The new MLB commish made some subtle rule changes over the winter with the goal of enhancing the overall experience of watching a baseball game for the casual and hardcore fan. It remains to be seen if the new pace of play rules will lead to a better flow of action and a more engaged audience but no matter the outcome, commissioner Manfred should be applauded for addressing a complaint and trying to find a resolution. Your fantasy commish deserves the smallest of golf claps for his 2015 rule change proposals and instead we should all do a leaping team high five and congratulate the owners at large for forging ahead with new rules that should make for a better league. Just like the uncertainty surrounding the new pace of play rules, it's hard to say if the Shocker Fantasy Baseball League's new rules will be deemed a success but the commish wanted to take a few minutes of your time to show what affect, if any, the statistical switch from Batting Average to On Base + Slugging will have on our league.
Your father and your father's father grew up with batting average as a critical stat in their evaluation of a hitter. We have also grown up mostly using batting average as an essential stat to assess a batter but I wonder if our sons will be talking about OPS when they collect and trade Topps cards in a few years. OPS is a better gauge of evaluating the overall hitter because it ties walks and extra base hits into the equation. Of course hitting for a high average is a fine quality for any baseball player to possess but we can all agree a player that hits .300 with no patience or power is not as valuable as a player that hits .270 but will draw a walk and can drive a ball into the gaps or over the wall. This is why OPS is becoming a more popular stat for the common man and it's why I'm happy and impressed that our league was gung-ho on using is as a statistical category.
The real question now is how will it effect the players we prefer to draft and acquire? That's what this post aims to answer. First, I just want to give everyone a basic understanding of what is a good and not so good OPS number when it comes time to analyze the player pool. We're conditioned to know what constitutes a good and bad batting average number pretty easily but knowing a good and bad OPS number might not be as obvious. So to help, here's a little cheat sheet.
Your father and your father's father grew up with batting average as a critical stat in their evaluation of a hitter. We have also grown up mostly using batting average as an essential stat to assess a batter but I wonder if our sons will be talking about OPS when they collect and trade Topps cards in a few years. OPS is a better gauge of evaluating the overall hitter because it ties walks and extra base hits into the equation. Of course hitting for a high average is a fine quality for any baseball player to possess but we can all agree a player that hits .300 with no patience or power is not as valuable as a player that hits .270 but will draw a walk and can drive a ball into the gaps or over the wall. This is why OPS is becoming a more popular stat for the common man and it's why I'm happy and impressed that our league was gung-ho on using is as a statistical category.
The real question now is how will it effect the players we prefer to draft and acquire? That's what this post aims to answer. First, I just want to give everyone a basic understanding of what is a good and not so good OPS number when it comes time to analyze the player pool. We're conditioned to know what constitutes a good and bad batting average number pretty easily but knowing a good and bad OPS number might not be as obvious. So to help, here's a little cheat sheet.
Hopefully this somewhat helps guide us as a league when we see an OPS for a player and decide how to process whether this is good or not. I'm guessing most of you have done a little research on OPS, I know I had to, and if you haven't I encourage you to go to fangraphs or whatever stat table you like to use and associate OPS numbers with players. As you can tell, I have done a little research for my 2015 draft preparation and also to gain a better understanding of OPS when it comes to being a better baseball fan. I actually put this stuff together a week before our draft but I want to win this league as much as anyone else, which is why I didn't feel like sharing this before our draft took place. It's not like my findings are ground breaking by any stretch but I'll be goddamned if my hours of hard work on the laptop helps any of you jabronis win money in this league.
Ok, let's really try to find out what kind of players and what specific players are going to be more or less valuable in our new OPS world. Let's start by rounding up the top 12 ranked players in batting average in 2014 and see where they ranked in OPS in 2014.
Ok, let's really try to find out what kind of players and what specific players are going to be more or less valuable in our new OPS world. Let's start by rounding up the top 12 ranked players in batting average in 2014 and see where they ranked in OPS in 2014.
Well, this is alarming. Right off the bat (pun intended) slap hitters like Altuve and Revere look like they're going to see a significant drop in fantasy value. In fact, only two of the top 12 guys on this list ranked higher in OPS than they did in batting average. It takes a truly complete batter to rank high in average, OBP, and SLG%, which might be why the top batting average guys aren't usually the top OPS guys as well. Now let's see who will suffer the biggest drop in hitting value in our league and take a look at the high contact/low power & patience guys that should be dropping down our draft order.
Ben Revere batted .306 last season but it could've been the emptiest .306 in the history of baseball. If you're a major league pitcher and you give up an outside the park home run to Ben Revere, you should walk off the mound and directly into oncoming traffic. Revere ranked 12th in all of baseball in batting average but only 139th when it came to OPS for a difference of 127 spots. You can see that this list is loaded with a bunch of slap happy hitters who put the bat on the ball a lot, and probably a little too much, if there's such a thing. This is where our fantasy league will outshine all the others. Your lady or casual baseball fan will look up at the Coors Field scoreboard and see James Loney batting .290, then lean over to you and tell you that James Loney is a great hitter and should be in the all star game. At this time, you can take your OPS knowledge and tell that person that James Loney is nothing more than a below average hitter and is lucky to be starting at first base on his own team, let alone an all star team. Then take a sip of your microbrew with your pinky extended and give a self-approving "Aaahhhhhhhhhh" as the golden barley and baseball knowledge rush through your veins.
Let's turn our attention to the players that stood up and screamed when they saw the OPS voting results during our league's offseason.
