Moving the Chains at the end of the Year

I'll start this post by stating the obvious. If you're in a close race at the end of the year, there's nothing more exciting in this entire game, with the possible exception of the adrenaline rush you get on Auction Day. You spend the week hitting the refresh button on your computer over and over so you can see the results of what are otherwise meaningless games. If you have the MLB TV or Radio package, you flip around the dial incessantly to watch and/or hear what's going on. If your stat service has a live stats tracker, you hit refresh on that a million times a night as well. If you're married, your spouse hates you. If you're not, you're still the embodiment of that awful fantasy sports stereotype that thinks that everyone cares that Freddy Sanchez hit a HR off of Adam Wainwright and isn't that oh so exciting!

If you're in a weekly transactions league like I am, the die is cast and your roster is what it is. If you're in a close race like I am (I'm currently up by 3 points in my A.L., but could fall into a tie if my opponent gets three more steals than the team ahead of him and makes up the .0002 differential in WHIP between my team and his), you probably agonized over your moves all weekend. If you're like me, though, you recognize that what is done is done and now all you can do is root for your team to win.

One thing I've recognized over the last 20 years of playing Rotisserie baseball is that the quantitative categories on offense, particularly HR/RBI can move a lot more than you might expect.

I thought I'd take an unscientific look back at my league (going back to 1998) and see what the most radical moves were in each quantitative category every year. The list below isn't the highest and lowest total in each category at the end of the week, it's the difference between two or more teams when points were lost or gained in a category. So if a "10" is listed in the HR category, it means that one team had 15 HR, another team had 5 HR and the team with 5 HR lost a point in the standings or more as a result.

For some reason, my stat service goofed and 2002 doesn't track the weekly stats. So the data reads as follows: 1998-2006, with a blank for 2002. If there is no change in the category, I will list NC.

HR: 10, 4, 7, 5, 9, NC, 9, NC.
RBI: 18, 24, 9, 36, NC, 9, 10, NC.
SB: 5, 2, 4, 8, 5, 4, 6, 4.
W: 5, 4, 5, 3, 5, 1, 3, 2.
S: 1, 2, NC, NC, 2, NC, 5, 3.

One way of reading these data is that, in a league with eight years of data, the maximum HR swing that affected the league standings was 10, the maximum RBI swing 36, steals eight, wins five and saves five. If you were further behind in one of these categories at the beginning of the week, you can probably kiss that category goodbye, barring your opponent having a mostly injured or non-productive roster.

Delving deeper, I was more than a little surprised at some of these results. The 36 RBI leap aside, it's harder to make a move in that category one way or another in the final week. Home runs, it turns out, appears to be far more dynamic category down the stretch. My guess that's as easier for a line-up of half-timers (due to teams clinching or resting their vets) to pop a bunch of HR than it is to drive in a bunch of runs in the last week.

Stolen bases are surprisingly fluid as well. I expected to see at least one year where there wasn't movement in this category, but every year there is a shift in the last week. The theory I was operating under was that players don't run as much in order to reduce the risk of injury in the final week. However, there are enough 5+ SB swings historically between contenders; it turns out that speedsters do run in the last week.

The pitching categories, in my opinion, were actually more predictable. Wins moves more than saves in most years. Part of this is because it's easier to pick up a bunch of starting pitching - good, bad, or ugly - for the final week of the season, whereas you're not going to find a miracle closer sitting in the free agent pool who will pick up three saves. A more significant part of the equation, though, is that teams start sitting their closers once the games don't matter. There's a good chance that Mariano Rivera, Joe Borowski, Francisco Rodriguez and Jon Papelbon don't get all of the save opportunities in this last week. This reduces the opportunity for movement.

In the broader picture, though, the good news is that there is the chance for a good deal of movement in the last week of the season. You don't want to get too cute with your roster and overdo it, but you can increase your chances of moving up a point or two in the last week if you make the right moves.