Bru Crew willing to hear your best trade proposals (rant included)

Hi everyone,

I thought, for the past several weeks, that my next communication with you would be to announce that I would be leaving this pool.

I have decided to stick it out.

That means I am very willing to deal almost anyone from my roster, for the best offer.

The most popular inquiries surround Belt, Lucroy, Sale and Janssen.

I am leaning toward keeping (and stand to be blown away by the right trade offer for) Sale and Jansen, but Belt and Lucroy, will be moved.

Bry Crew trade window is now open.

As for my rant,

I have reached some indefensible conclusions:

1. This DMB software is missing a "u", because it is simply the worst simulation software for recreating prior seasons that I have come across in my 30 years of playing any version of fantasy baseball...STRAT-O-MATIC is the best, followed by Statis Pro and Tony Larussa, in that order. Regardless of # of teams or roster sizes, a stud batter or pitcher performed as such, more often than they seem to, in DMB.

2. The field in the pool is very skewed when only some of us own the software. DMB Owners have a huge advantage. I am going to join the "haves". You can run your own sims well in advance of our draft and you will draw conclusions about the inherent leanings it undoubtedly must have. I have cracked all the others and will do the same here.

I urge all non-owners to look into buying this product or risk being also-rans.

Good rant!

Glad that you are sticking it out.

Some of my conclusions....LHP under perform unless they have opposite splits......

We have good owners right now. I agree that the more that have the software, the better! (I have certainly enjoyed more owners sending the MP's by file instead of having to input them myself!)

Sedona Bombs wrote:Good rant!

Glad that you are sticking it out.

Some of my conclusions....LHP under perform unless they have opposite splits......

We have good owners right now. I agree that the more that have the software, the better! (I have certainly enjoyed more owners sending the MP's by file instead of having to input them myself!)

Agreed, I find there are significantly less issues with incorrect MPs with people who send the file instead of the typed ones.

Also; pitchers with reverse splits tend to perform pretty well. I find the opposite is usually true with hitters. Reverse splits for a batter don't seem to translate well for whatever reason.

some people seem to be cursed as well for some reason. (matt cain comes to mind)
Park factors also play into it a significant amount. (more than i thought when i first joined)

The cabal did discuss that topic in the off season Paul. (Or previous... can't remember now its all a blur sometimes)
Any idea proposed ultimately had to many holes in it. but it was brought up

For years, certain players seem to be draft bombs, designed to destroy your season.

Remember that we do publish the History files every year**, which can be found here.
http://torontobaseballguys.com/tbgbl/history.html

In it, you can see the historic stats for every player as well as their entire year-by-year careers.

Please feel free to research it up.

Players that have always frustrated owners:

Alou, Moises
Encarnacion, Edwin
Glavine, Tom
Kazmir, Scott
Kinsler, Ian
Rios, Alex

** I've been struggling to find the spare time to update to the end of Season 26. I'm still working on it, but those kids take all my time these days.

Oh man I finally had to trade Edwin because he KILLS me every sim.

Last year he and Mitch Moreland had almost the same exact stat line.

I also shy away from lefties because they always seem to get hammered.

Bandini'sBombers wrote:Oh man I finally had to trade Edwin because he KILLS me every sim.

Eddie is always perplexing to me.

I've tried analyzing whether it was the Rogers Centre influence... but I don't know if that's it. I'm just not sure how far down the rabbit hole the software goes. Did Eddie hit a disproportionately large amount of dingers off of the bottom 3rd of MLB pitchers? So he's missing out there? Does DMB punish his lack of speed?

No answers man. No answers.

I found this on the DMB website, which, I think explains rather nicely why we sometimes see players significantly off their real life stats:

3 If a player isn't doing as well as he did in real life, does the game improve his ratings so he'll make up ground in the rest of the season?

Diamond Mind Baseball does not adjust ratings to force the stats to come out right, and that's for several very good reasons.

First, and most important, forcing the stats to come out would create real problems late in the year. Suppose a .280 hitter enters the last 20% of the season batting only .250 (for whatever reason). We'd have to make him a .400 hitter the rest of the way to get his average up to .280. If you knew this (and it wouldn't take you very long to figure this out), you could start giving extra playing time to the guys who you knew were going to get a late-season boost. And you'd start to sit the guys who were ahead of their pace.

This, admittedly, is a bit of an extreme example, because you might hope that the player never deviated as much as 30 points from his real-life average in the first place. But it wouldn't be realistic if this never happened. There are lots of guys who bat .350 for the first month of the year and gradually fade to .280 by the end of the season. And there are plenty of guys who raise their average by 20-30 points late in the year.

Second, what stats should we force things to? If you're playing a draft league, chances are your players are in different ballparks, facing a different mix of opponents, possibly playing under a different era, and possibly facing a much higher concentration of talent. When you change the context like this, the stats should change. It wouldn't be realistic to keep them the same.

Third, if we forced the stats to come out right, there wouldn't be any surprises. Replays using real rosters would always yield the same results, so there'd be no point in doing them. Draft-league seasons would be almost totally decided after the draft was run. There would be almost no opportunities for you to get a few wins out of your team through superior managerial skill, since the "forcing" logic would be pushing the results toward the real-life total.

Finally, uncertainty about future performance is a significant part of the managerial experience. Real-life managers know that a certain player is most likely to hit .280 with 20-25 HR and a decent on-base percentage, because that's what he's done in the past. But the manager doesn't know whether he's going to get a career year, a normal year, or a bad year out of the guy. And he doesn't know whether the guy is about to get hot or go into a slump at any given point in the season. If we forced the stats toward the real-life totals, your managerial experience would be much different, and much easier, than that of a real manager.

