Winning Roto for Winners

Derek Zumsteg

There's a reason I never liked fantasy baseball players: first, I find John Hunt's Baseball McWeekly column intolerably bad (Billy Ashley: due any year now), and the second, the traditional roto categories (BA, HR, RBI, SB...) all make me sick. They would have you believe that empty players like Joe Carter are worth anything, when they're not. If someone put together a game that consisted entirely of baseball stats that annoy me, you'd pretty much have traditional fantasy baseball.

I finally got back into it this year though, taking over an expansion team in a cool league that uses Diamond Mind Baseball to run simulated games for your rosters (Diamond Mind, btw, is the software those guys on ESPN use to make each year's eerily accurate forcasts). So putting together a high OBP, low-RBI lineup of players picked off across the league will murder an opponent's RBI-vulture team. Because I spend a lot of time following prospects, etc., anyway, it's not that much of an additional investment of time, and it's been a lot of fun.

There's a widespread mockery of fantasy baseball, and I think for good reason: people who sit in the stands and argue about whether BJ Surhoff was worth $13 or $15 in their keeper league, based on his couple of added SBs a year. They're the guys who call up sports talk radio and rail about how platoon partner #2 should be an everyday player. They buy Street and Smith, and Bill Mazeroski's annual, and whatever else they can get their hands on, so every year the fantasy section gets a little fatter and the actual baseball coverage a little thinner.

And therin lies my personal objection to fantasy baseball: it places additional artifical importance on the baseball statistics that are most worthless. Fantasy baseball players are a giant, affluent target audience, so baseball broadcasters want to give them those roto stats. The end effect of this is that there's an even greater reluctance to embrace the work of the baseball statheads who do great work proving, over and over again, that OBP is so much better an evaluator than BA it's funny.

This is what's really unfortunate about the glut of old-school fantasy baseball: it at once provides easy targets for those who want to make fun of the statistically-intersted while not advancing their interests at all.

So I want everyone to join better fantasy leagues. Seriously. If you're going to play fantasy baseball, play it like you're a real GM, with a real simulation engine. You'll learn something, and I won't have to listen to people wax poetic about what a great slugger Juan Gonzalez is because he's such a good RBI man. And if fantasy leaguers make a movement towards taking their hobby a little more seriously, it'll become a hobby people can take more seriously, and that's good for everybody.

And if anyone wants to take inherited Fred McGriff from my beloved Alaskan Malamutes, let me know. All I want are a couple of draft picks.

about the author

Derek Zumsteg traded Devon White for Jeremy Giambi and a draft pick.

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