Crash course in Advanced Fantasy Statistics

If you ever took an advanced statistics course in college, the above image should make you shudder, I know it does that to me.

With all the wealth of information out there today, how is it possible to know something about a players fantasy value that every other person in your league doesn't know? It's getting increasingly difficult to gain an edge these days over your fellow league mates. With this post, I'll give a short (or long, depending on which way you look at it) crash course in some advanced statistics that will probably help you in the long run.

What are advanced statistics? You may have heard of BABIP among others, but what about ISO or WAR? What about FIP? Confused yet? If so, don't worry. Over the course of this post you should gain a basic understanding of what these statistics are and how to use them to your advantage.

BABIP - Batting Average on Balls In Play

Lets start with an easy one. What you see is what you get. This is basically a players average of balls hit into the field of play. The simplest way to calculate this is (H-HR)/(AB-HR-SO). Basically you are taking strikeouts and homeruns out of a players average and calculating what percentage of the balls hit into play landed safely.

The simplest way to use BABIP, is to analyze "luck." If you think about it, of every single ball a player hits into the field of play, there should be a single constant percentage that land safely for hits. This population mean is subject to fluctuating standard deviations, and is subject to change itself (if the player changes their swing or approach at the plate) but all in all it should be fairly simple to predict what percentage of balls a guy hits in play will land safe, and what percent will be recorded as outs. This is a useful statistic if you know how to analyze trends. It's really simple, actually. The best and easiest example is Aaron Hill. Take a look at the table below.

Year	BABIP
2005	.299
2006	.319
2007	.324
2008	.301
2009	.288
2010	.202
Career	.294

Without knowing anything about BABIP, you should be able to tell something is going wrong in 2010. Now, combine that with the simple fact that I just told you, that BABIP is commonly used to measure "luck." It is obvious to assume that Aaron Hill is experiencing a bit of bad luck in 2010, is it not? Based soley on this statistic, one could argue that Aaron Hill's low batting average this year is largely due to bad luck, and he is bound to rebound.

The problem that most people get when analyzing this statistic is what I refer to as the "Gambler's Falacy." If you assume that Aaron Hill has had bad luck to this point, then who's not to say that everything will average out and at the end of the year, his BABIP will be somewhere around his career average? In order for Hill's 2010 BABIP to finish close to his career BABIP, he would have to hit at a rediculously high BABIP for the rest of the season to make up for the low BABIP he's had to this point. You simply can't expect that, and it's called the "Gambler's Falacy." You can, however, safely guess that he will hit somewhere around his career BABIP for the remainder of the season.

IPO - Isolated Power

The Sabermetrics Library gives a great description of what this is, but I'll quickly sum it up. Isolated power, is a way of calculating a batters potential for hitting for extra bases. The formula is simple, it is ISO = SLG-AVG, basically taking all the singles out of the slugging percentage leaving behind only the extra base hits. Saberlibrary notes that in small sample sizes (of less than 550 at bats) this statistic is basically useless in predicting future ISO, and should not be used as a frame of reference. Here is an example (all credit to Sabermetrics Library) of a few players ISO numbers from 2009.

Player	2009 ISO
Albert Pujols	.331
Adam Dunn	.257
Ryan Braun	.231
Grady Sizemore	.197
Jimmy Rollins	.173
Derek Jeter	.131
Elvis Andrus	.106
Luis Castillo	.043

WAR - Wins Above Replacement

WAR exactly a statistic commonly used in baseball, as it doesn't necessarily tell you their value as a fantasy player, rather it tells you their value to their team. It puts a tangible number to the question "What if this player were injured, how much value does this team lose?" If you had to use one statistic, and only one, to evaluate a players value, WAR is the statistic you want. WAR is about as all-inclusive as statistics get. Of course, it's not the end-all be-all of statistics or it would be more widely used, but it is a powerful tool.

The problem with WAR, is that it doesn't necessarily predict future value. In fact, it doesn't at all. WAR tells you how much value the player has been worth until this point, offensively and defensively, and gives you a number of wins as the value. The higher the WAR the better.

