Nate Silver on Fantasy Baseball
Listed in:In a BP Unfiltered post, Nate Silver touches on a topic that I tried attacking a few weeks back, and which directly relates to a fantasy baseball column I posted more recently. Silver states the ideas more clearly than I did. He concludes:
In any reasonably competitive fantasy league, there is no gimmicky plan that will make you more likely to win your league than playing it straight based on good, old-fashioned projections, valuations, and intuitions...
To put that into Gladwellian terms, though there are differences in skill levels and philosophies, ultimately every member of my 5x5 league is competent, so, in the end, there's really no systemic leverage to be gained by attacking our non-auction draft with a unique valuation process because everyone has a certain level of expertise. However, my point still stands that minor advantages can be found by trying to see things differently and uncover useful information unknown to the rest of the league.
I wouldn't call that a systemic change, because I suspect everyone in our league is basically on the same page when it comes to which blocs of ballplayers are better than the other blocs. Within those blocs, however, Ben might bump a player up higher in his rankings because he knows something I don't, and that gives him a tiny advantage. Do it enough times, and Ben should have a better team than mine, even though we went through equally solid valuation processes.