We could design the game so that every player came out within one or two in every statistical category. But if we allow streaks and slumps during the season, we open ourselves up to the late-season distortions we described above. And if we keep the stats in line during the year to avoid late-season distortions, we eliminate the streaks and slumps that are so common in real baseball. The laws of probability are enough to make most of the stats come out very close for most of the players, and we think it's a much better game this way.
----

Now, that said, Edwin seems to be off all the time, but it's hard to say because over more sims, maybe he will far exceed his numbers - we wont really know because we only sim 3 times per actual season.

Also of note: I personally have been the fantasy owner of 1) Daryl Kile, 2) Corey Lidle, 3) Oscar Taveras 4) Jose Fernandez during the year they were, shall we say, no longer of any use to my team.

So, it could just be me.

30 batting average points is extreme?? How about 100 points?? And not from the split but from last season's numbers using the same splits....Hello Joc Pederson hitting .190 ugh....Power still there but terrible average. He is 80 points off of his MLB season split versus righties. And his .293 on base vs RHP is a shadow of his .371 MLB on base vs righties...

If I read this right, if a guy starts slow we will "know" he will bounce back if players put up numbers close to what they really did and that will produce off kilter results late (like the early numbers are off kilter to the crap side), so don't expect a correction?

So the software deliberately hand-cuffs certain players who are hitting below their splits so their numbers remain substandard? Yeesh...

See I read that as the player is just as likely to go on a hot streak as a cold streak.

If he has a greater talent level, he's more likely to go on an extended hot streak than someone who doesn't right?

I.e., if Pederson is hitting .190 in July, he is still more likely to have a very hot month to bring his numbers up than Darwin Barney. But it doesn't mean he's guaranteed to have that hot streak....

Rawken Hawks wrote:30 batting average points is extreme??  How about 100 points??  And not from the split but from last season's numbers using the same splits....Hello Joc Pederson hitting .190 ugh....Power still there but terrible average.  He is 80 points off of his MLB season split versus righties.  And his .293 on base vs RHP is a shadow of his .371 MLB on base vs righties...

If I read this right, if a guy starts slow we will "know" he will bounce back if players put up numbers close to what they really did and that will produce off kilter results late (like the early numbers are off kilter to the crap side), so don't expect a correction?

So the software deliberately hand-cuffs certain players who are hitting below their splits so their numbers remain substandard?  Yeesh...

Thats how I read it... don't expect a correction.

Yeah, it definitely means a hot streak is as likely as a cold streak, but you don't know how may PAs you need before one or the other occurs - theoretically you could flip a coin 100 times and get 100 heads but over time it will balance out.

However, players who ALWAYS seem to be on the up or downside of their numbers must have some other factor that is influencing that. My feeling is that strikeouts have a lot to do with this. I tend to look at OPS as most important but it's clearly not that simple.

I've wondered if the slow, lumbering slugger archetype is the problem (Dunn, Encarnacion, Alou). But then again; explain Dexter Fowler...........

I firmly believe that park factors play a huge role too though. I think it might be one of biggest factors.

Bandini'sBombers wrote:Thats how I read it... don't expect a correction.

Yeah, it definitely means a hot streak is as likely as a cold streak, but you don't know how may PAs you need before one or the other occurs - theoretically you could flip a coin 100 times and get 100 heads but over time it will balance out.

However, players who ALWAYS seem to be on the up or downside of their numbers must have some other factor that is influencing that. My feeling is that strikeouts have a lot to do with this. I tend to look at OPS as most important but it's clearly not that simple.

I don't think these statements from the blurb support what you are saying.....

First, and most important, forcing the stats to come out would create real problems late in the year. Suppose a .280 hitter enters the last 20% of the season batting only .250 (for whatever reason). We'd have to make him a .400 hitter the rest of the way to get his average up to .280. If you knew this (and it wouldn't take you very long to figure this out), you could start giving extra playing time to the guys who you knew were going to get a late-season boost. And you'd start to sit the guys who were ahead of their pace.

This seems to say across the board, there won't be much making up of numbers.

And...

Third, if we forced the stats to come out right, there wouldn't be any surprises.

I've seen Pederson hit pretty much the same .190 for 2 and a half months before I changed to Eddie Rosario...and for him to lose so many points in on base when his walks should be more consistent than his hits is very frustrating...

For what it's worth,

In 2016, Joc Pederson had an OPS of 918 at Dodger Stadium and an OPS of .787 everywhere else. He also has had to force the top 66% of all MLB pitchers, as the lesser lights in MLB wouldn't be drafted in our league. So it's tougher, right?

The software itself isn't going to self-correct stats to established benchmarks.... there's simply too many variables.

BUT, there's nothing saying that Pederson couldn't have a 900 OPS in the month of August. The statement is stating that the DMB won't force Pederson to have that hot August to approach the baseline stat.

Definitely not an exact science. Everytime you think you see a trend, you see it reversed in the next session.

Rawken Hawks wrote:I don't think these statements from the blurb support what you are saying.....

First, and most important, forcing the stats to come out would create real problems late in the year. Suppose a .280 hitter enters the last 20% of the season batting only .250 (for whatever reason). We'd have to make him a .400 hitter the rest of the way to get his average up to .280. If you knew this (and it wouldn't take you very long to figure this out), you could start giving extra playing time to the guys who you knew were going to get a late-season boost. And you'd start to sit the guys who were ahead of their pace.

This seems to say across the board, there won't be much making up of numbers.

And...

Third, if we forced the stats to come out right, there wouldn't be any surprises.

I've seen Pederson hit pretty much the same .190 for 2 and a half months before I changed to Eddie Rosario...and for him to lose so many points in on base when his walks should be more consistent than his hits is very frustrating...

Agreed, some players seem to chronically underperform. I haven't figured out why.
As to self correcting: no. Each and every occurrence is based on probabilities. Probabilities, people!