executing a flawed strategy
warning: this is an incredibly long post. while i think it is interesting, it might only be interesting if you’re in my fantasy baseball league and want to learn more about my tendencies. i think it also is interesting if you have any kind of deep interest in fantasy baseball. if i were you, i’d read it. but it’s really long and you probably need to go watch tv. anyway, you’ve been warned.
on sunday ottoneu, the fantasy baseball league i’m in, held its 4th 5th (oops, thanks thad!) annual auction draft. i’ve mentioned ottoneu here and in various other places, but in case you aren’t caught up on it, let me finally, officially write up a primer on ottoneu.
about ottoneu
ottoneu (login upon request) was created in 2006 as an alternate to yahoo-style fantasy baseball games. there were two directions in which we (geoff, chad, and myself) feel we’ve improved upon traditional rotisserie fantasy baseball. first, our league uses different statistics from the standard 5×5 league, using instead statistics that we feel more accurately represent what major league teams need to win and lose games. this is not a big leap from what is out there, but i’m constantly surprised to find that not a lot of other fantasy players have taken a step towards different statistics. plenty of players use more advanced metrics to predict the standard 5×5 fare, but why not just use more advanced metrics? for the record, our metrics aren’t that advanced. we run a 4×4 scoring system with OBP, SLG, HR, and R on offense and ERA, WHIP, SLGA, and K for pitching, as well as hard upper and lower bounds on positional games and innings pitched. this is definitely the smaller of the two major differences.
the second difference, and what makes things quite interesting, is our roster construction. our teams each have 40-man rosters and a $400 salary cap. players are added to teams via a 2-day blind auction and during our once-a-year auction draft. this means every player in the league has a salary that is set by the open market, as all 12 owners have an opportunity to bid on every player. a lot follows from the salary cap system. first, the open competition for each player adds incredible amounts of strategy to auctions both before and during the season. instead of hoping your team is first in line, you need to constantly be considering your team’s budget and needs when new players become available. second, teams can make very interesting trades, because beyond trading players, teams can loan each other money. more on this in a second.
like i mentioned, there is a 40-man roster, which is much deeper than most fantasy baseball leagues. a typical league these days will be closer to half that number. with the 40-man roster, owners are given the luxury of both flexibility – platoons, depth at certain positions, etc – as well as a farm system. minor leaguers are one of the coolest part of having a deep roster dynasty league, because, much like as in real life, prospects can be a source of cheap, high-quality production for a team, which, given the salary cap, is incredibly valuable.
of course, prospects also let teams who are not doing well (like me last year) trade off some of their more expensive players in an effort to get young and cheap and rebuild for the next year. this sentence alone makes the ottoneu experience far superior to yahoo – instead of losing interest in july when your team is in 8th and there’s no one available on the waiver wire, you can build for the future. in baseball, for the vast majority of teams and owners and fans, nothing is more fun than the future.
there is one quirk rule that i have to point out, because it leads into my strategy for our just completed auction draft. when we started ottoneu, geoff was rightly concerned about competitive balance. basically, if a team somehow ended up with 20 superstars for very cheap, we wanted a way to redistribute those players to the rest of the league. now, this is something we’re moving away from, but the rules as of this year allowed 2 players from each team to be voted off and forced back to auction, with the team who originally held those players to get a $5 coupon on those players at auction. for example, i could bid $20 on a player and get him for $15 if it was the highest bidder and i held a coupon for him. going forward, we’re switching this rule to only allow one player to be voted off and for the coupon value to be $10, so only egregious situations would open back up to the league. i wouldn’t be surprised if in 2 years this rule was completely done away with.
ok, so that is how the league works and some of the basic strategy. i’m willing to write much, much more on the subject – just ask.
the draft
our auction draft was on sunday. my team was in an interesting position going in. i had decided 1 day after last year’s auction draft that i had done such a bad job that i needed to punt on all of 2009. this resulted in my trading off some high cost players, getting a ton of prospects, and barely being able to field a team during the season. my pitching has been strong ever since the league began, but my offense was quite bad, and i finished in 7th place and probably should have finished in 10th or 11th. i jettisoned a lot of junk in the offseason, though arguably not quite enough. i had 19 roster spots to fill and $177 to use, putting me in an average-ish situation, but in reality i only needed a few key starters shored up, and the rest of my roster could be filled out with marginal $1 players.
