

Show HN: Advanced analytics for fantasy baseball players - tyroneschiff
https://baseballengine.com/about/

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eel
As 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.

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wadefuller
"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.

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ironblunt
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.

~~~
tyroneschiff
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.

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prophetjohn
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.

~~~
tyroneschiff
Do you have any input on the BE Score?

~~~
prophetjohn
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.

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tyroneschiff
The Baseball Engine lets you analyze and compare major league baseball players
in over 80 statistical categories.

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Groxx
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.

~~~
tyroneschiff
What do you like about this version that you would like to see in the football
one?

~~~
wadefuller
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.

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hornd
This is fantastic, thank you. Any chance of adding predictions based on past
performance, etc?

~~~
tyroneschiff
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.

~~~
hornd
Excellent. Again, this is really great!

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ilcavero
very nice graphics, but not having previous years data is a big drawback.

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wadefuller
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.

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kurrent
looks great, job well done.

would love to see a blog post from you explaining your development process on
the project

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fluorescentLAMP
Anybody interested in advanced analytics for soccer (a fledgling industry),
check out my blog: www.centralwinger.com

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tyroneschiff
Does anyone have any input on the cost that Pro has been set at or the pay
structure of the website?

~~~
wadefuller
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.

~~~
tyroneschiff
Added a 7 day free trial: <https://baseballengine.com/free-trial/>

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tyroneschiff
I am trying to figure out how to reach this customer segment. Do you have any
suggestions?

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gdilla
Contact sportswriters like Rob Neyer and Fantasy Sports editors/bloggers.

~~~
tyroneschiff
Thank you. I've contacted Rob!

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ironblunt
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)

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kylemaxwell
Always glad to see more hacking on the one sport that can appeal to geeks of
any stripe.

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binarymax
Great job. Curious where are you getting your raw data from?

~~~
sparkygoblue
Could be here:

<http://developer.yahoo.com/fantasysports/>

~~~
wadefuller
@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?

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cmaxwell
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...:-)

~~~
tyroneschiff
Thanks. The implementation is also very well documented and there are so many
different customizations that can be made!

