Why I hate giving out end of season awards, and how they can be helpful.

Sports broadcaster, journalists, and fans like to give out end of season awards. They like to figure out who was the best at every little thing. Sometimes these awards can be good. For example a major league GM sitting to create a big board of free agents could make his job a lot easier. However, at least when it comes to fantasy baseball it is amazingly frustrating. 

Fantasy baseball measures players using very subjective, and often times moronic metrics like “RBI” and “WINS.” Everyone with an IQ over 40 (I’m just sort of estimating where Joe Morgan is) knows that Josh Hamilton is not a top 5 or 10 hitter and not one of the top 3 outfielders in baseball. But because he was lucky enough to collect a ton of RBI’s in a stacked lineup he produced a lot of fantasy value. Any measurement of how valuable a player has been in 2008 must include Hamilton high on their list, even if it is almost certain that he will regress significantly in 2009. This is not informative, it just confuses people. 

There are two kinds of rankings you can produce for fantasy baseball at the end of a season: 

1. Rankings based on how much a player helped a fantasy team at the end of the season. These really don’t tell you anything because of the unpredictable nature of baseball. If someone has a very fluky season, he might produce like a top 10 player even though his base statistics show he wasn’t any better than before. I don’t put any value into these.

2. Rankings based on how much value a player would have produced at the end of the season if he played in a perfect world where there was no such thing as luck and only skill mattered. Because this shows you how skilled a player was in a given year, these are the kind of measures I like to look at towards the end of the season. I will probably hand out awards, and I will do them in this format. So don’t expect to see Josh Hamilton or Francisco Rodriguez on this list.

Some lists that I don’t like because they are based on team and luck dependent stats. They do however capture how much raw value these guys had this year. 

http://mvn.com/outsider/2008/09/18/fantasy-baseball-standouts-the-players-you-wish-youd-drafted/

http://www.bradenton.com/sports/story/898723.html