This season, I’ve been running a series of articles here at the website for the CardRunners Experts League looking at closers and how we can best predict the number of games a closer will save in a given year.  Thus far, I’ve looked at a closer’s preseason hold on the job, his skills, and his closing experience, but aside from picking a closer with a firm hold on the job before the season starts, there is little difference between the top tier closers and the bottom tier ones in terms of pure saves.  Today, I wanted to combine all of our factors to see just how well we can predict saves and then look at which closers have over/underperformed expectations in 2011 and which CardRunners teams have gained/lost the most.
 

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This season, I’ve been conducting a series of studies in an attempt to better understand which closers will accumulate the most saves—the primary reason we draft them in the first place.  Over the past couple of months, I’ve found that closers who begin the season with a tenuous hold on the closer’s chair tend to wind up with far fewer saves than those who begin the year with the job all to themselves.  I’ve also found that relievers with poor skills who “aren’t good enough to be closers” tend to accumulate nearly as many saves as relievers with elite skills.  Today, I thought I’d add a third variable to the mix: experience.

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I meant to post this earlier, but a couple of weeks ago, I penned an article for Baseball Prospectus discussing the differences between mixed leagues and AL/NL-only leagues using my participation in Tout Wars (mixed), CardRunners (AL), and LABR (NL) as examples.  Most of it is behind the pay wall, but if you have a subscription, I think it's an interesting read.

A couple weeks ago, I began a series looking at closers and how to best identify the closers that will succeed in a given year.  Given that, on the whole, less than 50 percent of pitchers who begin the season as a closer end the year closing games, deciding which closers to choose for our fantasy teams is a tricky subject.

Last time, I looked at how often closers lose their jobs based on their start-of-year classification of sole closer, injured closer, injury replacement, or part-of-a-committee.  I found that, far and away, sole closers are the best bets while the rest are lucky to get double-digit saves.  This time, I’m going to put the theory of “draft skills, not roles” to the test.
 

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It would be an understatement to say that I've struggled with drafting competent closers in the CardRunners Experts League (a fact that Eric has little problem reminding me of on a semi-regular basis).  Last year, I drafted Frank Francisco, who lost his job two weeks into the season and, despite being one of the top non-closers in the game the rest of the way, never reclaimed the role.  This year, I drafted Matt Thornton and Francisco again.  Thornton was arguably the best non-closer in baseball before finally getting a crack at closing this year, but he had a rough (arguably unlucky) start to the season and lost the job in April as well.  Francisco managed to get injured after our draft and finally took the role back a couple weeks ago, but after a rough few days may be on thin ice again.

Given my storied unsuccess drafting closers, Eric suggested that I run some studies on closers and examine just what kind of return on investment one can expect from a closer.  Over the next few weeks, I'll be digging into the data and answering a number of questions about closers that should prove extremely useful for both myself in figuring out where I keep going wrong and for the population at large in their own closer decisions.

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In our 2011 pre-season organization an interesting challenge arose to one of my favorite rules- that AL players traded to the NL cease to acquire statistics. Sadly, after opening the rule up to a vote, it met a quick demise. I’m writing this mostly because I think the motivation behind the voters' reasoning is misguided in the current state of fantasy baseball. 

A number of the experts hated the rule, and even those that tolerated it decried the extra variance it added. Losing a player is such a blow, they argued, why should the results of a league be decided by who gets traded as opposed to our assessments of a player’s intrinsic worth? Also, they claimed, these trades are too unpredictable, making it too easy for major value to be destroyed in the blink of an eye.

Larry Schechter wrote the day after the Vernon Wells trade, “Was anyone going to avoid taking V Wells because of a trade risk?  If he'd been traded the day after our auction, rather than yesterday, and to an NL team, is that really fair for the guy that just spent $20 on him? “ His point I take it is that it is foolish to have leagues decided by the vagaries of fate instead of …. well, different vagaries of fate.

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Yesterday, Chris Liss penned a post at RotoWire's RotoSynthesis blog that mentioned my luck, randomness, and Dan Haren article.  This stemmed a little debate in the comments section, which I wanted to respond to here since I'm incapable of writing up a succinct response that's appropriate for a comments section.

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There's an interesting conversation going on in the comments section of my post from Wednesday (far more interesting than the post itself), and my would-be-responses were very long, so I turned them into articles over at THT:

Do we use luck and randomness as a crutch?

How much do counts affect BABIP?

I thought I'd point them out for those interested.

I am rather fond of the Cardrunners League rules, although some of them are a bit unusual. While some of them, like the ability to draft and stash National League players on your reserves in hopes they come over to the AL, are popular with the experts using them for the first time, a couple have been routinely bashed. I'd like to discuss why I think they are good rules, and explore the experts' distaste for them.  

The rules in question:

Rule #1) We allow teams to call a brief time out in the middle of auctioning for a player.

Rule#2) We have two week long line up periods.

Before exploring the rules, I think its worthwhile to explore a fundamental question- what skills are we really trying to test here?

We are testing our valuation of players, and our ability to assemble them via the auction, waiver pool, and trades into competitive teams scored by the relevant categories. In other words we should be primarily testing our judgment, and everything else is either secondary or possibly even an obstacle to that testing.  What I like about these two rules is they allow the skill intensive decisions to become paramount, without getting lost in extraneous factors.

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