Mound Talk

Completing the offensive portion of the average roto league, today we turn to average. What is the average average? Again, this is a collection of data taken from 600 Yahoo leagues consisting of 12 teams per league and standard Yahoo settings.

Rank AVG
1.   .299
2.   .294
3.   .287
4.   .285
5.   .284
6.   .283
7.   .282
8.   .280
9.   .279
10.  .278
11.  .276
12.  .272

This was the biggest surprise to me of all the offensive categories. Compiling a team average of .299 is a little lower than I would have expected, but I certainly did not expect .011 to separate 11th place from 3rd place.

So I dug a little deeper to try to figure out why. The answer isn’t all that hard to figure out but after analyzing the pool of the most likely starters at each position, found there to be a pretty even curve throughout the positions. Virtually regardless of position, a bell-like curve exists among the 12-15 best fantasy players in terms of average. What’s more, is that the ‘bell’ is very wide and steep falling. There are very few players at each position who excell at average and are still good producers in other categories. It is for that reason that Freddy Sanchez holds little value where Garret Atkins holds much value. What’s more, is that for the most part, this analysis roughly suggested that the spread from the position average to the outliers was roughly equal from position to position. Without getting bogged down in the analysis and all those numbers, the point is that unless you are drafting the high-side outliers at each position, you’ll fall right into the pack.

The second factor in the massive clumping is that batting average is so unpredictable. A guy who hits .345 one year can very easily hit .310 the next, and vice versa. For that reason, there can tend to be a normalized effect on team average.

Since the difference in a single point of batting average is only about 5 or 6 hits, batting average can be extremely sensitive. Playing the wire and finding hot hitters while benching cold hitters can be critical. The difference between 11th place and 3rd place is only .011 points of average or about 55 hits. At that rate, a lot of points can be gained by having Matt Holliday instead of Adam Dunn last year.

I’ve seen many people sacrifice average and simply not consider it because of the variability of it. These are the people who end up with a team average of .272. Though predicting average is difficult, it is possible to consider it as a loose estimation of batting average range. As evidenced by the average league findings, average is highly sensitive. If you can put your cold players on the bench and pick up a few hits from a hot hitter over the course of the season, you’ll end up stealing a few points in the overall standings.