Thursday, May 29, 2008

VORPed Minds Think Alike

An interesting baseball stat is Value Over Replacement Player, or VORP. Essentially, what this stat does is give you a picture of what would happen if a team did not have this player, but instead some random guy up from the minors. Now, in the majors, the conceptual definition VORP is sort of subjective based on what each franchise has in the minors. In fantasy baseball, the notion of a replacement player is much easier to define objectively, since everyone has the same pool of replacement players. Additionally, in fantasy, you don't have to worry about defense. So the evaluation is a bit easier.

This perspective also takes into account positional scarcity, since the replacement players for different positions will give you an indication of the scarcity that's in play.

So what's the easy way to do this sort of evaluation? Just look at each position, and note the difference in performance is. For example, look at these season-to-date lines:

Player G AB R HR RBI SB OBP SLG
Chase Utley 55 210 42.0 17.0 46.0 5.0 0.394 0.638
Orlando Hudson 45 166 24.0 4.0 26.0 2.0 0.380 0.488
Utley Proj 162 618.5 123.7 50.1 135.5 14.7 0.394 0.638
Hudson Proj 162 597.6 86.4 14.4 93.6 7.2 0.380 0.488
Utley VORP - - 37.3 35.7 41.9 7.5 0.014 0.150

What I'm doing is projecting out Utley and Hudson's stats to 162 games. And then, illustrating the difference over 162 games. Of course, you can tweak what numbers you use in the projected values. Maybe you take some weighted average of this year's stats and prior year's stats, or whatever. Or for younger players, you use numbers based on the career arc. I'm also assuming that Hudson is the next best available 2B. This may not bet the case, particularly if you sort stats by the most recent month. But you can use a similar method for evaluation, only projecting out stats based on the most recent month's performance. That may not be the most accurate method, but if you want to try to ride out hot streaks, it could be what you're looking for.

In any case, you can start to see some other things to do. First, if you have a working understanding of what the replacement player levels are, you will have a better picture of the value of players. In fact, looking at these stats, some of these players belong on rosters.

Player G AB R HR RBI SB OBP SLG
C - Olivio 30 106 12 6 22 2 0.333 0.594
C Proj 162 572.4 64.8 32.4 118.8 10.8 0.333 0.594
1B/3B - Cantu 50 198 28 7 24 2 0.332 0.532
1B/3B Proj 162 641.5 90.7 22.7 77.8 6.5 0.332 0.532
SS - Crosby 53 208 27 3 26 4 0.325 0.389
SS Proj 162 635.8 82.5 9.2 79.5 12.2 0.325 0.389
OF - Bradley 48 171 30 8 31 0 0.435 0.561
OF Proj 162 577.1 101.3 27.0 104.6 0.0 0.435 0.561

So what does this get us? First of all, Milton Bradley and Miguel Olivio belong on a UPL roster. But really, you see the difference in what's available. 2B and SS have little value. 3B and 1B are a little better, and both run deeper. There are a lot of talented OF. What's misleading is C. After Olivio, you don't have much.

To get a true picture of each position, you should probably go deeper, maybe average out the top 3 replacement players. Additionally, you also have to account for the number of AB that each player will actually have. But, this is a nice little way of seeing what's available, as well as giving you a consistent metric for evaluating trades and other transactions. Also, I'm projecting stats based on 162 games. Maybe using AB is a better way of doing your projections for some players, since you could account for players who are coming off injury and have been used in pinch hitting roles or players who platoon.

So the notion of scarcity is a very real thing. This approach also helps illustrate what I was talking about in the previous post about injuries.

Player G AB R HR RBI SB OBP SLG
SS Proj 162 635.8 82.53 9.17 79.47 12.23 0.325 0.389
21 SS Games 21 82.4 10.7 1.2 10.3 1.6 0.325 0.389
C Proj 162 572.4 64.8 32.4 118.8 10.8 0.333 0.594
14 C Games 14 49.5 5.6 2.8 10.3 0.9 0.333 0.594
Total Stats 35 131.9 16.3 3.989 20.57 2.518 0.328 0.466

I've lost out on 21 games of Rafael Furcal and 14 games of Ryan Doumit. Here's what I missed out on, with replacement players, prorated for the games missed (this is the upper bound - in actuality, you probably don't get all of those games: likely only 19 games from SS and maybe 10 games from C). See some interesting results? It looks like I missed out on about 16R, 4HR, 21 RBI, 3SB, but would have only had a .328 OBP and a .466 SLG during that time from those 2 positions. And more importantly, my roster flexibility would have been lost. Even if the OBP and SLG weren't a concern for my team (and really, this year, they're not), what this data shows is that my roster flexibility was worth about 16 R, 4 HR, 21 RBI, and 3SB, roughly what I guessed in my last post.

