Nook Logan, Pitching vs. Hitting Prospects
A reader noticed that Nook Logan is getting, as he called it, the "goose egg" in projected value in our fantasy ranking sheets. The reader added the following:
"Seeing how (Manny) Acta seems just as high on Logan as (Frank) Robinson was, shouldn't he have some value given, for nothing else, he's the front runner to bad leadoff and get some steals?"
The problem here, as often comes up, is that our fantasy ranking sheets and the projected values associated with them, provide an unbiased opinion based on our forecasts and how they apply to the parameters of the user's league. The stage at which we have to consider extra information should be and is the stage when we are building the forecast itself. Certainly, I've taken into account all the info available re: Logan when building the projection but the one fact I can't escape is that I don't expect him to hit well at all. No matter what a manager says he wants to do with a player, I can't reasonably give a full-time projection to a player projected to hit about .218 and this is why he only gets 12 steals projected, because I can't give him more than about 214 at bats.
Once the conclusion is made about the player's ability, we then apply that to the playing time scenarios and ultimately produce a forecast. By the time we hit the ranking sheet stage, now a purely mathematical interpretation of the forecasts and their implications for each league has to come into play and no longer should we be giving artificial boosts because of hunches or extra information. That information, if it was to be applied at all, should have been applied at the forecasting stage.
When I remind readers that our information should supplement their own knowledge, what I want to be clear about is that most of the time, it's the forecasting stage where this sort of analysis should occur. In other words, if you agree that Logan is only going to hit .218, then you shouldn't be saying to yourself well, I believe he'll hit .218 but I think I have to give him some projected value anyway because the Nationals think he's a good player. That's dangerous to your success. A better approach might be this: Acta says he's a regular so he must see some skill here which perhaps says that the .218 forecast is wrong and if he's going to hit, say, .250, then he'll keep the job and steal 30 bases and that means he deserves some fantasy value here. I assume you can see the difference in the two approaches.
In any case, Logan's surface stats really don't reveal the concern here. While he hit .300 in 90 at bats with Washington last year, he also hit just .218 in 142 at bats between Double-A and Triple-A last season and while he was nursing a sore finger, that wasn't the only reason he wasn't hitting. Things got so bad for him that the Tigers had sent him down to Double-A not because of injury but because they had signed Dustan Mohr in June.
Anyway, I don't expect Logan to be successful and the forecast already reflects the best theory I can create about how he'll perform. If I'm right about that, then no, he doesn't deserve any value in most fantasy leagues.
Another reader asked whether I ever do a top prospect list for each league rather than all together. We actually have done this before but there really isn't a good reason to separate them as long as we denote which organization a player is with. If you play in an NL only league, it shouldn't be that difficult to simply bypass the AL prospects when looking for names and, on average, a top prospect list will still yield about fifty prospects in each league.
Readers who looked at the latest projection notes will have noticed that we are soon to add some new categories to the choices available on the fantasy domination ranking sheets. We're also already working on having the points league sheets list the minor league position like the domination sheets already do and some other developments. We'll announce each new development as they are completed in this space.
A reader who had read our BNRA noticed that many hitters who were highly-ranked last year "held their status quite well" while a lot of pitchers seemed to fall quite a bit. The reader wanted to know if his perception here was accurate and if so, if there is more volatility in pitching forecasts versus hitting forecasts in terms of the top prospect list.
I don't tend to rate how much volatility there is in the two categories but I can say that pitchers do seem to be less predictable. I've clarified in previous years that this doesn't mean that I believe that pitchers are unpredictable as it's an important distinction to make. The skills that make a successful pitcher are really more of a combination of skills that all rely on each other and if any one of those skills goes outside the limits of expectation for the future, then the whole projection can collapse. For example, if a pitcher suddenly achieves control I didn't expect, then that's going to improve their game regardless of their stuff. If their fastball drops five miles an hour over the course of one winter, it doesn't matter how good their other skills are because that pitcher is likely facing new problems.
In the case of hitters, a hitter can lose some power or speed or even ability to hit to the gaps and still maintain, approximately, the same sort of game he had a year before. Even contact rate tends not to fluctuate too much between years and so the hitters tend to be much more predictable from year to year.
So, I'll make the casual comment as well that the reader's perception has some merit here and that pitchers probably are less predictable. I still make the best estimate possible at the time a list is published and when I have dropped pitchers from a list, it's often based on something that's happened or some new data that's getting lots of weight since the previous list was published. Also, by coincidence more than anything, many of the pitchers who had made last year's top prospect list have lost their rookie status since and thus aren't eligible for the list anymore. This wasn't the case with most of last year's top hitting prospects.
By the way, don't forget that you don't need the BNRA to get our annual top prospect list. We're sending it out free this upcoming Friday evening to everyone who's on our free mailing list. Just because you might subscribe to the paid section of the site does not automatically put you on the mailing list so you'll want to be sure you're signed up if you want to get this. This list will not be archived at our site until much later in the 2007 season.
