It may be hard to believe, but last week I was criticized for drafting Nick Markakis in the fourth round of a 12 team mixed league. Was this critique correct?
An owner in a 12 team mixed league was chiding me last week for drafting Nick Markakis in the fourth round. This owner was quite supercilious in his critique, having ridden a four week winning streak to the overall points lead. So, I decided to take a look and see whether Markakis was worth the selection. Even on the surface it appears that anyone with a cursory knowledge of fantasy would see that Markakis was worth it, but a superficial analysis isn’t enough.
Job one of course is to rank him in the league to date, and after that we will see whether the second half looks promising enough to project that he will be a top 50 player.
Every league has its own point structure, so these comments may not be completely transferable to other leagues. As of today Markakis is the 15th ranked overall hitter in the league. That pretty much should end the discussion right there. But let’s see whether he rates to stay solid in the second half.
1. His hit rate is 35%, versus a projected 34%.
2. His contact rate is 80% versus a projected 81%.
3. His expected batting average is .300 versus a .303 actual batting average.
4. His line drive rate is 23% versus a projected 22%. This shows that his hit rate is sustainable.
There is no reason for any owner to think that Markakis has been anything other than a huge success. Clearly he is worth a fourth round pick, if not a higher pick, depending on what you think of drafting pitchers in early rounds. There is no reason to think that he will have a fall off in the second half.
The owner can be forgiven for his haughty criticism. He rode a four game winning streak to the top and has never won the league. The amusing part was that he singled out two of the three former champions of the league in his criticism; quite risky from a guy who has never won and is not even in first place in his division.
There is a good lesson here for fantasy owners, especially for the “know it all” of the league. Be careful of what you say in public if you don’t know what you are talking about. Like being a baseball manager, many fantasy players think they know more than everyone else, and but for the grace of God they could be an expert if only the opportunity presented itself. More than almost any other industry, fantasy baseball is replete with kibbitzers who are willing to pick apart anything that is written or said, and looking to prove they know more than the experts. This is mostly due to the luck factor being sufficiently high in the vanilla format that the results are seductive even when the thought process is clearly lacking.
I hope readers of this site do not fall into this trap. Just win and don’t be the league “know it all” unless you actually do know it all! And don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back when you have just been lucky; far more important is to develop your knowledge so that you can tell the difference.
9 responses so far ↓
1 Brian Joura // Jul 11, 2008 at 10:32 am
Another thing to keep in mind about Markakis is that in his two previous seasons he’s been a stronger hitter (especially for power) in the second half.
2 Rhett Oldham // Jul 11, 2008 at 11:18 am
Truer word were never spoken!
3 Neil // Jul 11, 2008 at 11:31 am
I don’t understand how Nick is the “15th ranked overall hitter in the league.” As of now, he is about 25th in batting average and 28th in OPS. Baseball Prospectus has him 23rd in VORP (JD Drew = 22). I like him a lot and he is on pace for 109 runs, 25 HR, 91 RBI, 16 SB, .300 BA, .400 OBP, but he’s also on pace for a whopping 630 at bats. As a side note, Beltran and Markakis both cost $29 in my league - who would you prefer if the season started today?
4 Mike Podhorzer // Jul 11, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Neil, Patrick was referring to Markakis’ rank in his points system. I’d still prefer to go with Beltran the rest of the way, but it should be close enough that it won’t make or break your season if you choose Markakis.
5 Brian Joura // Jul 11, 2008 at 1:37 pm
The RotoTimes Player Rater for a standard 5X5 league has Markakis as the 20th best hitter. Beltran places 30th. Markakis has a 39-point lead in batting average.
6 Patrick DiCaprio // Jul 11, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Neil, that is why I said this:
Every league has its own point structure, so these comments may not be completely transferable to other leagues.
7 rob // Jul 11, 2008 at 2:05 pm
PlayerTrack has Markakis as the #30 player in all of fantasy as of 6/18/08 (last update). I’d say a fourth round pick in a 12 team league makes your fourth round pick a BARGAIN, actually.
8 mike // Jul 13, 2008 at 9:26 am
I picked him in the 5th round so I cant say I blame you for grabbing him in the 4th. It definetely wasnt a crazy move. I took Rios in the 4th which looking back on it now was alot worse than taking Markakis in the 5th. Def a good move to take him early.
9 Neil // Jul 14, 2008 at 7:59 am
With all the disparities in player evaluation both pre-season and mid-season, my theory is to always get as much data as possible and take an average. Since RotoTimes has Markakis as 20, Player Track has him at 30, OPS has him at 28 and VORP has him at 23, if anyone asked me to rank Markakis, I would say he was 25 – his average of the four.
Pre-season, I was a 100% newbie to fantasy baseball and had very little knowledge of MLB players other than guys on the Mets. Being completely ignorant, my pre-season draft strategy in my salary cap league (where the salaries were set by the Sporting News) was to first rank each player by salary (e.g. A-Rod was #1, Kinsler was #98, Uggla was #195). Then, next to each player, I added ESPN’s overall ranking, CBS Sports’ overall ranking and Baseball Prospectus’ overall PECOTA ranking (not the raw PECOTA score). I took an average of these three rankings and compared it to the price ranking. Anytime the average ranking was better than the price ranking, that became a green light to buy or at least further investigate.
For example, the Sporting News priced Adam Dunn at $20, which was approximately the 100th highest salary, but Dunn’s average ranking by ESPN/CBS/Baseball Prospectus was 56th – so you had the 56th ranked player, but he was only the 100th most expensive. That’s a buy. Overall, this strategy didn’t really work well on the top tier guys because the overall ranking and salary ranking were often extremely very close, but it worked very well for a lot of the guys not in the top 75 in salary rank (e.g. Uggla, Burrell, McCann, Halladay) and it worked extremely well in “red lighting” the guys that were way overpriced by the Sporting News. The analysis also didn’t do a great job with pitchers, but we all know that luck and injuries are such huge parts of pitching.
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