Show HN: Advanced analytics for fantasy baseball players
baseballengine.comAs a baseball fan and fantasy baseball player, I hope you don't mind if I say that I am not finding this site very useful (or am I not able to figure out how to use it effectively.) For instance, given that we are only 3 (or 4) days into the season, showing 2012 season stats is not very useful yet. Showing projections might be useful -- you don't even have to make your own projections, as there other well-known projections out there such as Bill James', ZiPS, Marcel, etc.
Another issue is that selection of stat categories for the "BE scorecard" does not match up with most fantasy baseball 5x5 leagues since it is missing AVG.
I think the idea of bringing more data visualization to baseball is great though. This is actually the topic I am using for my class project in my data visualization class (due in a couple weeks now!) I will definitely keep an eye on this site though, and hopefully you will continue developing and improving it.
"Another issue is that selection of stat categories for the "BE scorecard" does not match up with most fantasy baseball 5x5 leagues since it is missing AVG."
Tyrone, it seems like your site's main marketability strategy is to allow fantasy owners big and small to customize their own comparisons and data visualization based on the stats they want to see. So with the above concern raised in mind, what if you allowed users to input their own 5x5 categories for their league and boiled that down into one number?
For example if someone was playing in a league that counted just Hits, Runs, Stolen Bases, Home Runs and OPS, and they wanted to know how Alexi Ramirez was doing in this format, they could just input these five stats and create a "Custom BE Rating".
This way, the hardcore data crunching aspect is still there, but the user will still be able to get a full amount of value from the site because it offers them the ability to tailor the data to their own league.
Thanks for your feedback. The site updates once a day, so tomorrow there will be more data
This is interesting stuff. I started a fantasy baseball analytics site as well a couple of years ago and have a bunch of feedback.
1) I would love for the site to integrate with my Yahoo/CBS/ESPN leagues and adjust the stat displays to account for my league settings
2) These stats are great for during research, but are also available at baseball-reference.com, fangraphs.com and several other sites. What would be great is for this to use the CBS/Yahoo API (scrape ESPN until they open their fantasy leagues API), and pull in my league info, teams, settings, positions and give me customized advice.
3) One this I found 2 years ago was that these stats were great for hard core stat nerds, but for more casual games, I've found that these numbers didn't make sense to them. We had to provide a simpler dashboard, with easily digestible recommendations/graphs and allow them to drill into more detail for each point.
4) Historical data is nice to have, but the real value would be to use the historical data to try and project the future. I don't really care that in 35 career ABs that Aaron Hill hit 4 HR (too small a sample size). What I'd like to know, is given his age, his ball park, and the profiles of the opposing starting pitchers, what range of stats can I expect from him?
5) In addition to historical stats, it would be nice to use your particular league context to define what a "good" trade is. For instance, trading Miguel Cabrera for Michael Bourn late in the season may seem crazy, but if you need SB and trading Cabrera to an opponent might prevent your nearest opponents from gaining on you in HR/RBI, this trade might make all the sense and actually improve your odds of winning.
These are just some of my quick thoughts and I hope they help.
Thanks for your feedback. I think the integrations with other services (Yahoo/CBS/ESPN) would be great as would be the customized recommendations.
I think the first thing I'll add is the projections, because that seems to be meaningful to a lot of people.
This is pretty cool, but some of that stat choices are a little curious. VORP instead of WAR? No park- or league-adjusted offensive stats like wRC+ or OPS+? No defensive stats at all? No BABIP or batted ball rates for pitchers? It's hard to do any in-depth pitcher analysis with only FIP.
I really like the ability to compare up to 4 players on any given stat that's available, but the choice of stats is kind of lacking and I don't see much to draw me away from Fangraphs at this point.
I know you said this is primarily for fantasy nerds, (and stats like UZR don't really matter for fantasy baseball) but you could pull in stat nerds in general if you expanded the stat selection to be competitive with FG/StatCorner/etc. Pitch f/x data could also be something to think about as a future addition to add huge utility to the site.
Do you have any input on the BE Score?
This is a tough question to answer. The fact is that your typical fantasy league is going to value stats that have little predictive or descriptive value such as RBI. I think that the BE score would be a good metric for how valuable a player has been in one of these kind of fantasy leagues in the past. However, if you're wanting the BE score to be predictive of future value to a fantasy team, what you're really trying to project is future performance in general. If you want to get into that, the inputs that you have aren't sufficiently predictive and you're going to have to lean on more advanced metrics. As far as I can tell, BE weights all of the 7 stats exactly equally. The truth is that RBI is a terrible stat and VORP is an okay stat, for instance.
