1.  PARTICIPANTS

 

This section is mostly unchanged from last year.

 

 

Most of you are in the Active Participation Level, meaning that you will be giving me a ranked list from 1 to n, where n = 25 * number of teams.  The number of teams is going to be 22. 

 

A few of Forecasters are Trustee, meaning that someone will go through the forecaster’s forecasts and provide them to me in a properly formatted manner.  MGL and BIS will provide their forecasts, and I will designate someone to convert them into my form.  Baseball Prospectus will have their forecasts obtained from their public source, and someone will convert them into my form.  I (likely) will parse through the Fangraphs Community myself.  And Marcel is of course the simple system I constructed, and I’ll take care of that one.

 

2.  METRIC

 

This section is unchanged from last year.

 

The metric for hitting will be:

HR + SB + (H - .27*AB) + R/3 + RBI/3

 

The metric for pitching will be:

2*W + SV + K/5 + IP - (H + BB + ER)/2

 

The top players last year were at 150-160 points.  The median are also roughly similar.  You can even think of the points along the familiar RBI scale, as you will find when you prepare your rankings.

 

You will find that this system aligns itself nicely with the 5x5 leagues. 

 

You will also find that the pitching metric will somewhat overweight starters compared to relievers (compared to the 5x5 leagues).  This serves two purposes: (1) to make the starter/relief split more reasonable and (2) not to worry about teams loading up on relievers, which would force us to consider an overall minimum IP team total.

 

3.  ROSTER

 

This section is unchanged from last year.

 

The roster sizes will be:

15 hitters:   2 C, 5 IF (2B/SS/3B), 5 OF, 2 1B/DH, 1 Utility (UT)

10 pitchers

 

I will supply the position group for each player: they can be found in the http://tangotiger.net/files/REPORT_POSITION_CLASS.csv file.  If there are any nonpitchers in which you are interested, that has not been assigned a position, then you need to tell me that you want this player classified for a position by March 1, 2010.  Otherwise, he goes into the 1B/DH position group.

4.  DRAFT LIST

 

This section is unchanged from last year.

 

You will provide one ranked list from 1 to n, where n = 25 * number of teams (n=550).  You must use one of these templates:

Order, MLBAM_ID, Player_Name

OR

MLBAM_ID, Player_Name

 

If you omit the “Order” field, then I will presume that you are giving me your list ordered as listed.

 

You must use the MLBAM_ID (which will be my Universal ID) noted in the REPORT_POSITION_CLASS.csv file.  This file contains the entire list of players of anyone who played in MLB or MiLB in 2009. For your convenience, I also show the BDBid, RetroID, STATSid, and BISid for each player.  Any player who played in MLB in 2009 has each of these IDs mapped to the MLBAM_ID, so it should make joining to MLBAM_ID a snap.

 

If there is anyone else you are interested in (Japanese, Cubans, college players, etc who did not play in MLB or MiLB in 2009), then put a 0 in his ID field, and I’ll assign one to him.

 

I do NOT need to know your forecasted points for each player.  I recommend you provide at least 500 players. 

 

DEADLINE: Opening Pitch, Sunday, Apr 4, 8pm ET.

 

 

5.  DRAFT COMPETITION

 

This section is new.

 

A group of 21 “average joes’ (Joes) will be determined, most likely from the community forecasts at Fangraphs.  Each of you participants (Pros) will be entered in a competition against the same 21 Joes.  So, Marcel will draft first, and then the 21 Joes.  PECOTA will draft first, and then the same 21 Joes.  And so on.  This simulates the real experience of having a Pro competing against a bunch of Joes.

 

Then, a new group of 21 Joes will be determined, and this time each Pro will draft second. And so on. 

 

In the end, you each will be entered into 22 competitions, one for each draft position.  There are currently 26 Pros, which means there will be 26*22 (572) drafts.

 

6.  DRAFT STYLE

 

This section is unchanged from last year.

 

My computer program will select players using the standard snake-style draft order, and begin drafting based on the ranked order for each participant.  Once your position pool allocation is filled, I simply go on to the next player on your list.  If your ranked list is exhausted at some point, I will select using Marcel’s ranked list.

 

Each draft represents one league.  Once one draft has been completed, I repeat the steps from the previous paragraph a fixed number of times. 

 

7.  TEAM RANKINGS

 

This section is unchanged from last year.

 

At the end of the season, I will total the player points for each team in each league.  The top five teams will earn points.  All other teams will earn zero points.  The number of points to allocate will be equal to the number of teams. 

 

The point allocation will be as follows:

Points             Rank

0                 6^th through last place

1                 5^th

2                 4^th

3                 3^rd

5                 2^nd

11               1st

 

I will allocate these points for each team in the 572 leagues (22 for each participant), and add it up for each participant.  The winner will be whoever gets the most points.

 

Results will be posted at http://tangotiger.net/forecast/ .