my important keepers were 2 very good starting pitchers (sabathia, kershaw), 2 OFs i picked up from geoff in the offseason and i am betting on bounce-backs from (granderson, jay bruce) and a solid 2B (dan uggla). my first priority was getting back my voted off players, jon lester and andre ethier. i felt that lester pushed my rotation from good to excellent on his own, and ethier pushes my OF from risky to a possible strength. given the $5 coupons, i was guaranteed to get these guys at a ‘value’ price, so i just had to hope that they didn’t get pushed up too much by other owners (perhaps an overzealous dodgers fan? thankfully we have no red sox fans in our league). i budgeted $28 for ethier (he was at $11 before being voted off) and $28 for lester ($21 before being voted off, i think). so, that’s $56 of my $177 gone.
my second priority was a solid bat at first base. i’ve learned that having a james loney at first just won’t fly – there’s too much power at the position, and i put myself in a terrible disadvantage by not getting a piece of that power. you can’t make it up in other places. so i budgeted $45 for a 1B and hoped i’d get someone in the 3rd tier (first being pujols, second being fielder+miguel cabrera+ryan howard).
third priority was a catcher. i like to punt the position, and there was a decent crop of catchers at auction. i was hoping $10 would net me a couple of decent catchers, nothing too exciting, but some good depth and passable obp.
my fourth priority was a middle infielder. i had to keep this a low priority because the damn position does not have any depth right now. but we have a 2B, SS, and MI position to fill, and i was running with dan uggla and … clint barmes. so i had to do something here. i budgeted $10 here and hoped i got lucky.
finally, with P5, or essentially 0 priority, i threw $30 at the remaining rotation+pen. i have ted lilly, porcello, niemann, and joba around, so i think most of this money would probably go at whatever relief guys i could find. technically i had $25 more to play with, but you have to give yourself some wiggle room, and i also knew i had to fill out the rest of my roster
the results
so, instead of stepping through everything that occurred in the auction (because that is both pointless and long, and this post has enough of each right now), let me tell you the results of each priority:
priority 1 was a rousing success. i spent $24 on ethier and $24 on lester, so i saved $8 here and turned my rotation into elite and my OF into solid using the one built-in advantage i had at auction.
priority 2 was a win, i think, but i could easily be wrong. i paid $37 for carlos pena, who is good but one step down from what i wanted.
a side note – according to lastplayerpicked.com, i am 3 for 3 on overpaying for guys right now. this is just how i roll i guess.
priority 3 was a reach, in which i grabbed geovany soto for $17. this is too much money for geovany soto. lastplayerpicked has him worth $18, but the projections LPP uses are a bit optimistic on him. furthermore, i didn’t want to spend this much money at catcher, i wanted to punt catcher. the true test of seeing if this was a failure or not will come out in the season, i think. if soto does what he is capable of doing, my offense becomes pretty good. otherwise, i’m in the same situation as last year.
now for priority 4 and 5, where things get zany. i had $10 for a middle infielder, i had some money for other pitchers, maybe some decent relievers, whatever. i ended up with… ubaldo jiminez. as my 4th starter (above lilly, below lester). what? i don’t need another pitcher. i don’t need to be paying $29 to ubaldo jiminez when i have a cheaper lester, sabathia, and kershaw. and $29 is overpaying a bit. and yet, here we are. i’d call this a success if i can trade a pitcher for a middle infielder. otherwise, i have too many goddamn pitchers and their value really starts decreasing on my team – the number of points any one of my top 4 earn me over the rest of my staff is quite small. and the salary going to pitchers is quite large. not good.
and instead of getting any relievers, i ended up snagging chipper jones and vladimir guerrero. these are my x-factors – two aging guys who project favorably. if they come back strong from weak 2009 outings, my offense becomes quite good. but now i’m asking for soto, chipper, and vlad to all come back strong. stranger things have happened, but not many. and i’m kind of ok with grabbing chipper, because andy laroche at 3B was looking like less and less of a good option.
