Yes, it’s time. I’m about to join the crazies who ignore their family and slack off during the work day to feed their fantasy team fantasy. I’m joining the legion of Rotisserie leage baseball manager wannabes who crowd Major League Baseball team phone lines with calls trying to find out if the top pitcher on their fantasy team is on the d.l. or not of when he’s likely to come off. I haven’t hired a statistician at the Jet Propulsion League to pore over the endless array of baseball stats for pitchers and hitters, let’s see there’s:

WHIP and OOPS.
pitchers: K/9 (strikeouts per nine innings), K/BB (strikeouts per walk), WHIP (walks+hits per inning pitched) and OOPS (opponent on-base plus slugging).
defense-Independent ERA (dERA), evaluate a pitcher solely according to those events governed solely by the pitcher’s performance, regardless of the strength of the defensive players behind him.

# LOB – Left on base – number of runners not out nor scored at the end of an innning.
# OBP – On base percentage – times reached base (H + BB + HBP) divided by at bats plus walks plus hit by pitch plus sacrifice flies (AB + BB + HBP + SF).
# OPS – On-base plus slugging – on-base percentage plus slugging percentage

PVR:SI ranked the position players in the major leagues from 1 (the best) to 400 and the pitchers from 1 to 350, based on projections of their statistical production this season. The categories considered for position players were batting average, home runs, RBIs and stolen bases; for pitchers the categories were wins, saves, ERA and WHIP (walks plus hits per inning pitched). We also took into account each player’s career stats as well as his role on his team, his prospects for improving or declining, and his injury history and physical condition. Using these criteria, SI determined each player’s value ranking, or PVR, which appears next to his name in his team’s projected roster in the scouting reports.

but that’s only because [blockquote]fantasy tennis is harder than fantasy football, basketball or baseball – you actually have to pick the winner. How novel is that? I could look at 1st serve % and number of forehand errors and percentage of break points converted, number of wins on clay when the temperature was below 50 degrees and the wind was above 13 mph while the player’s father was sitting in the player’s box – that could affect the player’s performance you know. I could play in a league where only the statistics matter and – in stock market investing it’s call technical analysis. But it’s much harder to be a better – that person has to choose the winner or at least cover the spread. It seems to me that it harder because you have to take into account more personal, harder to quantify [note to Peter about this and fantasy tennis, does he have any opinion about it] such as facing Pedro Martinez in a world series knowing that he’s likely to go head-hunting. It’s true that this would be reflected in statistics but there’s a finality here – if you lose the game that’s it. Your leftfielder might have gotten three hits but the team lost.

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