Personally, I love playing fantasy baseball with a point system. It allows you to tailor your fantasy game to just about any taste. Head-to-Head and Rotisserie leagues bind you to a static value on any category that’s added, which isn’t optimal in most cases. If you want to place a negative value on a strike-out, but don’t want to make it equal to a category like HRs or SB, you’re pretty stuck — Unless of course, you embrace the point system!
Points system’s allow me to rank and compare players quite a bit easier as well. So, before I start spitting out rankings, I’ll share with you the method behind the madness. We’ll start with the hitters and get to the pitchers tomorrow or the next day.
The first problem with a points system is variance in any given year. Jacoby Ellsbury had 70 SB in 2009, but Jose Reyes had 78 SB two years earlier. Albert Pujols ended up hitting 47 HR last year, but Ryan Howard bested that mark by 11 in 2006. So how do we deal with this?
First, we have to admit that there’s no way to perfectly assign each category a static 100% value in a points system. This isn’t something we want to do anyways because very rarely are the accomplishments equal. If someone leads the league and sets records with 90 SB that should be worth more than someone that leads the league with a paltry 48 HR.
Using the Top-10 and Top-5 League Leaders (final quartile of usable fantasy players) from the previous five years, we’ll create an average for each year, with which we’ll create a weighted average. We’ll give the greatest importance to the most recent sets of data and descend from there. We’ll then normalize that to a hundred points for ease of use(feel free to use base ten multipliers if you don’t like decimal points).
Then we pray. We pray hard. We pray that the Maximum value attained over the previous five years doesn’t fall outside 30% of our hundred points. Thankfully, as much as stolen bases, homeruns and batting average varies — we’re good to go.
Stolen Bases:
| 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | |
| TOP-10 | 44.5 | 46.7 | 49.5 | 50.3 | 48 |
| TOP-5 | 55 | 53 | 58.6 | 56.6 | 56.8 |
| MAX | 70 | 68 | 78 | 65 | 62 |
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Weighted Average: 55.6 SB
Small 2007 Jose Reyes Adjustment.
TOTAL POINTS FOR ONE STOLEN BASE: 1.75
Home Runs
| 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | |
| TOP-10 | 41 | 37.5 | 41.1 | 46.2 | 44 |
| TOP-5 | 44.4 | 39.4 | 47.4 | 50.4 | 47.4 |
| MAX | 47 | 48 | 54 | 58 | 51 |
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Weighted Average: 44.9 HR
TOTAL POINTS FOR ONE HOME RUN 2.23
Runs Batted In:
| 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | |
| TOP-10 | 121.8 | 123.4 | 129.1 | 130.2 | 128.9 |
| TOP-5 | 131.6 | 131.2 | 138.6 | 137.8 | 138.8 |
| MAX | 141 | 146 | 156 | 149 | 148 |
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Weighted Average: 134.3
TOTAL POINTS FOR ONE RBI 0.75
Runs Scored:
| 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | |
| TOP-10 | 111.7 | 114.6 | 124.2 | 123.5 | 118.5 |
| TOP-5 | 115.6 | 117.6 | 130.4 | 128.2 | 122.8 |
| MAX | 124 | 125 | 143 | 134 | 129 |
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Weighted Average: 120.9
TOTAL POINTS FOR ONE RUNS SCORED 0.83
Batting Average
This one’s by far the toughest to get through, but here goes –
An At-Bat is worth NEGATIVE 0.16
A HIT is worth 0.962
or, a hit is worth roughly 6 times as much as an AB.
That’ll give us a Maximum of 120 (Ichiro in 2007) and a minimum of 100 (Dustin Pedroia in 2008).
For Data From The Previous 4 Years
Hello, I like your baseball point system formula. I also wanted to tell you about another Baseball Point System. It was invented by Steve Mann and he made several fantasy baseball guides in the 1990′s. The formula goes like this: (Hits x 2) + (Walks x 1.5) + (Total Bases x 1) + ( Stolen Bases x 1) – ( Caught Stealing x 2) – ( At-Bats x .5) = Points. You then divide Points by 4.4 to get Runs Produced by the hitter. Try this for a team or a league and the Runs Produced is pretty close to the actual Runs Scored by the team or league. Here is one player example: In 1970 Johnny Bench had 177 hits, 54 walks, 355 Total Bases, 5 stolen bases, 2 caught stealing, and 605 At-Bats. If you plug these into the formula you get 488.5 points that Johnny produced in 1970. And if you divide by 4.4 you get 111 Runs Produced. If you want to find his rate of production then you divide points by his At-Bats plus Walks which gives 488.5/ 659 = .741 points per plate appearance. Check it out and let me know what you think. Thanks. Sincerely, Gary Velich.
