Archive of SportingNews.com's old SOM Baseball forum

Sometimes you know you have a certain card by a player, or perhaps a limited range of cards with similar characteristics, but the player's performance is very different. Maybe they're hitting or pitching better or worse overall, or not hitting lefties when they should, or whatever.

Do you reach a point where you start managing the performance rather than the card? For example, one year knew I had Dave Collins in his 1984 season. It's his best year, .801 E. So his platoon ought to be balanced. But in practice he killed RHP and didn't hit lefties much at all. He had a .893 OPS vs RHP (in 119 AB) and .660 OPS vs LHP (in 60 AB). Collins was my backup OF, but, as you can probably guess, after a while I started platooning Collins vs RHP and limiting his AB vs LHP. I found it hard to resist doing this even though the card told me their performance should be even. This platoon differential was surely just random, and his overall OPS of .816 was not far from the OPS on the card. Still, I've made similar moves with other players as well. Sometimes, I've managed lineups this way, batting the better performer higher in the order than the better card.

So, sometimes I find it hard to resist the karma of the rolls. Am I just nuts or do other managers do the same? I do try to avoid dropping a good card because of bad performance, but it's hard to resist having it affect my lineup choices....

Sounds like a bit of the gambler's fallacy, although somewhat in reverse.. When you manage on performance instead of the card, you are hoping that the outcomes remain favorable, but the probabilities should be what drives decision-making, regardless of past outcomes. Its the same as betting that in a fair coin toss, in which the previous ten flips were 80% heads, that next one will also be heads.

Its just one of those ways our minds play tricks on us.

I like to do a bit of both. Sometimes when the dice are rolling right series after series, I will move the hot batter into a number 3 or 4 spot in the order until he starts cooling down. Most of the time I manage to the card when known.

Mike

Half the rolls will come off the pitchers cards. Maybe Collins faced a number of reverse lefties? (You could've looked throughout the league for probable reverse lefties...that's something that I don't do, which might explain my record.)

Pitching is 50% of the game. If Collins has an even card, yet only faces good seasons from Guidry, Higuera, Valenzuela, Fernandez, and Key, then he is clearly going to perform worse against that group compared to a right handed mix of Whitt, Boyd, Rhoden, etc.

The difference in performance could easily be attributable to a mix of the starters faced that were left handed/right handed. The pitchers card does not however change Collins card chances so he was still the best player to have in the game. Unless you were facing strong reverse pitchers and then maybe someone batting for the other side of the plate would be better.

Always manage based on the probabilities,

Bbrool

[quote:d59bcd4b6c]Always manage based on the probabilities,

Bbrool[/quote:d59bcd4b6c]

Quite right. I did cut Tommy Herr in the round 2 bracket league who was hitting a meager .200 after 250 AB's (his .280 Even balance card.) But I did so not so much as because I was pissed at his performance but rather that I needed the extra salary to improve my team in other areas.

If my team had been humming along otherwise, I'd have stuck it out with Herr.

I fell victim to managing by performance against the probabilities on the card in my current bracket 2 team. I determined from an injury reveal that I have Oberkfell's excellent '79 year (next to his best card and balanced even). However, in the early going, through maybe 35 games, he wasn't touching RHP. So Buechele, who was initially hot against RHP despite a reveal of a lefty balanaced card, was in at 3B against RHP for quite a while. As Buechele's numbers came back to earth, I put Oberkfell back in against RHP, and have been kicking myself since as he's been hot as blazes. Shoulda just kept him in there all along! 112 ABs against RHP by this point, and he's hitting .313, slugging of .393 with OBP of .361 - and that's including his terrible initial stats. Live and learn.

:!:

The problem I have with basing line-ups on probabilities and not performance is that while performance should reflect the card, it doesn't always.
Right now I'm waiting for Ryne Sandberg to start to perform up to his card. An injury reveal shows me that it is his 40-dinger season.
After 87 games, he should be pounding RHPs, batting around .300 with an OBP of around .360.
He is hitting HRs, 30 so far. But his BA is around .250 against RHPs and LHPs and his OBP is sub-.300 against both.
Based on his card, I would have him hitting in the 3, 4 or 5 spot. Since I have Guerrero, Dwight Evans and Murray, I could hit him in the two spot. But, based on his performance, I'm Tony Armas-ing him and he's hitting in the 8 spot.
If he starts to perform, I can move him up.
Butch Wynegar is another example. An injury reveal shows I have his '83 Yankee season. He is hitting better against righties as he should, but his numbers against them are about 50 points lower than they should. Based on the probabilities, I'd lead him off against RHPs. Based on his perrformance, he's at the bottom of the order.
In the meantime. I have Dykstra and John Wathan both with near .400 OBPs hitting at the top of the order and Evans and Guerrero are in the top 10 for RBIs because there are guys on base for them to drive in. Wathan is also an injury reveal, one of three possible seasons, none of which bear any resemblance to his performance, after 130 ABs.
My offence is fourth in runs scored despite average BA, SLG and OBP.
If you think about performance as being a bell curve, most guys will perform right around their average. But there will always be players who underperform and those who overperform. And you want to ride those players who exceed expectations.
I think it is because each at bat is an independent random event that has no bearing on what the player did in his last at bat or what the players around him did. Plus, the outcome is determined not only by the information on his card, but on that of the pitcher's card as well.
This is, i believe, borne out my Wynegar again. His injury roll is a 3. Yet, his injury number has come up four or five times this season. How come? Because the dice don't recall that he was injured before.
Another example of the randomness of the dice results is a Dave Stieb season I had recently where he walked 155 and struck out 156 in 276 innings. It was his '85 season where he should have close to twice as many Ks as walks.
That's where the fun and the managing element of the game comes in for me. If I wasn't watching my team everyday to adjust my line-ups as the performance of players rises and falls then I'd be foolish to manage based on performance.

The point that the hitting environment may affect the performance (supplemented, no doubt, by random chance) is a very intriguing one. The team with Dave Collins that I mentioned is an interesting case in point. This team (in Royals) had an awesome OBP of .379. Obviously Royals helped, but I've played there several times and never approached that OBP. Also, while my hitters were all in good years, few were in their best years. I kept wondering why this team just kept hammering the ball. Maybe it had something to do with the enviroment of my division. One team had pretty good pitching but another team gave up 839 runs and yet another team gave up 1042! Team ERA was 5.80 with a 1.73 WHIP. They posted a team BA of .303, walked 716, and made 176 errors.

As the season wore on, I figured that any time I played them, I was good for 45 hits and a slew of walks. I never completely put it together, but maybe my excellent OBP performance was a result of having this one team in my division to skew my results upward. The other good-hitting team in my division was built for power in Jack Murphy but still managed a .346 OBP (along with 327 HR) in a stadium that hurts OBP pretty badly. This Murphy team outscored me 986 runs to 952. We were definitely in a hitting rich environment.

So, again, when we're assessing performance, sometimes the environment might turn a good hitter into a bad hitter or into a great hitter, depending on the conditions. And that might be a reason to sometimes play the performance instead of the card, since the card might be only a partial indicator of the overall probabilites. In saying this, of course, I'm just restating some of the points made above. But it's something I've never really thought about before.

And that really is the point.
Most of your players will perform according to their cards.
However, it's the players who don't that you have to manage.