Category Weights

Theories, Concepts and Analytical Discussion (draft strategies, valuation, inflation, scarcity, etc.)
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Skin Blues
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Posts: 63
Joined: March 13th, 2010, 11:24 am

Category Weights

#1 Post by Skin Blues »

OK, so something I've been thinking of and decided to look into today was regressing auction sell prices to get an idea of how people allocate money to different categories when the rubber meets the road. Quite often stolen bases will have a premium on them, but other than that, what can we do to better match up our dollar values with the realistic prices people pay so we aren't forced to do it arbitrarily on the fly? Even if we personally don't want to allocate dollar values the same way others do, it's important to create values that way in order to find the best discounts throughout an auction for the same reason it's important to predict what the league-wide hitter/pitcher split will be, regardless of how we intend to allocate our dollars. Essentially, it's extending the idea of a hitter/pitcher split to a more granular level, splitting up money for each of the 10 categories.

To start with, I only did hitters, and for an AL Only league. This is only using the results of one single auction (AL LABR) but the results I got from the regression were kind of interesting. The category dollar values I used were from the MastersBall projections, input to the LastPlayerPicked dollar value generator (for quick and dirty conversion to individual category dollar values). Then I ran the regression to get the coefficients for each category. They were as follows:

AVG: 0.95
R: 0.27
RBI: 0.93
HR: 1.51
SB: 1.34

Seems crazy, and that there'd be outliers galore with such skewed values, but that wasn't the case. Putting these values into the CVRC, the projected dollar values varied only slightly from the results for a league using coefficients of 1-1-1-1-1. The guys high in steals/homers moved up a couple bucks, guys low in steals/homers went down a couple bucks. Nothing drastic; only 7 players had their projected value change by more than $2. The biggest difference was Jarrod Dyson who went from $23 to $28 with the new category weights. Now, this is something most people probably do subconsciously, avoiding "boring" players like Joe Mauer and Melky Cabrera, and ticking up guys like Dyson and Rajai Davis who are elite in a category that is notoriously barren. Any thoughts on using these dollar values as opposed to the traditional 1-1-1-1-1 or something more tame? Is the difference so small as to not matter much? Has anybody else looked into this kind of thing in the past?

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Todd Zola
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Joined: December 25th, 2008, 12:45 pm

Re: Category Weights

#2 Post by Todd Zola »

Personally, I'm off worrying about things on this level. What I really care about is what I'm willing to pay. Sure, I'd like an idea of what others will pay so I can plan, but I doubt -- highly, highly doubt -- anyone looks at it via category spending. At best, they use some sort of value calculator, which incorporates everything, then react to what their draft software says they should do.

ETA -- I'll use 1-1-1-1-1 as my starting point, or maybe take some from BAvg and SB to give to power. I auction (and draft) off the tiers so I don't know the exact number anyway.

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