What does the card price reflect?

Since 80 million is the standard expected team salary then they might set total salaries at 30 times 80 million=2.4 billion. If you look at Nick Markakis's and Dustin Pedroia 's cards they are priced identically, even though you would expect Pedroia's card to be a lot more expensive because second base is far more valuable defensively. This leads me to think that they have comparisons at each position (as I. Strether argued above). So looking at offense you add the contributions ( by looking at Strat's criteria and weighting them by their importance) of the players at each position to find its contribution to offense and defense. Then if RF had more of a contribution it would be assigned a higher percentage of the total 2.4 billion than say LF (just for example). A similar assessment would be done for pitchers. So each position would get a total amount of salary based on its relative contribution. Then for each position the mean is taken of all the players based on Strat's weighted criteria and that mean score will be given the average salary calculated by adding the total of the salary allocated to the position/total number of players with salaries being given based on positive or negative standard deviations from the mean salary. So that is why you get the anomaly of Pedroia being wrongly priced on a par with Markakis--each position will have a different skewing of its salaries based on its variance from the mean and perhaps Markakis's excellent defense gets overvalued because right field defense was bad last year.

Just speculation of course (I cross-posted with Wavy Gravy)

Interesting stuff, guys. Speaking of interesting stuff, Wavygravy, you made an interesting claim in another thread:

Speaking of search engines, it's easy to access any manager's past teams.

This was a fascinating claim, since so many people want that access and believe they don't have it. So, could you please show us how to access any manager's past teams? I'm not particularly interested, but many managers are.

Personnally, I think Wavy and Freeman have good insights of what needs to be done in terms of structural/comparative values, but I do believe that what SOM does is much more simpler than what they propose. I believe that, once SOM found out a good pricing system some ten years ago, SOM probably repeated the formulas year after year (with lots of little tweaks and maybe two or three more important changes that didn't affect the overall structure).

Of course, SOM set up a pricing structure that would make sense of 12 teams playing with 80M. With that in mind, I would guess that 40M for offense would probably be the minimum that a competitive team should spend and so, in my opinion, SOM established the pricing structure so that, roughly speaking, the 12th best value at each defending position is priced around 4M---with an exception to first baseman whose 12th best value was probably set around 5M, mostly because the pool of offensive threats is greater there and first basemen are often dh (and vice versa--dh having first baseman ratings). This way, an ower with the 12th best value at every position would still field a roster of a minium of 36M-37M---40M with the bench included.

I'm pretty sure that SOM did so not by playing with standard deviations or complicated formulas, but simply by adding/substracting a baseline for each position when calculating the defensive value. Something very similar to how sabermetricians calculate Win Value: Batting Runs + Base Running Runs +Fielding Runs + Positional Adjustment. Of course, the positional adjustment can be integrated to the formulas calculating fielding runs easily. By using this positional adjustemnt, you also have your comparative element, and by setting the right adjustment--you have your structural element so that rosters fit the 80M that SOM targeted.


I also believe that SOM lives very well with small variations. In the last three years, the overall sum of all players has changed (it changed from 2.11B to 2.07B), the hitting vs pitching ratio has changed towards the pitching (from 63/37 in 2012 to 61/39, which is in accordance to the small reduction of offense since in the last years). So I don't think SOM is using rigid total sums or rigid ratios (as suggested above). Similarly, even though the quality of this year's set at ss is pretty low, so much that your 12th best value at ss is closer to 3M than to 4M, SOM didn't seem to have adjusted. As long as the overall picture is fine, they go along with their formulas---which of course doesn't exclude some tweaks here and there to make the pricing look better.

Here are prices for 12th highest salary player whose primary position is the stated position:

C 3.87
1B 6.00 (4.08=18th if you assume 1b gets half of DH positions)
2b 3.00
SS. 3.39
3B. 4.11
LF 4.64
CF 4.76
RF 4.63

So on this extremely limited data, one would could hypothesize that 2b and SS have their 12th place guy set at around 3million, 1B , 3B and C are set at about 4 million and outfielders are set up at about 5 million.
I think you might be on to something Marc.

Wavy, Freeman and MarcP - great analysis! Thanks for the perspectives on pricing, all great takes on it.

Isn't it possible that they also build in some percentage of randomness up or down -- say zero to 10% -- to "create" bargains and bad values? I've always taken it for granted that this was so.

I would be very surprised if this was so---in fact I'm sure it's not the case. In its beginning, SOM (via Bernie--kudos to him if he's still around) was very transparent in its intention to have the most accurate pricing system. The system plays like an equalizer if the cards are valued accurately. SOM has always been careful to have a game that newbies can play and have a chance to win---that's how you gain new customers, while in the same time have a pricing system that "appeals" to veterans--hence tweaking the system, but more in a systematic way, and certainly not in the scale it used to be.

The old folks who have been playing-online since when it was created will remember that some cards were severly over/under valued at the beginning, first two-three seasons, it was easy for experienced owners to grab the most underrated cards, and newbies quickly became punching bags for experienced managers. I had a team, in a regular 80M league, which won 118 games, and remember, this was before the improve stats accuracy scandall. With the current pricing structure, no team could dominate like this one (in regular 80M leagues).

http://onlinegames.strat-o-matic.com/team/518567

That is one insane team Marc! Let me guess, the wildcard took you down in the championship?

I have to say though, I've often wondered about the possibility of some random pricing factor being built in too, similar to what Clowntime mentioned. Seems every year there are a handful of bargain buys out there, just not at the extremes we saw in 2001. Examples from 2013 would have been guys like Infante, Carp, or some of the SS3s. Again, not huge glaring bargains, but good value plays nonetheless. I dunno, maybe some guys are bargains based in ballparks though, too (thinking more about Carp in that instance).

That is one insane team Marc! Let me guess, the wildcard took you down in the championship?

You've guessed it!! Also, like I said earlier, in those years, SOM had the "increase stat accuracy" turned on, so powerful teams were affected at the season endings because sluggers would have their stats "corrected". My team had a 14-11 record and scored almost 2 fewer runs per game in those last 25 games---and my gut feelings is that this "correction" was continuing during the playoffs, but maybe I'm wrong.

I dunno, maybe some guys are bargains based in ballparks though, too (thinking more about Carp in that instance).

I think you're spot on!! When you establish a pricetag, there is a lot of "context-specifics" that you have to assume, and if one coach plays continuosly in a specific context, then there is a constant deviation that might very well be systematically positive. Moreover, I do believe that Strat, in establishing pricetags, under-evaluates some areas (clutch, injury-prone players) and so some players are truely bargains because they have these assets.

Very interesting. It really is about getting the most for your money and hoping the rolls at least even out.

Wow that team of Mark's from 2001 was loaded. It looked to me like Omar Zivquel and Boone were under priced for that set.

It is interesting to think about what they do not take into account when pricing players? Clutch? Bunting? Hit Run? SB? Arm?