There are some really smart people out there working on projection systems that you could look into. Dan Szymborski does ZiPS, Tom Tango does Marcel and then you probably know about Bill James who has a projection system by the same name. There are others, but these are probably the most popular.
I'd love to offer my assistance; baseball nerdery plus development nerdery would essentially be my dream job, but I would be way too swamped until June or so to be able to contribute. I don't know how SABR savvy you are, but my contact is in my profile and you're welcome to bounce questions off of me. There are also tons of resources out there I can direct you to.
The Baseball Engine lets you analyze and compare major league baseball players in over 80 statistical categories.
Very interesting idea - I'll have to introduce it to one of my friends :) You wouldn't happen to have football a fantasy football branch in the works, would you?
One complaint: on the root page, the right (?) puts text off-screen, and you can't scroll to view it because that hides the text.
Thanks. I've made it show on the left now!
Perfect :) Much better.
What do you like about this version that you would like to see in the football one?
Tyrone, first of all I love the data visualization efforts. As a personal baseball stat nerd myself, I always appreciate a site with in depth stats.
As for a football version, since the format is week to week you should heavily consider incorporating weekly matchups for players (ex. Arian Foster vs. Indanapolis Colts Defense, at home). There are a few good resources that I could direct you to for projecting matchups, but if you made your own incorporating split stats you could honestly provide a great resource to fantasy owners and, with the right marketing, capture a good portion the fantasy football market.
Positions are much more important for fantasy football than they are in baseball, so the tabbing system you have right now to distinguish pitchers and hitters is good, but expanding that concept to QB, RB, WR, WR/R, K, DEF would provide a good resource for all fantasy owners.
If you have any questions, email me. I'd love to help you out with this, and I could go on and on about where you could take this idea. The market for this type of site is just getting off the ground! My contact information is in my profile.
Unfortunately, I have no answer for that. I'm not a fantasy anything player, so I really don't know what would be useful. I can get ahold of my friend though, a (sports) journalism major who plays a few leagues at a time, and see what he'd like :)
This is fantastic, thank you. Any chance of adding predictions based on past performance, etc?
If you take a look at the data table, you'll see that in the BE Scorecard & statistic value columns they are either colored green or red. I'm doing a least-squares linear regression on the player's BE Score here and showing red if the player's BE Score is trending down over the last 30 days or green if the player's BE Score is trending up over the last 30 days.
Excellent. Again, this is really great!
very nice graphics, but not having previous years data is a big drawback.
I have peppered in some comments throughout this thread, but I've got loads more. Give them a read and dont hesitate to contact me if you'd like to share ideas sometime.
looks great, job well done.
would love to see a blog post from you explaining your development process on the project
Anybody interested in advanced analytics for soccer (a fledgling industry), check out my blog: www.centralwinger.com
Does anyone have any input on the cost that Pro has been set at or the pay structure of the website?
Pay structure should include a free 10 day trial. That way users will be able to see what kind of advanced stats and analysis that is provided. Through the free trial method, users will get a small sample of the site and develop a dependency of sorts on the site's analysis and find themselves needing it for the rest of the season!
There appears to be a lack of advertising on the site as well. Seeing that you work for Google, I'm assuming its not because AdSense wouldn't accept the request for ads, but a strategic move on your part. Nice job, it looks very clean and easy to trust. Having no ads at this phase in the site's development is a smart move, and as the site gets more web traffic it might be a smart idea to reevaluate.
Added a 7 day free trial: https://baseballengine.com/free-trial/
I am trying to figure out how to reach this customer segment. Do you have any suggestions?
Contact sportswriters like Rob Neyer and Fantasy Sports editors/bloggers.
Thank you. I've contacted Rob!
Also consider going the the Fantasy Sports Trade Association conferences. They have them twice a year and the opportunity to meet a lot of folks in the Fantasy sports world gives you an opportunity for cross promotion and just meeting good guys (and it's almost all guys)
Always glad to see more hacking on the one sport that can appeal to geeks of any stripe.
Great job. Curious where are you getting your raw data from?
Could be here:
@sparkygoblue Is anybody using this API? If so, have you ever used YQL? Since it integrates so many other languages like JSON, do you know how different it is from SQL?
From CBS Sports
Scraped or API?
Highcharts looks slick. My weekend project is using Flot. If I ever generate some cash from it I might have to buy a Highchart license and make the jump. Looks so much better...:-)
Thanks. The implementation is also very well documented and there are so many different customizations that can be made!