Here's the good point:
I think the SGP process of pricing is a lot of hoo-hah with little practical purpose. If you're making general purpose prices there should be adjustments for the categories that teams regularly dump (saves and steals), but since you can't know what the spread in any individual league's categories is going to be, adjusting for it is as likely to be wrong as right.Some of you are probably nodding your heads. But I'll bet many of you are scratching them instead. So I'll take a few steps back.
Back in the very early days of Rotisserie, the few pricing systems that were around used what was known as a scarcity model of pricing, where the less of something there was, the more valuable it was in terms of pricing. The problem with this approach was that someone like Vince Coleman back when he stole 100+ bases would have been worth $90 since he was stealing so many bases and providing such a rare stat so frequently.
SGP is "Standings Gain Points" for short and attempts to weigh stats based on how competitive individual categories are in each league. Alex Patton's pricing model puts a 3:2:1 weight on RBI/HR/SB, more or less. And, yes, the adjustment is primarily made based on the fact that some teams generally dump steals or saves (particularly in 4x4 leagues), and if one or two teams dump a category, it depends to depress prices in the category.
I agree with Rotoman that it is impossible to predict how this will play out in every individual league. Non-carryover leagues play differently than keeper leagues. Teams are less likely to dump categories in 5x5 than they are in 4x4. Some leagues cherish saves and pay a premium for scarcity: both at the auction and once the season starts.
However, you do probably want to make some kind of adjustment and avoid falling back on a pure scarcity model. Unless you want to pay $80 for Jose Reyes, of course.
Rotoman is right that adjusting for your league's individual spreads would theoretically be the correct way to set prices for each individual league. However, the perfect adjustment would be based on what is going to happen in the upcoming season, not what happened the year before.
To that end, you probably are better off with a generic adjustment. But, again, you should make an adjustment of some kind, even if you are simply tweaking based on your league's specific bids. Paying $55 for Joe Nathan or Heath Bell next year isn't going to win you your league, even if they are technically that valuable.
1 comment:
Thanks, Mike!
To be clear, my pricing formula weights steals at 50 percent and saves at 70 percent. My justification for those weights is that they make the prices look normal (the way people actually play the game), which may sound arbitrary, but gets at my main point.
We create prices so we can evaluate whether a player is under or over valued on the market, but it turns out that there is no single set price for player. Player values jiggle during the auction depending on the strategies of the players in your league and how they're able to execute them. A guy you price at $16 might go for $18 if his name comes up early, but might fall to $14 if he's the first guy called after lunch, or bump to $20 if he's the last perceived power hitter available.
Which gets to my problem with SGP. The Hoo Ha isn't the theory, which in Art McGee's telling is elegant and insightful, but in the execution, which is overly complex for (here's the hoo ha) no clear advantage. In this context, how does it make sense to do all the calculations to reflect the individual weights?
Thanks for having me!
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