Okay, so maybe this should be called “Assumed curiosities as to what this site is and why one should trust their fantasy team’s fate and presumably prestige managerial reputation with its projections and rankings”, but I’m happy to also add real questions if they are, firstly, asked, and secondly, asked at a frequent pace. With that said, to the assumed curiosities!
How did you create these projections?
I didn’t. I may spend a lot, perhaps too much, of my free time watching baseball and spending time in its fantastical alternate universes, but I don’t have the time to reliably analyze and predict the performances of all those who partake within it. Instead I rely upon the expertise of those who do have such time (and are for the most part even paid to do so!). With a strong belief, or minimally some sort of faint hope, that the voices of many will eliminate the faults and biases of the few, I use a combination of several projection systems as the base of the RotoProjos ranking tool. Sometimes I combine these myself, or sometimes I stumble across someone who has already done this for me (thanks FantasyPros.com!!), but I will always subnote my sources with each ranking.
Why are RotoProjos rankings better than others?
Most rankings presume traditional 5×5 fantasy baseball league scoring categories: R, HR, RBI, SB, AVG, and W, SV, K, ERA, WHIP. With the advent of the common baseball fan realizing many of these categories are garbage in actually evaluating player performance, more and more leagues are experimenting with adventurous new categories (like quality starts, holds and OPS! Oh my!). If you’re in such a radical league, swaying from traditional scoring categories can drastically change a player’s worth, so don’t create your rankings based on stats that don’t count in your league! RotoProjos lets you choose your scoring categories and ranks players based on your league’s settings. Plus I worked REALLY HARD at developing this for you, so using it is the nice thing to do.
How does RotoProjos customize its rankings and what is the RotoScore?
I’ll answer your question with a question: What are we really trying to do in fantasy baseball? And now I’ll answer my question to your question with an answer to my question: Perform better in designated statistical categories than the other teams in your league. So to create a ranking using these specific categories, we must somehow reduce several, vastly different statistics into a single, rankable, all encompassing value that evaluates each player. RotoProjos calls this computed value, the RotoScore.
In a single, run-on sentence, the RotoScore determines how many standard deviations above the mean each player is projected to perform in each of your league’s scoring categories, performs some at bat or innings pitched weighting to rate stats, adds these values together and manipulates them into a statistic that more or less tops out at 100 for the “perfect” player (Sorry Mike Trout, you’re not QUITE there yet.)
In other words, the RotoScore is each player’s “goodness” in your league. It determines how much better each player is than their competitor in each scoring category and then standardizes those results so they can be added together to create one overall score. It’s pretty much the best stat that’s on the internet.
Explain this “Fill stats to 600 ABs” option!
That’s not a question. But alas, this option is for those who realize projections, and thus the rankings of players, can be heavily influenced by the number of at bats a player is projected to have. The problem with this is two-fold… 1.) What if a player’s less-than-normal projection of at bats is based on an assumption or risk of injury and then they don’t get injured? Then your rankings were swayed by a bad assumption! and B.) Even if a player does miss time due to injury or other circumstances, should we assume you’re not going to replace that player in your fantasy lineup? No!
With that said, we don’t want to completely ignore injury risk or players that may be splitting time between the bigs and the minors, so our solution is this: fill those at bats with stats of a likely replacement player. Since replacement players will differ from position to position, we’ve compiled replacement player stats for each position by averaging out the top [super secret number] players at that position. For players that qualify at multiple positions, since you SHOULD be using them at their most valuable position (aka the one with the worst counterparts), we use the replacement player stats for their position lowest on the defensive spectrum. In effect, losing a star catcher for x at bats is going to be more costly than losing a star first baseman for the same x at bats because his replacement is going to be much better offensively.
But why male models?
Are you serious?