end up being in the standings. The current 5th place team rises, and convincingly, to first. The 1st and 3rd place teams both plummet. I suppose this means those dropping a lot may be winning several categories by a little and losing a few others by a lot. It could also mean that they are tanking a few categories along with other teams. If 3 or 4 teams give up on saves, then only 1 team appears at the true bottom of the rankings and gets 1 point, the others would get 2-4 points and not suffer than much from the tanked category.

On the other hand, if a category was particularly close and bunched together, someone may suffer and get a low ranking despite being close to the league average or even the league leaders. In the standardized system, they wouldn't lose many points and wouldn't be anchored trailing slightly in a tight race.

There's a lot of stuff to this system, and I find it pretty fascinating. One interesting note is that of the 100 possible spots (10 categories by 10 teams), I only caught 3 that would be considered outliers (past + or - 1.96) and all 3 were averages and not pure numbers. That is to say, based on the number of times per something else and not just the total result.

It would be interesting to see a league run this was for a season to see how you could exploit the system. I think if I were playing in this league, I would make a go at drafting an all steals offense and not even play a pitcher.

If you could get enough steals, your players would probably stay near average in runs and batting average. The gain from being so far above in steals would most likely more than make up for what you lose in HR and RBI.

As for the pitching, by giving up on wins, K's and saves, you'll be a low outlier. But first, you'll drag the overall average way down making you less of an outlier. Second, if you have a 0.00 ERA and WHIP, not to mention 0 losses in this league, you're likely to lead those categories by at least as much as you lose the stats.

Of course, all of that would be for not if someone else used the same strategy. Or would it?