Thanks Gary,
That’s a terrific formula but I attempted to develop a formula that closely resembled the pre-rankings that you’d find on all of the websites and not-so-cheap magazines. The majority of work that’s been done on baseball has been done to find the true value of the player and estimate a team’s runs scored — that’s how you win ballgames, obviously. For some reason however, fantasy players don’t exactly care for value. They care about the five major categories and the majority of leagues are run like that.
With that said, I love the inclusion of walks but hesitate to actually include it. It throws a solid amount of the numbers off and guys like Ichiro who are often ranked very high become less valuable.
Maybe fantasy baseball will trend towards actual value rather than just the newspaper statistics, that’d be a great day.
Walks are of great value. They add to On-Base percentage. Runs Batted In and Runs Scored are flawed stats and I will tell you why. A players Runs Scored totals depend on the players driving you in. You can’t get a Run Scored unless your teammate drives you in unless you hit a homer. Here is an example: Pete Rose Doubles. The next three batters strikeout to end the inning. Pete Rose does not get a Run Scored. It wasn’t his fault. It was the batters behind him that were at fault for not driving him in. Also the Run Batted In stat is flawed the same way. You can’t get an RBI if nobody gets on base for you. It depends how well your teammates are at getting on base. Here is another example: Pete Rose comes to bat with nobody on base. How is he supposed to get an RBI if nobody is on base for him? He can only get an RBI if he hits a homer. That is why I don’t like to use Runs or RBI in a Runs Created or similar formula. On the other end of the spectrum you could argue that Runs Scored and RBI are what actually went on the scoreboard and that baseball is a team game and they should be included in evaluating a player. My opinion is that both ways are correct. You can use Runs and RBI and you don’t have to use them either. You can make arguments for both. I hope this is helpful.
Kris, Another awesome stat is the players Runs Contributed. It is calculated as follows: Team Runs divided by Team Runs + Team RBI multiplied by the players Runs + RBI. If you add up all of the players Runs Contributed on the team it will be the exact Teams Runs Scored. I learned how to do this from Steve Mann’s Baseball Superstats book from 1989. He is the man and is very smart about baseball. Here is an example of the Runs Contributed stat : In 1970 the Cincinnati Reds scored 775 Runs and had 726 RBI. Johnny Bench had 97 Runs and 148 RBI for a Runs + RBI total of 245. If you plug these totals into the formula it shows that Johnny contributed 126.50 runs to the Reds 775 Runs Scored. 775/1501 x 245 = 126.50. Also if you do this for a game boxscore you can find out how many runs the hitter contributed to his team as the Runs Contributed also add up to the teams actual runs scored for the game. So you can make an argument that the player who contributes the most runs to his team is the most valuable player.
I fully agree that a players value cannot be calculated based on the counting categories. Realistically, they should pretty much be ignored. However, fantasy baseball is based on simplicity and R, HR, RBI, SB are exactly that. I remember the hooplah surrounding fantasy baseball when a *confusing* stat like WHIP was introduced.
Rather than reinvent the wheel, I just stuck with the R, RBI, HR, BA, SB system and translated it into a points system. Nobody likes winning HR by 40 and only be awarding a single roto-point. I think it makes for more interesting teams as certain guys will often load up on stolen bases or homers yet the teams will be equally as competitive.
Hello Kris, I forgot to mention a man named Barry Codell. He is the guy that invented the Base-Out percentage stat where you add up the players bases that he gains and divides by the total outs that the player made. It is a terrific stat and I use it all the time. He doesn’t have a point system like Steve Mann that I told you about, but he has a lot of AWESOME baseball stats on his website. You can check it out at Barrycode.com. He is extremely smart about baseball also and he gives perfect answers to me every time that I have a question about something. When you get a chance please check out his baseball website. He also has a baseball friend by the name of Don Sevcik. He is the guy who puts all these stats on Barry’s website. He is incredible and amazing also. You won’t be disappointed when you see this incredible baseball stat website. I am glad that I have found it and I wanted to tell you about it. Your friend, Gary Velich.