On The Value of Rankings

If you read my work last season, you may remember that 2018 was an uncommonly lean year in terms of personal fantasy success. Actually kinda hope you don't remember, because if you do that probably means I complained about it too often. Alas.

Anyway, in reflecting on the root causes of these struggles, one of the theories I developed was that compiling rankings had ceased to be a productive exercise for me; they were a hindrance, rather than a help. Simply put, they were anchoring my values too much.

So when it came time to put together RotoBaller's preseason rankings for 2019, I opted out of participating for the first time in the five years I've been with this here website. While there remains much to be determined, my results thus far this season have been notably improved. Case closed: Rankings are bad. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

Rank Hypocrisy

Obviously, it's not that simple. And a good thing too, since I've got to squeeze another 500 words out of this premise. We've discussed it in the this space before, but knowing your own tendencies is one of the most critical components of sustained success in fantasy baseball. It's probably important for sustained success in other things, too. If I ever have sustained success in something besides this game, I'll let y'all know.

Self-deprecation aside, understanding the way you play the game is crucial. In my case, I gravitate toward a somewhat risk-averse approach. It became apparent that last season, I clung too tightly to my preseason valuations as a result of that natural tendency. It made me too slow to react to what was happening, and as a result the Juan Sotos of the world landed on rosters that belonged to others, while I waited in vain for guys like Domingo Santana to get it together.

A question you may be asking yourself, besides whether or not you should keep reading this because we're getting particularly navel-gazey this week, is : If I've been doing rankings for years, why didn't they have the same negative effect in other seasons? That seems like it might be part of the problem. I had generally been successful, and the longer I occupied a position of relative authority as a paid analyst, the more difficult it became to pivot when my priors turned out to be garbage. When you spend a lot of time honing something, it's tough to let go.

Accordingly, in addition to not publishing rankings, I mostly avoided those published by others. It's also why you saw significantly fewer offseason columns with my byline. The goal was to recharge for the season ahead, and put off diving into the data for long enough that I would only have time to get the lay of the land and not wind up missing the forest for the trees.

Is this approach viable for everyone? Probably not. Like so much else about this game, it's subjective. The exercise of ranking 400 players just stopped being valuable enough to me to invest the time and effort required. That doesn't mean I didn't prepare as usual for my drafts, up to and including the construction of customized spreadsheets for most of them because I am a giant nerd. I just didn't start thinking about them in December or spend hours slaving over which NL Central utility guy might be better than the other.

Instead, I relied more on intuition backed by the strong research foundation I'd already developed. That may not sound terribly different, but even that subtle change yielded positive results.

Is it possible that I was simply luckier this year than last? Absolutely. We could be back here in August 2020 and I'll be whining about how taking a hands off approach to preseason prep brought nothing but ruin. But it feels like this year was the discovery a sweet spot between winging it and overthinking it.

Or maybe I'm just jealous of Mariano. Either way.

The Friday Meta is Kyle Bishop's attempt to go beyond the fantasy box score or simple strategic pointers and get at the philosophical and/or behavioral side of the game. It is hopefully not as absurd, pretentious, or absurdly pretentious as that sounds.

More Fantasy Baseball Analysis