Thursday, February 23, 2012

How does Yahoo fantasy baseball rank the Mets?

As February turns to April so do a young mans mind turn to fantasy baseball. I play in three leagues, two of which are hosted by Yahoo fantasy sports, which I am sure most all of you have used before you. When the 2012 season became live last week the first thing I did was check how Yahoo had ranked the Mets. For those unfamiliar with their system Yahoo uses two ranks O-Rank - for preseason rankings based on their projections and Rank - which changes throughout the year and is based on actual performance. Below I have listed the Mets projected starters and listed both their ranks: O-Rank for the 2012 projection and Rank for how they finished up 2012. (Note: O-Rank is separate for offense and defense, so Wright is not the 27th best player but the 27th best position player)

Player
O-Rank
Rank
Thole
373
901
Davis
115
890
Murphy
280
267
Tejada
372
826
Wright
27
230
Torres
602
804
Bay
219
294
Duda
189
426
Santana
243
No Rank
Dickey
283
203
Niese
352
480
Pelf
909
1011
Gee
565
462
Rauch
462
381
F.Francisco
190
280
R. Ramirez
417
239

Woof. As expected the Mets did not rank high. Our average O-Rank was 349 and our average Rank was 512.Our highest rated O-Rank was Wright who came in at 27 and was the 4th best 3B according to Yahoo. To be honest this is probably a little too good for D- Wright, I would have a hard time saying that he is the 27th best offensive player in baseball. After Wright comes Ike, who came in at 115, very respectable for a guy who missed most of his sophomore season. Frank Frank got hit pretty hard at 190th, coming in well in the bottom half of potential starting relievers. Our highest ranked pitcher was Johan at 243rd, as you can see these ranks tend to benefit established stars over statistical strength.

On the 2011 side our highest ranked player was, of course, Dickey. R.A. came in at 203, on the opposite spectrum our "ace" Big Pelf came in a shameful 1011th. My biggest disappointment of the list was not seeing Dickey with a higher O-Rank, I very much believe he is a top 25 pitcher. That being said most Yahoo fantasy users agree these rankings are way off base, so I don't put much stock in them, but is interesting to see how one of the most popular fantasy sites ranks our squad.

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