Let's turn our attention to the players that stood up and screamed when they saw the OPS voting results during our league's offseason.
Now this is a list of high quality MLB hitters. Guys like Stanton, Bautista, Encarnacion, and Ortiz might hit into the shift plenty this season, dropping their average down, but they are all significantly more feared at the plate than pretty much everyone else in the league. Guys like V-Mart, McCutchen, and Miggy are such great overall hitters that they occupy both batting average and OPS lists but as you can see, our fantasy league is about to dig the long ball more than ever before. It's not just home runs though, as we can now yell at our hitter to take a chance at a double or triple and dare I say we just made bases on balls more exciting. Let's see which players just saw their fantasy value skyrocket the most thanks to the rule change.
These guys might swing and miss more than most others but when they do make contact, it's Ball Go Far time. Chris Carter won't have a batting average much higher than a pitcher's but when you look at the OPS ranks in MLB, he's the 13th best. These guys all seem to be pitched around a little more often and most of these guys seem to run hot or cold for long stretches depending on how their swing is feeling. Whether it's a timing thing going on or not, these guys will be forgiven much more by us when they K or hit into the shift because we know a well timed walk or double in the gap might be soon to follow.
So now you're probably thinking, "Awesome, I'll just draft a bunch of big hitters and win this league with ease". Well, as Lee Corso is famous for saying on Saturday, "Slow your fuckin' roll, home slice". I mean, "Not so fast, my friend". We do play with five other batting categories, which determine the overall value of a batter so while it's nice to think you can win with guys like Seth Smith and Chris Carter, we should realize that these guys strike out a lot more than others, don't touch the plate as often as Altuve-types, and are essentially zero threat to steal a base. So, we should try to see exactly how much of a difference OPS is going to make on our player rankings when we take into account all six offensive categories we use as a league.
So now you're probably thinking, "Awesome, I'll just draft a bunch of big hitters and win this league with ease". Well, as Lee Corso is famous for saying on Saturday, "Slow your fuckin' roll, home slice". I mean, "Not so fast, my friend". We do play with five other batting categories, which determine the overall value of a batter so while it's nice to think you can win with guys like Seth Smith and Chris Carter, we should realize that these guys strike out a lot more than others, don't touch the plate as often as Altuve-types, and are essentially zero threat to steal a base. So, we should try to see exactly how much of a difference OPS is going to make on our player rankings when we take into account all six offensive categories we use as a league.
I tried to take the ESPN overall ranks for last year and compare them to a ranking system I made up but I couldn't decode the ESPN player ranking formula, so you'll have to trust the DeFelie Stat Generator when you look at these rankings. I basically took the six categories we use and compared a player's stats to the league average and came up with these rankings. I took the top 12 overall ranked batters when using batting average and the other five categories and wanted to see how much they would be affected with our shift to OPS. The "Batting Rank BA" is their 2014 overall rank using batting average and the "Batting Rank OPS" is their overall rank using OPS. As you can see, there isn't much of a shift except for Pujols, Kinsler and Altuve drop about a round in our rankings where players like Trout and Abreu would've seen a slight uptick in value if we used OPS last season. Altuve is one of the biggest batting average to OPS offenders in the league but he would've only dropped eight spots in our rankings, which means OPS will penalize singles hitters but if that hitter also steals bases and scores runs better than most others, he's still someone to covet on draft night.
Overall, the top hitters we're taking in the first three or four rounds won't see a big drop or gain in value because they're all pretty good hitters no matter what the stat. It's the middle and late rounds where we can try to find an advantage or avoid catastrophe, which takes us to the tables below.
Overall, the top hitters we're taking in the first three or four rounds won't see a big drop or gain in value because they're all pretty good hitters no matter what the stat. It's the middle and late rounds where we can try to find an advantage or avoid catastrophe, which takes us to the tables below.
A lot of familiar names on this list if you've been paying attention. Inpatient singles hitters won't be worth as much as they have in the past and according to this table, the worst offenders will be worth about 15-30 spots worse if we used OPS last year instead of batting average. Let's close on a positive note to see what players would've risen the most last year.
Seth Smith, Carter, and Valbuena, who are middle-to-late round picks should probably be taken a couple rounds earlier than what ESPN's standard rankings will tell you because their large gain in OPS over batting average will make a difference when the 2015 season is over. The guys on this list shouldn't be rushed to the top of your draft day cheat sheet but they will be ranked higher at the end of 2015 than they were in 2014. Of course most of these players come with a downside and it might be smarter to go with Alcides Escobar over Bradon Moss in the 7th round if you need more runs and SB's with less K's but overall we will see more DH types making a difference in our league. You probably don't want to go overboard with this strategy because you won't have a very well rounded roster but taking guys on the list above will become the smarter thing to do if you want to pump up your chances of winning the OPS stat every week and gain a small advantage when the season is all said and done.
I hope this helps give you a better idea of how OPS will effect our league and how we can better analyze the OPS stat when it comes to our fantasy rosters and casual baseball watching. I don't generally do cartwheels about changing a particular stat in our league but I really like that we will now dig a little deeper when it comes to following and watching baseball, which makes this league and baseball in general more fun to follow, in my opinion. I think this is a smart step in the right direction when it comes to playing fantasy baseball and we will all look like baseball insiders when we're tossing around OPS numbers at the bar when it comes to lineup decisions made in the Shocker League and on a manager's lineup card.