"Seeing how (Manny) Acta seems just as high on Logan as (Frank) Robinson was, shouldn't he have some value given, for nothing else, he's the front runner to bad leadoff and get some steals?"
The problem here, as often comes up, is that our fantasy ranking sheets and the projected values associated with them, provide an unbiased opinion based on our forecasts and how they apply to the parameters of the user's league. The stage at which we have to consider extra information should be and is the stage when we are building the forecast itself. Certainly, I've taken into account all the info available re: Logan when building the projection but the one fact I can't escape is that I don't expect him to hit well at all. No matter what a manager says he wants to do with a player, I can't reasonably give a full-time projection to a player projected to hit about .218 and this is why he only gets 12 steals projected, because I can't give him more than about 214 at bats.
Once the conclusion is made about the player's ability, we then apply that to the playing time scenarios and ultimately produce a forecast. By the time we hit the ranking sheet stage, now a purely mathematical interpretation of the forecasts and their implications for each league has to come into play and no longer should we be giving artificial boosts because of hunches or extra information. That information, if it was to be applied at all, should have been applied at the forecasting stage.
When I remind readers that our information should supplement their own knowledge, what I want to be clear about is that most of the time, it's the forecasting stage where this sort of analysis should occur. In other words, if you agree that Logan is only going to hit .218, then you shouldn't be saying to yourself well, I believe he'll hit .218 but I think I have to give him some projected value anyway because the Nationals think he's a good player. That's dangerous to your success. A better approach might be this: Acta says he's a regular so he must see some skill here which perhaps says that the .218 forecast is wrong and if he's going to hit, say, .250, then he'll keep the job and steal 30 bases and that means he deserves some fantasy value here. I assume you can see the difference in the two approaches.
In any case, Logan's surface stats really don't reveal the concern here. While he hit .300 in 90 at bats with Washington last year, he also hit just .218 in 142 at bats between Double-A and Triple-A last season and while he was nursing a sore finger, that wasn't the only reason he wasn't hitting. Things got so bad for him that the Tigers had sent him down to Double-A not because of injury but because they had signed Dustan Mohr in June.
Anyway, I don't expect Logan to be successful and the forecast already reflects the best theory I can create about how he'll perform. If I'm right about that, then no, he doesn't deserve any value in most fantasy leagues.
Another reader asked whether I ever do a top prospect list for each league rather than all together. We actually have done this before but there really isn't a good reason to separate them as long as we denote which organization a player is with. If you play in an NL only league, it shouldn't be that difficult to simply bypass the AL prospects when looking for names and, on average, a top prospect list will still yield about fifty prospects in each league.
Readers who looked at the latest projection notes will have noticed that we are soon to add some new categories to the choices available on the fantasy domination ranking sheets. We're also already working on having the points league sheets list the minor league position like the domination sheets already do and some other developments. We'll announce each new development as they are completed in this space.
A reader who had read our BNRA noticed that many hitters who were highly-ranked last year "held their status quite well" while a lot of pitchers seemed to fall quite a bit. The reader wanted to know if his perception here was accurate and if so, if there is more volatility in pitching forecasts versus hitting forecasts in terms of the top prospect list.
I don't tend to rate how much volatility there is in the two categories but I can say that pitchers do seem to be less predictable. I've clarified in previous years that this doesn't mean that I believe that pitchers are unpredictable as it's an important distinction to make. The skills that make a successful pitcher are really more of a combination of skills that all rely on each other and if any one of those skills goes outside the limits of expectation for the future, then the whole projection can collapse. For example, if a pitcher suddenly achieves control I didn't expect, then that's going to improve their game regardless of their stuff. If their fastball drops five miles an hour over the course of one winter, it doesn't matter how good their other skills are because that pitcher is likely facing new problems.
In the case of hitters, a hitter can lose some power or speed or even ability to hit to the gaps and still maintain, approximately, the same sort of game he had a year before. Even contact rate tends not to fluctuate too much between years and so the hitters tend to be much more predictable from year to year.
So, I'll make the casual comment as well that the reader's perception has some merit here and that pitchers probably are less predictable. I still make the best estimate possible at the time a list is published and when I have dropped pitchers from a list, it's often based on something that's happened or some new data that's getting lots of weight since the previous list was published. Also, by coincidence more than anything, many of the pitchers who had made last year's top prospect list have lost their rookie status since and thus aren't eligible for the list anymore. This wasn't the case with most of last year's top hitting prospects.
By the way, don't forget that you don't need the BNRA to get our annual top prospect list. We're sending it out free this upcoming Friday evening to everyone who's on our free mailing list. Just because you might subscribe to the paid section of the site does not automatically put you on the mailing list so you'll want to be sure you're signed up if you want to get this. This list will not be archived at our site until much later in the 2007 season.
posted by David Luciani at
2:10 PM