the rest of my money was spread out amongst various middle infielders (including rafael furcal) and a couple of relievers. looking at my priorities going in, i did a pretty good job – i retained the two guys who were voted off my team, i added a good first baseman, and i took an ok risk at catcher. however, getting ubaldo instead of a decent MI option is looking more and more like a big mistake, especially now that i’m finally starting to realize who clint barmes actually is. i also have entirely too many risks on my team – it’s fine to look at chipper and say “oh he’ll bounce back” and then look at soto and think the same thing and then look at vlad and think the same thing… but when you’re adding those 3 guys to jay bruce and curtis granderson (two more guys i am hoping will bounce back) and andre ethier and dan uggla (who could both regress), all of a sudden your offense doesn’t look super solid.
my strategy was flawed in that i found too many risks acceptable and targeted too many risky players. my execution was flawed because i ended up with ubaldo jiminez. however, if i can move a pitcher for a solid positional player and get a little lucky, my team will be right in it in september/october. and you have to be a little lucky to win a league like ottoneu.
i’d be really interested to see how you think i did. i’m worried that i might have been too fixated on getting back guys that were voted off (though i can’t be too upset given the price i got them at). also, for the record, here are the LPP settings i used. they were really good for offensive players, as i had a really good feel for some of the other owners in our auction. pitching simply doesn’t work because there’s no way of telling the site that we have a lower bound for IP, which skews the site a bit in favor of relievers. (note: there’s a serious, serious chance that i totally undervalue relievers.)
according to wordpress, i’ve crossed over the 2000 word limit, which may or may not include links. either way, i wrote a whole f’n lot on ottoneu, and i will probably write a lot more this season. this, more than anything else, speaks to how freaking sweet my fantasy baseball league is.
a short scene with no discernible words
location: ramona’s pizzeria, or any pizzeria you’ve ever been to
i’m waiting for a pizza. there is a girl who has to be 4 to 5 years old, waiting here with her dad for their dinner.
she is wearing a well-worn pink baseball hat.
i wish i still had the raw emotion in me that she surely has for that pink baseball hat.
let’s get started.
Posted by niv in Uncategorized on February 28, 2010
heavy rain is the best video game i’ve ever played.
i have played a shitload of video games. a shitload. especially since the middle of college. i remember skipping a week of classes to play through wind waker. i remember not being able to put down my controller during bioshock, or any of the last 3 call of duty games, because i was compelled to push forward through the single player game. i mean, if i’m going to spend this much money on this hobby/habit, i might as well finish these games, right? and since there’s only so much time before the next one, there’s not a lot of reason to do anything other than power through these games.
however, heavy rain felt different.
i slapped myself in the head, realizing that i forgot to do a task in one of the scenes. i regretted some of the decisions i made two, three, ten scenes after i made them, realizing why what i had done before was a mistake. and most of all, i was compelled to press through the game, to push forward in the story. not because mlb 10 and final fantasy 13 come out in the next two weeks. not because i was ready to put the game on the shelf and not see it again for a long time, or because i had some obligation to the game. i pushed through because i wanted to see what happened, and not only that, i had a connection to the characters that i’ve never had in any other video game i’ve ever played. they were each their own people, but i had made my little imprint in all of them, and that personal connection was a completely new experience to me.
the only game i can remember recently wanting to power through because the story gripped me was bioshock, and that game did not leave as much of an impression on me as heavy rain. more to the point, i’m never going to take bioshock off the shelf again unless a fit of nostalgia hits me. heavy rain will not be the same. i’m considering starting it back up right now.
if you have a ps3, play heavy rain. the end.
music i am listening to now, well behind the curve:
phoenix – no matter if geoff thinks it makes me a hipster, i don’t wear skinny jeans and have ridiculous hair and at least it is good to code to (which maybe isn’t a compliment)
passion pit – aiiya. i’m sorry, i can’t help it.
japandroids – fucking awesome, and made zach embrace distortion in ways he won’t even admit to me, so that’s double awesome.