As far as Fantasy Baseball is concerned, this is one advanced stat that probably won't help you very much. I can, however, think of a situation where it might. If your WAR is negative, that means that your team is better off using a minor leaguer or guy off the bench in rather than you. So if your Adam Lind, and your WAR is a league low -1.0 (which is actually is this season), you might lose some playing time, and your fantasy owners might consider dropping you.

FIP - Fielding Independent Pitching

Again, I don't feel I can explain this any better than Sabermetrics Library, as their description is spot on.

Basically, research has proven that their isn't a constant average of balls hit in play that are recorded for outs. It varies from year to year and changes constantly. FIP factors the things the pitcher can control, namely walks, strikeouts and homeruns, and puts it into a fancy equation and scales down so it's similar to ERA. The equation is below.

FIP = ((13*HR)+(3*(BB+HBP-IBB))-(2*K))/IP+constant
Again, the constant (generally around 3.2 and is calcuated by subtracting League-average-FIP from League-average-ERA) is to scale it down to an ERA-type scale, mostly for ease of use. The most imporant use of FIP is it's predictive power. Research by Tom Tango has shown that FIP is the best known predictor for ERA the following season. That's a pretty powerful tool, if you know how to use it.

There is your short crash course in advanced Fantasy statistics. Any further questions should be emailed to sillyfantasybaseballgame.blog@gmail.com and I can post on them later.

Time to give up on Aaron Hill?

In 2009, Aaron Hill had a season of a lifetime. He batted .286 with 36 homeruns, 103 runs and 108 RBI's. Absolutely rediculous numbers for a second baseman that wasn't highly drafted. Any person with a decent knowlede of baseball would have expected a slight regression...but this?

As of this post, Aaron Hill is hitting .192 through 65 games, falling short of the "Mendoza line" for the first 50+ game stretch in his professional career (at any level). Hill's only saving grace (and the reason he remains owned in nearly 90% of ESPN Standard Leagues) is that his power is still legit. I'm not entirely sure if he is injured and the public just doesn't know about it, or maybe he's got his sights set on swinging for the fences every time he steps up to the plate, whatever it is it has his fantasy owners frustrated.

Being that the season is nearly half over, at what point do you dump Hill? If he bats below .200 all year, even if he hits 15 more homeruns, he's going to get dropped in a lot of leagues (and might already have been in yours). I'll give a couple arguements for both sides and let you decide what to do with him.

"Dump him I say! Another 15 homeruns isn't worth how much he's killing my batting average!" A valid arguement good sir. Here is something to think about: All else equal and constant, if Hill were to bat his career average from here on out the rest of the season (.276), he would still end up batting .239 in 581 at bats. While it's not god-awful, it presents the same problem Carlos Pena owners have all year long. Is the power really worth the batting average? Thats assuming he will improve his batting average, what if he doesnt? If he bats .250 the rest of the way, he'll end the year at .223. Lets not even think about him batting below .200 the rest of the season, because if he does he likely won't make it to 500 at bats, let alone the 15 extra homeruns your expecting from him.

"Whoa, steady now! He's gotten really unlucky so far, he's bound to turn it around." Another good point, and the most commonly used defence against his poor performance thus far. His BABIP is an unworldly .185 compared to his career average of .296. Consider he posted a previous career low BABIP of .288 in 2009 and the picture becomes more clear. This must be bad luck, it's statistically improbable (but not impossible) that his performance should actually be this bad. However, a look at other periferals makes things a little clearer. Hill's LD% (Line-Drive Percent) is nearly half of what it was last year, as well as his career average, sitting at 8.3%. It's possible he's just not seeing the ball well this year, or pitchers have found a glaring hole in his swing. At any rate, I would expect both of those numbers to increase, which will cause his batting average to go up as well. He might even get more runs and RBI's out of this as well.

So really, it depends on how optimistic you are. Do you wait it out or bail now? My advice would be that if you've ridden this ride this long, you better be in it for the long haul. I would also consider him a strong buy low candidate, and if he's on the waiver wire in your league, grab him and stash him on the bench.