What happens when Nate Silver’s PECOTA system joins forces with Jonah Keri’s boundless energy and Will Carroll’s injury encyclopedia? You get a killer roto team…maybe. Read on to see how BP fared at this year’s Tout Wars National League draft.
Commissioner Bud Selig recently extolled Major League Baseball’s place in the daily lives of millions of fans. This public affection for the game came just a day after the public finally learned the extent of MLB’s cold-blooded plot to take the game away from many of those fans.
Last spring, MLB settled its lawsuit with the Minnesota Twins’ landlord within days after being ordered to produce sensitive internal documents relating to contraction. Some of these documents have now been leaked to the press. As this Newsday article, and others like it, show, just months after MLB’s hand-picked Blue Ribbon Economic Panel had concluded that contraction was unnecessary, high-ranking MLB executives had begun a yearlong process of identifying which teams should be killed.
It’s not often that someone finds the answer to a question that we’ve been asking for years, but during today’s BPR taping, Mat Olkin hit me with a thunderbolt. Through the always amazing Retrosheet and the work of David Smith, Mat was able to find something back in 2001–pitch counts for the late 1940s and 1950s. It’s often an argument of the old school that most pitchers of that era threw more innings and completed more games. The argument goes that pitchers today are by extension being babied. Mat pointed out that pitchers were much more efficient–to the tune of completing games with 110 pitches.
Fresh off PECOTA’s maiden voyage into rotoland, Nate Silver publishes the PECOTA-generated roto values used by the BP team at the recent Tout Wars National League draft. Hint: pay the premium for studs.
After using PECOTA-generated roto values at the recent Tout Wars National League draft, Nate Silver runs the numbers to produce values for the AL. Hint: as in the NL, pay the premium for studs. And do everything you can to get Pedro.