I once read a great, in depth, article that compared the all around talents of Babe Ruth with Barry Bonds. It was trying to determine which one was the better player, and it obviously compared their stats, but it also compared them to the competition of their time period, the quality of the pitching they faced, and the parks they played in. The data concluded that they were pretty close–until you looked at Ruth’s pitching ability. He had some great stats from the mound, but didn’t spend any time there once he went to the Yankees. This part of his career has gone totally forgotten, but with the use of advanced statistics, we can see just how good he was all around, even surpassing Bonds.
The traditional stats that we look at are not very indicative of a player’s true ability. Things like batting average, RBI, ERA; they all show things that are often beyond a player’s control and don’t show his actual ability with any sort of accuracy. Modern analytics are able to get a lot closer to the truth, and they’re even able to compare two players that were born over 50 years apart with a high degree of certainty. It’s quite amazing.
With 2015 Fantasy Baseball Manual, I tried to take these advanced concepts and teach them in a way that made sense to the average fantasy baseball fan. Most people don’t have the desire or the time to sift through thousands and thousands of numbers and make sense of them. I took the highlights of my own research, the most current and accurate measures of talent that others have devised, and then applied them both to the 2015 season by looking at recent examples of past performances.
I also tried to provide a framework so that you can do this yourself in the future. The book certainly isn’t exhaustive, but it will give you many of the tools you need to dominate your league and a good launch point if you want to further your own research. That’s what my main goal was with this: to show people that this type of research is available and understandable for every fantasy baseball fan out there. It’s just a matter of applying that to your type of game, whether it’s a dynasty, a season long, or even a one day league. Hopefully, you will find that his makes the game more fun for you.
