Mound Talk

How About A Fantasy Platoon

Major League Baseball teams use platoons all the time. So why can’t Sammy’s Sluggers of Yahoo Public League #2373145 do it too? Over the next few days (or maybe weeks) I’ll be exploring the possible use of platoons in fantasy baseball. As such, I will introduce a methodology and create a way in which we can evaluate the ability and value of such a strategy.

The Strategy:
Selecting two players who are fulltime players on their major league club that can be subsituted to mitigate the ill-effects of bad matchups can provide a major benefit without a major cost to your fantasy team. In your draft you’d be delighted if you could use your 11th and 14th round pick and get close to the production of that 4th round 3B you passed on. This is basically attempting to isolate the categorical weaknesses of each player and finding out when there is a player who can compliment him. To do so I will evaluate players based on home/road splits and righty/lefty splits. Most major league players will have slightly less than 50% of their ABs coming at home and slightly more than 50% coming on the road. Further, most major leaguers will have 73% of their ABs coming against righties and 27% against lefties. Some players are equally good at home and on the road, but most aren’t. Some are equally good no matter what hand the pitcher throws with, but most aren’t. So what we need to do is isolate areas that on any given day one of two specially selected players would be in their positive quandrant. In otherwords, to find good candidates we need to find two players who fit a criteria where:
1. The player’s draft day value is low.
2. Projecting a positive split over 550 ABs would make the player worth much more than his overall numbers.
3. The positive split chosen, whether it be a half split ( home games or vs. lefties) or a quandrant split (home games and vs. lefties) should be a high(er) frequency occurance.
4. Draft/Bid/Sign players who fit 1-3.
5. Each quandrant for each player should be ranked 1-8 in order of expected production. Throughout the season each day the choice of who to play should be made by which players respective quandrant applying to their game is highest.

The Issues:
**H2H or roto?**
Platooning should work better for roto than H2H because roto counts cummulative statistics where H2H is more subject to statistical noise which is what platooning is trying to help avoid. Since MLB platoons try to eliminate the poor performance of one player while utilizing the positive performance of another in the same situation every situation is a positive expected value. Roughly the same applies here. Every day each player is faced with one of four quandrants of success each day. One is going to excel at a higher rate than the other. While that might not always be the case, the majority of the time, if our projections are correct, it will and we will have successfully “created” a better “player” by platooning two lesser players. The issue then in H2H is that you will likely end up trying to ride hot streaks and if you don’t you might suffer from playing guys during cold streaks. But if we assume that these are unavoidable, as they often are, H2H takes 6 games at a time and compares how you do. If during those two series your players are both on the road (where they do worse) and possibly facing predominantly lefthanded pitching (which they struggle with) you will suffer because of that and you will not be able to “make that up later.” This is a general principle of H2H but is much more important when you are playing bargain players who are bargain players because of certain circumstances. Remember, if we wanted a player who didn’t suffer dramatically in some quandrants, we would have simply drafted Albert Pujols or David Ortiz. Instead we’re trying to compile stats that are close to Pujols or Ortiz without spending our first round pick.

**Reaching**
An important thing to remember with this strategy is that you must get the players you want. If you target Nomar and Sean Casey, because their quandrants are most compatible, you must get them in order for the strategy to work most effectively. If you fail to get Casey after getting Nomar you’ll need to scramble to pick up a guy like Travis Lee or Mike Lamb and then you won’t have as effective of a platoon. So getting the right guys is essential and that may force you to reach for someone you might normally wait on. But, I suppose if you’re considering this strategy you are probably adaptable enough during your draft to be able to recognize players that in jeopardy of being drafted. This isn’t as big of a deal in auction drafts.

**Auction vs. Draft**
This strategy will work better during an auction because you don’t have the “reach” factor and passing on the top tier guys (who would be first and second rounders in a draft) allows you to end up with more of the next grouping (the third through fifth rounders, for all you non-auction players). If you are able to get more of this second group at the expense of a top guy, but are able to get comparable production out of your platoon, you now have a much better team than the guy who blew all his cash on Pujols and Hafner and you won’t be screwed when someone gets hurt.

**Injury Risk**
Obviously you’re platooning people for a reason. So what do you do when one guy goes down? The beauty of this is that you still have a viable player. Probably someone who would not be waiver wire fodder but a guy who would normally be sitting in a utility role or a backup. You’re one guy is still better than, to modify a Baseball Prospectus term, Fantasy Replacement Level.

I will post updates at positions based on 2006 statistics in the coming days which may shed light on some possible platoons that will work well. In doing so I will be looking for players who have hidden value if we can “shed the fat” so to speak and reap the benefits of his good aspects. Then we need to find another player who compliments this. Both of whom need to hold little value when used alone.