This also helps you evaluate trades. For a little while, Ryan Garko was being shopped around in our league. The problem was that his value wasn't any better than players who were available in free agency at the time. Additionally, since Garko was a 1B, you likely were going to play him at UTIL, so your VORP there has to be based on all positions. It's not like he was a 2B or SS whose stats weren't great, but still better than whatever was available. Those players still have some value, if you can find the right place for them. But at a position where most teams are already set? That's a tough sell.

In any case, VORP isn't a magical stat that's just better than anything else out there, but it's a nice way of looking at players, and matching up values when you need to try to compare apples to apples.

-Chairman (aka O.N. Thugs)

5 comments:

Greg McConnell said...

On a similar note, I just did a comparison for all 1B's so far this season. As it turns out, Mark DeRosa is the highest rated 1B on my roster. (Keep in mind, this is coming from a guy who drafted Fielder in the 1st round and Pena in the 3rd.)

Speaking of which, am I allowed to drop Pena yet? I remember one year when Francisco Rodriguez had gone something like 0-5 over a two-month stretch without a single save, then had an incident where the ball fell out of his hand trying to make a routine throw to third, allowing yet another run to score, so I finally dropped him but you put him back on my team. ;-)

clauff said...

Why would you want to drop Pena? You said when you drafted him in the 3rd round that he was going to have a similar year as last year. What happened? And who is available on the free agent list that will match his production?

Greg McConnell said...

I'm not sure what happened with Pena. He did sign a big contract extension in the off-season, so that might be a factor. My guess is that a bigger factor is that the league has re-adjusted to him.

As for Fielder, maybe his contract situation (didn't get the extension he wanted in the off-season) is weighing on his mind too.

There can be many reasons why a player's stats dip. I remember one year Griffey's numbers were strangely down quite a bit. It wasn't until a year or so later that the FBI revealed that he had been dealing with death threats during that time.

One of my lessons with Pena is that I should have rated Adam Dunn ahead of him. Granted, Dunn wasn't available for me in the 3rd round anyway. But, at the time, I would have been willing to take the prospect of Pena going .400/.600/45HR instead of Dunn, who's as big of a lock as their is in the MLB to go .380/.520/40HR.

I won't drop Pena for awhile. However, with Fielder at 1B, he could be expendable if he doesn't break out of this funk. It wouldn't take much if somebody wanted to trade for him at this point.

Chairman said...

I thought that you were just collecting Devil Ray players. But, if you want to drop Pena, go for it. I'm sure that the bottom half of the league will be salivating.

Greg McConnell said...

Heheh. Well, I guess I do have a few more Rays than I realized. (Five!)

BTW, good points on roster management. It's an interesting topic. Although, in general, I still try to keep a full active roster with very few exceptions. (With you previously being in first by 20 points and having nearly all of your players "going well," that could probably classify as one of the exceptions.)

I know last year I was greatly frustrated when Chipper got hurt yet Atlanta wouldn't put him on the DL. At first I just left him at 3B for over a week. After a while I tried to find a replacement and probably did hurt my stats with brutal numbers from guys like Reynolds.

I mentioned it earlier on the message board, but I'll say it again. I wish Yahoo would let us declare any of our players as DL'd. You can keep it at 2 DL slots max, just let me pick who I put there. (Obviously they'd have to stay for at least two weeks, otherwise the DL slot loses its meaning.) The reason I think that rule change would be good is that it would give us more control over our roster management--and not make us slaves to an MLB team's decision as to whether a player should go on the DL or not. Also, sometimes a player is still playing games while injured, so why not give a fantasy manager the ability to say, "Hey, if I were that team's manager, I'd put this guy on the DL." I think this is especially common with pitchers. How many times have we seen a pitcher have four or five suspiciously bad outings, only to find out he's been injured the whole time?