Professionals in the game of baseball, managers perhaps more than players, will hate to admit this. But it was fantasy baseball that shaped a lot of how we now think about the actual sport. And while few, if any teams are as yet run by amateurs, it must be conceded that the amateurs to the game revolutionized the way the game is currently run.
Everyone knows what ACTUALLY happened in a particular game. What people want to know, however, are the "what if" scenarios: What would likely have happened if a manager had replaced Player A in the batting order with Player B. Or even, what is likely to happen if Player A is traded for Player C. Or should pitcher X have been "lifted" for a reliever, and if so, which one?
Following the development of high speed computers, "quants" have long wondered whether baseball teams can be managed analytically. Foremost among them is a writer named Bill James, the creator of "sabermetrics" or baseball science, who was perhaps the most avid person in this pursuit.
Such writers would pose questions like, do pitchers lose effectiveness after they get above a certain "pitch count?" And what kind of batters/pitchers fare best against left or right handed pitchers/batters? A painstaking analysis of historical statistics would often provide an answer.
Proponents of "scientific" baseball like James presented their findings to managements of teams, who listened with a tin ear. This was new twist, because most of the similar talents seem to end up in places like hedge funds (although yours truly spans both worlds).
The "professionals" had their own long-established ways of doing things, based on established practice, rather than "science," and "amateurs" like James were regarded as unhelpful at best, heretical at worst.
Sabermetrics was, instead, "adopted" by the new past time of fantasy baseball, which provided an outlet for answering these questions. It allowed amateur "managers" to use real players to create fictitious teams in combinations that usually differ from real life ones.
The results of the fantasy teams are an aggregate of the real-life players on the team, more or less, but some judgments will have to be made. Suppose the members of your fantasy team collective produced ten hits, two of them home runs; how many runs would that translate to?
It could be as few as two, if the home runs were solo, and the other hitters were stranded. On the other hand, eight runs is a possibility if the bases were loaded both times. (And let's say that the other hits produced no runs).
Realistically, four or five runs might be produced by the homers, with the other hits producing one or two runs more. Any given thing could happen in any given game, but over time, the aggregates would provide a history of outcomes from any given situation.
This could, in turn, be reduced to a set of likely outcomes (in the above example, the number of runs credited to the team would not be two or eight but some intermediate number).
These fantasy leagues raised some important questions. Do runs scored correlate with wins? Or should managers concentrate on getting "clutch" hits and runs? Apparently, the answer is a bit of both. As I discussed in a previous piece, the Los Angeles Dodgers get enough hits (and runs) to be a World Series contender.
While they didn't, in large part because of "unlucky" games, a fantasy team that was a facsimile of it would earn more wins by "formula" would do well in fantasy. Likewise, teams like the Chicago Cubs and Colorado Rockies win more games facsimiles of such teams would be penalized in fantasy.
This effort led the theorists to study relationships about the value of different components of offense in scoring runs, and ultimately wins. The least common denominator was total bases (the number of walks and singles plus one additional base for each double, two for each triple, and three for each home run).
One result was that walks, hitherto relegated to the role of "pitchers' errors," were reinstated as a legitimate batting tool. This was particularly true if you had sluggers behind the walkers to drive them home.
Suddenly, people realized that batters like the Toronto Blue Jays' (formerly the Pittsburgh Pirates) Jose Bautista (pictured above), who had a mediocre batting average, but drew an inordinate number of walks, and thus got on base frequently, had real value to a team.
Pitching could be analyzed in much the same way. About a decade ago, an amateur analyst named Voros McCracken hypothesized that pitchers' "contributions" to the game could be reckoned by the number of home runs, strikeouts, and base on balls given up.
This was because they were the only plays where the interaction was solely between pitcher and batter. Everything else, specifically batting average on balls in play (BABIP) could be attributed to luck or defense.
McCracken's backtests on historical pitching data showed that this was at least a plausible hypothesis, and if there is any other relationship that better describes pitching, no one has found it. Bill James described these findings as "very significant, very useful."
Their hobbyhorse came of age with the arrival of a new generation of young Ivy League educated General Managers like the Los Angeles Dodgers' Paul DePodesta or the Boston Red Sox' Theo Epstein. Either of whom could have parleyed their talents into MBA programs and careers on Wall St., but chose instead to focus on baseball.
Also noteworthy is DePodesta's former boss, Billy Beane of the Oakland A's, who was eager to adopt this "collegiate" way of thinking because he was a major league ball player who didn't go to college.
Fantasy leagues can also test the effect of hypothetical new game parameters by imposing team restrictions not found in the sport itself. For instance, it could help answer the question of how much of an "unfair advantage" the New York Yankees' almost unlimited budget gives them.
Some leagues could restrict budgets to, say, $80 or $100 million a year to prevent the phenomenon of having a bunch of highly qualified, highly paid players on one team.
In such a fantasy league, a manager who drafted, say Alex Rodriguez, might not be able to also afford Derek Jeter and/or Mark Teixeira unless (s)he wanted to fill some spots with cheap "replacement" players; a problem that the real Yankees don't have.
Fantasy could answer the opposite questions by removing the budget constraints of "small market" teams. How far could a Kansas City Royals team go if you put some hitting next to Zack Greinke? Or a good-hitting Texas Rangers team, if you gave it some decent pitching?
Nevertheless, fantasy baseball has already made its mark. Fantasy players (and sports writers on this site) are now getting entry-level jobs in "front offices" of baseball clubs on the strength of what they did there. So it may contribute a general manager someday soon.
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