Hot and Sour Soup – Early Season NL Surprises

What players are having surprising seasons, both good and bad? To answer that question, I compared prices computed from my RotoValue projections with ones computed with 2013 stats through Friday. Here are the biggest positive surprises in  a 5×5 NL league: Evan Gattis – With roto star Brian McCann missing the start of the season recovering from shoulder surgery,… Continue reading Hot and Sour Soup – Early Season NL Surprises

Auction Weekend Recap

This past weekend we had the auctions for my two long-time leagues, the Park Slope Rotisserie League, a traditional 4×4 AL-only league, and the Ezra Stiles Rotisserie Association, a 4×4 NL league. This is the 25th season of the ESRA NL, of which I was a founding member, and the 26th year of the Park… Continue reading Auction Weekend Recap

Going 9 AL Recap

So I did a draft for an AL league sponsored by Going 9 Baseball, with 12 teams, so it’s a deep league. We drafted 25 players each, and it took a little over 3 hours to complete online. After doing a mock draft in a shallow mixed league a few weeks earlier, I had hoped to… Continue reading Going 9 AL Recap

Playing Time Projection

A big unknown in fantasy projections is playing time. Indeed projecting playing time well may be as, or even more, important, to fantasy owners than projecting a player’s rate statistics. The playing time in RotoValue projections is the result of a three-stage process. First, a basic projection algorithm uses a player’s age and historical performance… Continue reading Playing Time Projection

Updating Projections

I’ve updated projections at RotoValue, incorporating the most recent releases of two outside systems, Steamer/Razzball and CAIRO. In addition, I’ve updated my own RotoValue projections with playing time adjustments based on known injuries. For RotoValue, I scan injury reports looking for players known to miss time. Based on that report, I make an estimate of… Continue reading Updating Projections

RotoValue Prices – a WAR For Fantasy Sports

So how are RotoValue auction prices computed anyway? One way to think of them is as a sort of WAR for fantasy sports. Tom Tango has done a great job explaining WAR, emphasizing that it is a framework, and thus you can have many different implementations. Ultimately that’s what RotoValue is – an implementation of a model… Continue reading RotoValue Prices – a WAR For Fantasy Sports

An Auction Guy Gets Drafted

I’ve blogged about participating in a fantasy baseball mock draft last weekend, but I have a confession: I’d never before done a straight baseball draft. I’ve been playing fantasy sports for over two decades, and I’ve done fantasy football drafts often. Once we did a fantasy basketball draft when the delayed season start made it impossible… Continue reading An Auction Guy Gets Drafted

Mock Draft Reflections

Today I did a mock draft online, which was quite an experience. First, I’d like to thank Mark Healy of http://www.going9baseball.com/ for inviting me to participate. It was fast and fun – we used http://www.mockdraftcentral.com to hold it, and it was configured to allow at most 60 seconds per pick. Healy hosts a weekly radio show on SiriusXMFantasy, and he… Continue reading Mock Draft Reflections