A Whole New Ballgame, part 3


The most common question I get is "how did you get to where you are?".  Sometimes it's also formed as, "I want to do what you are doing... how do I do that?"  Well, there isn't a short or easy answer to that.  But generally I sum it up as, "find people who know what they are doing and ask a lot of questions."

For me, there was a bit of luck involved in the contacts I made, but I also put myself in places where I could get lucky.  For example, I joined SABR in order to talk with other people about baseball.  Not just the players and stories, but how the game actually works.  When I wanted to know about scouting I joined the SABR Scouting Committee, which is chaired by Bill Clark, one of the most successful major league scouts of the last 50 years.  So when I got an opportunity to talk with him, he was generous enough to sit with me and offer a few tidbits to get me going.  And that is where I began learning about what scouts see.  Anytime I have an opportunity to ask questions of someone who knows about the topic, I take it if I'm not being intrusive.

So when someone asks me how I became an "expert" about fantasy baseball, the first thing I say is, "well, I'm really not.  I'm just someone who asks a lot of questions and is able to differentiate (most of the time) what makes sense and what doesn't." 

Which is what I'm writing about today.  I apologize for writing about Strat-o-matic for a third straight time, but I think you'll understand why in just a second.  As I noted in the first column, I've never played this game.  I've played simulation baseball games before, but the rules and mechanics of each game are as different as they are for chess, checkers and Stratego.  All three are strategy games, but no one would mistake one for another. 

I joined this league knowing nothing about the game.  Which means I have a huge learning curve to overcome.  I drafted based on my knowledge of real baseball, but that is not the game I'm playing.  In order to have any chance of being competitive, I really need an understanding of how Strat works.  Basically, I need to find the Strat-o-matic version of SABR, and hopefully a Strat-o-matic Bill Clark. 

The first place  I looked were the message boards at the Sporting News where the game is being hosted.  It's amazing how informative they were.  Amazing and disappointing.  But disappointing only because the fairly unanimous opinion of the people who have been playing this game for many years and in many leagues (as many as 50 a year) was that my strategy of filling up my roster with high ceiling but highly injury prone players was doomed to fail.  In a regular fantasy baseball league, it's not a bad strategy to employ because there is always the chance that a Cliff Floyd will stay healthy for an entire season and put up excellent numbers in the process.  This is not true in Strat.  Because it is a simulation, and this particular league is a simulation of the 2004 season, a player like Jason Bay who missed 30 or 40 games due to injury is pretty much guaranteed to miss 30 or 40 games in the simulation.  You might get lucky and he'll only miss 25, but you have an equally good chance that he'll miss 50.  Either way, there's zero chance he'll miss zero games.  And since there is no way to predict when he will get injured - unlike the real Jason Bay who missed the first part of last year recovering from shoulder surgery - one would need to have a healthy replacement for when he does go down.  But if that replacement is the equally injury prone Cliff Floyd, the sim could play out that Bay goes down for 15 games, then the very next night, Floyd goes down for 15 games.  At that point I would be stuck trying to convince the bat boy that he can play left field and hit off Randy Johnson and Jason Schmidt.  Not good.

Another aspect of Strat that was revealed to me on the message boards but I didn't fully realize the implications is that because the game is actually played by a computer.  I don't get to manage my team during each game.  The computer is the one making the team's decisions based on my programmed tendencies.  Generally speaking, that means if my opponent has a tendency to bring in a left-handed reliever at a certain point in the game, the computer will likely bring in a right-handed pinch hitter for me.  The computer, like so many real major league managers, doesn't look at the splits; it only recognizes that it's a soutpaw on the mound so it needs to bring in the opposite side hitter off the bench.  However, there are a number of pitchers who excel against the reverse hand of the batter, meaning a lefty pitcher who routinely does well against right-handed batters.  Because of this quirk, it's possible to forgo spending big bucks on the elite situational relievers in favor of pitchers who have reverse splits who get the same job done because the computer won't make the correct adjustment based on the actual splits.  Likewise, I am subject to the same gambit from my opponent.  It's just another nuance that can mean the difference between sweeping a closely-played series and getting swept.

The other thing I learned is that one of the most important things to look for in a pitcher's card is not what his statistics were or even what his splits were, but how his card is arranged.  The game was originally determined by dice rolls on two six-sided die (now computerized) and each event (type of hits, walks, strikeouts, etc.) was assigned a particular number on the dice roll.  Does he have a lot of home run results, and if so are they on common rolls like 5-9, or are they rare like on a 2 or 12?  Are the homer results determined by the ballpark or are they unfettered bombs onto a nearby street?  These number determinations are based on what actually happened last year but because you creating your team from the stadium up, you can tailor it to take advantage of these number assignments.  For example, Roy Halladay's card has a lot of groundball numbers which can be either hits or outs based on the team defense.  In 2004, he gave up a lot of hits by his standards.  True, he suffered some shoulder problems, but, with the notable exception of Orlando Hudson, he was also backed up by one of the worst infields range-wise in the majors.  Carlos Delgado, Eric Hinske and some combination of Chris Gomez and Chris Woodward were abysmal when it came to getting to ground balls.  It's no mystery why he gave up so many hits.  But with an excellent infield defense, he might perform in Strat a lot more like this year's Halladay. 

Anyway, the only reason I now know this stuff is because I recognized there was a lot I didn't know and went to a place where I could ask lots of questions.  There's still a lot I don't know about this game and I have yet to find my Strat-o-Clark, but I'm still looking.  With the new info in hand, I dropped Jason Bay, Cliff Floyd, Alfredo Amezaga, Barry Zito, Brendan Donnelly and Jamie Walker.  In their places, I picked up the much more resilient and better defensively Jose Guillen for left field.  He's a notch below Bay offensively - .849 OPS vs Bay's .908 - but more importantly, now my bat boy needn't worry about anything but fetching bats.  Pokey Reese will now fill Amezaga's role as the defensive replacement if/when an injury occurs in the infield.  He's not quite as good with the glove as Amezaga, but his card has much more offensive promise.  While Zito's flyball tendency shouldn't prove too harmful given the pitcher-friendly parks in the division, he still gives up a lot of homers.  In his place, I'm taking a chance that Roy Halladay will revert to somewhere close to his All Star form with Chavez, ARod and Adam Kennedy behind him regularly.  And if he does give up a long flyball, there's at least a chance that Torii Hunter or JD Drew can bring it back, especially on the road trips to the other divisions where the parks aren't as spacious.  Walker and Donnelly are now replaced with Neal Cotts (one of those clever inexpensive lefties who is better at getting right-handers out) and Dennys Reyes, another reverse lefty who keeps the ball on the ground and generally in the ballpark, and can also spot start.

While my team now doesn't look as good sabermetrically and the bullpen certainly isn't as glamorous with the potential of striking out everyone in sight after the sixth inning as it was previously, I'm hoping the adjustments I've made will make it more competitive for this game.  I'm still learning.

Final Preseason follow-up