Post by Gas Can Turtles on Jun 10, 2004 23:40:06 GMT -5
The site is kind of crude in design but contains a lot of information about MLB players and free agency. With lists of free agents for the next 2 or 3 years
kmbumb.people.wm.edu/
NOTE: Roster Central is no longer maintained.
Since Roster Central is no longer maintained by the site owner, I dug up a couple other good sites for MLB player contract info and their free agency status -- crucial for determining keeper status for players.
www.hardballdollars.com/
NOTE: Hardball Dollars is no longer around.
More detailed format that includes service time (through end of previous year), which is especially useful for players w/ less than 6 years:
mlbcontracts.blogspot.com/
Nowadays, it looks like Rotoworld.com is also providing just enough details for most players to be useful for determining player keepability status in our league (among other useful fantasy news/info/commentary):
www.rotoworld.com/content/Home_MLB.aspx
XR Stats explained
www.baseballstuff.com/btf/scholars/furtado/articles/IntroducingXR.htm
I posted this info in Yahoo in the past (for the sake of fair play and disclosure), but figured it's good to post it here now also. Should be very useful for anyone who doesn't know much about the XR formula and need a reasonably good way to evaluate players quickly, especially batters.
As noted in the XR articles, Bill Jame's Runs Created formula (before some recent changes that added clutch factor) parallels XR w/ results that are not too diffferent except for the very best and worst batters. His RC tends to inflate the very best and deflate the worst compared to XR, but it's probably easy enough to account for that yourself. I couldn't find a good source for readily accessible XR values (outside of what the Yahoo FBB setup offers), but ESPN.com offers RC and RC27 (among other things) in their more advanced stats section that should be a great help.
Remember, XR doesn't favor the very best or devalue the worst as much as RC, so
Another helpful way to evaluate batters quickly would be AVG, OBP and SLG provided they are regulars w/ normal amount of plate appearances. Most of the XR formula revolves around stats that are fairly well reflected by a combo of those composite stats on top of plate appearances. If you want one quick-and-dirty value (other than RC), OPS would be ok too for regulars. If the player is a great basestealer, that helps some, but "great" means high success rate, not just many SBs, as the breakeven point is ~2:1 SB vs CS -- hint, there aren't that many great basestealers who also have a good OPS.
For pitchers, going w/ a combo of ERA and IPs will go a long way as can be plainly seen in the points values used. Give some favor to pitchers on good teams for those few bonus points given to W-L record, Saves and Holds.
These are the most essential stuff and most of what I look at in my own evaluation of players. Of course, there are other finer details that I look at also, but that's most of them, and you can figure out the rest and/or come up w/ other good ways yourself.
And remember, this is a dynasty-like keeper league that allows you to keep every player that doesn't officially enter free agency in real life during the offseason.