a seemingly juvenile story
when i first started at my current job, a lot of the code i was working on was written by a company in india that we outsourced work to. it was awful, awful code. like, incredible, in a way, because they did things that were so stupid i didn’t even know they were possible. it’s slow, it’s buggy, it’s prone to failure, and that’s why the first few months were so freaking awful for me – every weekend was fixing this shitty code, this vavni (that was the company name) code that blew up at the slightest input that these indian asshats didn’t consider.
so their american contacts were actually in the office with us, which is why we started using them in the first place. and beyond the fact that their indian cohorts wrote terrible, terrible code, we knew them for their food – awful combinations of indian food that made the common hallway smell like a third-world country. we knew they all bought shitty tiffin lunches from cheap places near their homes because they were all single men who didn’t know how to cook like mom and now were at the mercy of some indian lady in a strip mall somewhere, but that didn’t change the fact that they stunk up the office and we hated it.
(a tiffin lunch is basically a complete indian meal – 4 dishes, roti, etc, in a metal tiffin container that is really f’n cheap. basically old indian women make them after they don’t have kids to feed in the house anymore but still want to make food as if they do, and guys who just moved from india and don’t have women to cook for them consume this stuff in droves. my parents have asked me to get tiffin meals a few times, but given all this, i have passed. it’s not that food isn’t good, though i’m sure it wouldn’t meet my standard of “did my mom make it?”, but instead it just seems too sad.)
they moved out a few months back. their sticker is off the door. we stopped working with them. their name is the equivalent of shit.
which is why, in the last 2 weeks, when the toilets became unusable, their name came up time and again. “someone vavni code’d the toilets”
which means they (in one example) apparently crouched above the toilet seat, put no cover on the seat (there are plenty of covers in these stalls) and sprayed diarrhea all over the seat, and then didn’t flush, or at least clogged the toilet so bad that it wouldn’t flush.
there are two sit down toilets and 2 urinals in the men’s room. they have killed the plumbing, whoever ‘they’ are, to the sit down toilets, and now the entire hallway, instead of smelling like a tiffin lunch, smells like shit, to the point where we miss the tiffin lunches.
i share this story not to make you all think of this disgusting situation in my office, but to state once, clearly, in the open, that no, it is not ok to do this to communal toilets, and if you have ever done anything like this to a communal toilet, the reason better not have been less than a medical emergency.
an innocuous purchase
yesterday i bought new brown shoes. my new go-to, in between black shoes with a suit and sneakers with everything else. completely bland and un-newsworthy, except for the fact that these are the first new brown shoes i’ve bought in over 11 years.
these shoes replace the brown shoes i bought when i started 10th grade in cleveland.
i remember going to the mall with my dad to get the shoes these are replacing. i remember talking to the salesman who i had seen around before and i had seen help my dad before. i remember the way my dad looked at me when i shoved the shoes on without pulling out the back properly. i remember the way he sheepishly told the salesman “, kids” (that comma is no typo, friend). i remember the excitement of wearing brown shoes and starting private school and living in a new city where i knew no one. wait, not excitement, dread. terrifying dread.
and here we are, just over 11 years later, and i’m over a year into california and i work for the goddamn death star and i know only a few more people than i knew 11 years ago but i am going to marry one of them. and the year starts with a 2.
happy new year.
i have to put this everywhere
Posted by niv in Uncategorized on December 4, 2009
a correction, from the washington post. awesome.
weird coincidences
part of my job requires that i, from time to time, scour through databases of athletes of all sorts. today the focus was on college basketball, where i ran into a quirk that made me do a double take. we’ve recently gotten updates to our college basketball rosters for the 2009-10 season, and while the original set of players came in by last name, the new players we get come in by team name. which is all a long way of setting up this unlikely pairing of names that i found towards the end of the 19618 row table:
| 3024400 | Williams | Travis | 80 | F | 33 | 0 |
| 3032344 | Rehnquist | Peter | 107 | G | 25 | 0 |
williams and rehnquist. back to back, for some reason, in a gigantic table of basketball players.
basically i’m getting coded messages from my database. now i just need to see what exactly the database wants me to do.
world series
This is the hard reality of the World Series. It is not a celebration for everyone. Year after year, it is also a time for fans of losing teams to see their old stars, and remember the promise, and think about what might have been, had ownership been a little wiser and had a little more money to work with.
yankees in 5.