Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Keeper Numberology

All of these preview posts (and the impending draft) got me thinking about keepers, so I went back to 2007 and calculated the point totals for last season's keepers:




For those of you who aren't into statistics, the +- entries are the standard deviations. A large standard deviation indicates a lot of variability in the scores. For instance, in the case of BDJ, the score of Chris Carpenter (5) is very different from the average score (506), resulting in the large standard deviation (281). Small standard deviations, like that for MHI (27) indicate that all of the players scores are pretty close to the team average.

The first thing that jumped out at me was that the keepers taken in the first round averaged a score of only 491, by far the lowest of any keeper round. I attributed this to savvy KFS players trying to sabotage the Yahoo! Average Draft Position (ADP) rankings in combination with Chris Carpenters elbow. The overall average score for all keepers was 546 points, which was significantly lower than I would have guessed. Of course, after the scores of 2007 Worst Keeper candidates Chris Carpenter and BJ Ryan were removed, the average scores increased to a more respectable 574. These two ultimate keeper busts were both pitchers, but out of the other pitchers kept (Johan Santana(625), Jake Peavy(717), Brandon Webb(627), and Joe Nathan(548)) only Nathan didn't significantly outpace the average keeper score of 546 (or even the average with outliers removed, 574). I took this to indicate that keeping pitchers tends to be a high risk/high reward proposition.

As we should have expected, the highest team average keeper score went to Woosta (655), but Speedway wasn't too far behind 628). Interestingly, 2007 champions, CTA, were in the lower half of the list (5th place, 558 average), suggesting that the draft, a lucky schedule, and a hot streak around playoff time can more than make up for poor keeper performance. The relatively poor average keeper scores for the other 3 basement dwellers (BDJ, MST, and NHT) can be linked to injuries and/or lack of power hitters. I guess the old saying: "Chicks and KFS dig the longball," seems to hold true.









4 comments:

Grashbo Jonson said...

Sorry, I messed up the table. If you click on it you can see the whole thing. Is there any way to edit something that has already been published?

Ryan said...

If you haven't figured it out yet, the quickest way to edit is to click on the pencil at the bottom of any post.

These are great stats.

Anonymous said...

Well done. I can't wait to see Watts' numbers after the upcoming season.

Grashbo Jonson said...

Ahhh.. the pencil. Now I see. Thanks for the assistance, I'm new to blogging.