The Power of The Leviathan

Last week, I thought a little about doing a post about LABR (the League of Alternative Baseball Reality) and the American and National League drafts. I didn't do this, in part because I was writing about alternate strategies, but also because I frankly didn't see the value in writing about an auction that took place in early March in late March.

However, after seeing some of the freezes that happened in my league today, I wish I had given more credence to LABR.

Sometimes you've been playing this game for so long that you think you have it all down. Worse yet, you wind up giving your fellow owners a great deal of credit as well and assuming that they know most or all of the same things that you know.

Our league had reached a point that Alex Patton calls Stage 3, in my opinion. I've mentioned the "stages" of Rotisserie Baseball - as defined by Alex - in passing, but I'll run through them again, just to make sure that everyone is on the same page as I am.

Back in Stage One, everybody...wildly overspent on the star hitters with no speed and spent way too much on pitching, especially starting pitching. they had never even heard of Baseball America. The winner was always someone who kept his money, knew the rookies and cleaned up from the middle rounds on.
In Stage Two, everybody tried to be that somebody. There was too much money at the end and Jackie Robinson wouldn't have earned what was expected of the rookies.
In Stage Three, the final stage, everybody knows everything. Skill is so rampant that it's a game of luck.

I bring this up because the freeze lists I saw today challenge the very idea of Stage Three to the core.

The last three years saw my league definitively and without a doubt entrenched in Stage Three. I could write down a price on a piece of paper for every player and almost every player, without fail, would fall one way or the other within $3 of that price. Bargain hunting or waiting for your moment in the auction was a thing of the past; the bargains came in the last few rounds, when a $4 or $5 player might sneak in at $2. As we all know, you're not going to win getting $2-3 bargains on a handful of players in the endgame.

This year was the first that John Hunt wasn't running LABR for Sports Weekly. I had always had mixed feelings about Hunt's work for Sports Weekly. He seemed to know what he was talking about, but the two pages of fantasy information he provided seemed stale and not very useful to the more avid fantasy player. With the evolution of the Internet for fantasy players, I expected Hunt and Sports Weekly to start writing more essays about the game (like I'm writing here). It never happened. The fantasy column was mired in the same format year in and year out, and I felt better getting my information from more timely sources on the Internet.

Still, the "Leviathan" (as Hunt called Sports Weekly's Fantasy Baseball insert) was a pretty good piece of information to have before your auction. Hunt predicted the values for all players, the results of LABR for both leagues were available, and I always enjoyed reading it. Better yet, Hunt got better and better at predicting player values and using the $3120 model for his values.

I always read the Leviathan but never used it for my values. However, as it got closer to my pre-season values beginning in 2004, I noticed that was when other owners were starting to bid closer to closer to me. I didn't put two and two together, figuring that other owners, like me, were getting smarter and smarter on their own. After all, I was in a stable league with very little turnover and very experienced owners. I assumed that everyone else had a learning curve, too, and was learning how to value players and not just parrot LABR.

Flash forward to 2007. John Hunt is gone and Devin Clancy has taken over. Suddenly, there's something...um...um...

Light. There's something about the Leviathan that's a little light.

Beyond the fact that Hunt's writing had a little bit of a spark to it that Clancy's lacks, some of the comments almost seem to make me believe that Clancy either doesn't know what he's talking about or is talking down to the simplest of owners. There's always a blurb next to each player's projected statistics, and the blurbs this year (never that good to begin with due to their brevity), are now completely bereft of any usefulness at all. My favorite was the blurb next to Chien-Ming Wang:

More valuable in a 4x4, which doesn't count strikeouts.

I was floored when saw this comment. Who doesn't know this??? Wouldn't anyone picking up a publication with bid prices for auction style Rotisserie Baseball know this???

So I thought to myself that Sports Weekly, which has already gone pretty far downhill, was just sliding down the final few steps into oblivion. I figured that my fellow owners would also recognize this, we'd have a good laugh about it at the auction as we chowed down on our pre-game bagels and cream cheese (bring some with scallions this year, John) and would move on.

But then I saw the freeze lists from my league, and recognized that not everyone else has recognized the paradigm shift. I also didn't realize how many of my fellow owners are still using Sports Weekly's values.

I didn't go into this polemic merely to bash Sports Weekly. Clearly, if they continue to churn out their publication they're doing something right, and if I don't buy it, Paul White isn't going to curl up into the fetal position and go into a mammoth crying jag.

But this information does affect you if you fellow owners use Sports Weekly to manage their freeze lists and their auctions.

If you noticed a similar phenomenon this year, take notice. Review the prices in Sports Weekly and see if any of them come close to your freeze prices, especially on players you wouldn't have frozen or given contracts to in a million years. If that's the case, then you might have a paradigm shift on your hands as well. We might be moving back to Stage Two or even Stage One, though I can't tell you for sure until I see what happens at my Auction next weekend.

But it's something to watch for...