Each roster period, we all send an email to the whole league that shows our rosters and reserves. I find it a lot easier to keep up with what teams are doing from these emails than scanning the website.

It's a bit of a pain to do, but I like it.

In one of the comments Derek Carty noted the similarity of his team and ours.  Specifically, he was talking about the general price range of players that we bought.  My feeling auctioning against him went quite a bit deeper than that.  Throughout the auction we were very often the last two bidders on players.  As they used to say on the trading floor, it felt like we were "trading off the same sheets." There were however two groups of players where this was distinctly not true.

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Check out an interview by Rotosavant's Aaron Murray, discussing the ongoings in the Cardunners's League with Bill Phipps and Derek Carty.

Also if you missed it last week, Chris Liss gives an interview to Fangraphs and also discussed much of the recent debate.

I think it might be helpful in the ongoing debate to start  describing  my methods for preparing for a FBB season.

First and foremost, I am always reading about baseball. This is easily the most crucial part of my preparation. I can’t imagine having FBB success without staying on top of the news. Year round, if it is on Fangraphs, Rotoworld, THT, ESPN or MLB TradeRumors, it is a safe bet to say that I have read it. I also scour a collection of blogs devoted to specific teams, such as the ussmariner.com or letsgotribe.com. These local blogs are well done and often have unique insights into their teams.

In the month leading up to the auction, I start making player projections. I liken this task to being a sports handicapper. It is my job to find the expected mean for each player and set a line around that number. If done right, this means that if I have projected Joe Mauer to hit 24 home runs, I shouldn’t mind betting over 22 or under 26.

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In the comment string of a previous post, Rudy from Razzball.com talked about the various factors that go into a winning season. He said that he thought 40 percent of winning was luck, which is a big number and also one I pretty much agree with (given a margin of error of some arbitrarily large number).

The issue here is how much of league results are determined on draft day. How much do waiver acquisitions matter. How much do farm teams matter. One of the problems with the balkanization of fantasy rules is that for the most part, we're all playing different games. There is no obvious way to answer these questions for everyone since they'll vary from league to league.

Still. the question has an answer in the league you play in, and maybe we can figure it out.

To the extent this board is focused on AL or NL only leagues, feel free to comment. Draft? FA Acquisition? Strategy? Luck? What did I miss? What wins your leagues?

Quantify if you can.

Because I think there are some serious problems pricing players for auction based on their projections, and because I perhaps jumped the gun critiquing some of Bill and Robert's assumptions building their model (or maybe not, we'll see), I find myself tarred as someone who doesn't believe in models. But this isn't true. I thought it would be instructive to detail my methodology, at least in a broad sense, for setting player prices, projecting player performance, and preparing for the auction. As a so-called fantasy expert, I do these things to create products I sell to the public, as well as prepare for my own leagues, so please pull up a chair and watch the sausage get made.

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I've spent a lot of energy trying to debunk the notion that the quants have any edge whatsoever by creating projected stats and converting them precisely to dollar values. I stand by that. But that doesn't mean that Robert and Bill's game theory knowledge cannot be useful in fantasy baseball. In fact, I think it could offer a significant leg up.

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This is a claim I've made a few times in the comments and before any more veins pop in any more foreheads I am going to clarify what I mean by this.

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I described in detail in earlier comments how I get ready for an auction, so I won't rehash all of that here. But I do want to clarify what I mean when I say I'm making a "gut" call. Because I can see how that sounds unserious compared to building a rigorous pricing model.

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Before I start, I want to say the following:  Bill and I feel we have analysis to share, and would like to do so regularly. We were surprised at the sheer volume of objections, and how far afield they seemed to run, when we tried to begin our presentation with some general points. Neither of us are particularly quick writers and we are both extremely busy with work and family.  At this point we feel the most constructive way for us to proceed is to share details in a hopefully regular manner without delving into what appears to us to be an endless and somewhat premature debate. It's a long baseball season, and I'm sure by the time we are done we will have addressed many questions and at the least will be better situated to address anything that remains undiscussed.

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