3 Questions with Tom Tango

Tom Tango’s Thoughts on Fantasy Baseball

I got a chance to ask Tom Tango some questions this week about fantasy baseball. Tom is one of the writers of The Book – Playing the Percentages in Baseball and contributor to http://www.insidethebook.com/ and http://www.tangotiger.net/. He has also announced recently that he will be working as a consultant for The Seattle Mariners this season.

I wanted to get some of his thoughts on what stats we use commonly and would the game be better or worse with a change to a more sabermetric statistic scoring system. Here are his thoughts:

1) Of the 5 hitting and 5 pitching stats most commonly used in fantasy sports (R, HR, RBI, SB, AVG, W, S, K, ERA, WHIP), which do you think is the easiest to project, or feel your projections are most consistent in projecting.

Taking an educated guess, it's probably WHIP. The biggest problem in forecasting is getting the playing time right, and most of the other categories are very playing-time dependent.

2) If you could pick stats for fantasy sports that most accurately relate to real baseball what would they be?

It's a tough question, because you are trying to balance rate stats and counting stats. Ideally, you would try to do some sort of Linear Weights league, but making sure you set the values to a replacement-level, not average level.

3) Under this set of stats how competitive would the league be or would this make projections more accurate and the league less interesting?

You ask tough questions! I imagine that the more interesting leagues are those that are 5x5-type, and not points-type, since it makes it more interesting to trade a SB guy for a HR guy. That said, you can certainly make a league just as exciting with a sabermetric-set of categories than the traditional ones. As long as everyone is aware of the ground rules, it doesn't matter what categories you use.

Tom

I would like to again thank Tom for agreeing to answer these questions for me. I have to agree with him on these points, as a sabermetric game would lose much of the luck and possibly some of the entertainment. I also agree with him that WHIP is probably the most common stat to be accurately projected as it is playing time independent.

I would be interested in a linear weights league, as that would require having the best “baseball team” instead of the best fantasy players. This would make players like Michael Bourne and Willy Tavaras irrelevant, but make the results more reliant on actual baseball outcomes.

So who wants to join me in a wOBA and DIPS league in 2009?