7 Comments

My experience is seasons are made or lost in April, May and June. Deciding who to add and drop once players are playing is what makes a difference. Few players are solid producers each month. Avoiding players who flop multiple months, and picking up players who turn around a slow start is how to beat the average. I usually turn over half my roster during the season. This works in my 12 team league. Maybe it wouldn't in other leagues.

Expand full comment

In a pool where everyone is equally capable of evaluating the talent, your strategy sounds good. It would be a bit of boom or bust. That's ok where, as you say, being middle of the pack is no good.

I'd add a few things regarding investing:

- in investing, middle of the pack is far more acceptable. Maybe it's even the best option for all but the most capable full time investors.

- for the investor whose options are pretty much limited to public stocks and bonds, lower cost roster fillers can be pretty damn good.

Expand full comment

Seems like a good choice to have GPT-4 rank both hitters and pitchers for help in draft picking. Maybe also analyze last years draft vs results. Maybe try to get a pre-season ranking of last year to compare the ranking ability with results.

For my karaoke hobby, I will mostly skip the thrill of fantasy baseball victory and avoid any hint of agony in defeat, tho a few Wild Kingdom videos will be seen.

Expand full comment

Does GPT predict the future any better than joe sixpack? Let's put it to the test!

Expand full comment

Do you use any metrics to assess "boom-bust" potential? StDev of expert rankings, etc?

Expand full comment
author

No metrics. If an analyst makes a plausible case that someone could end up a top-five player at a position (including top-five 3rd outfielder or top-five 4th starting pitcher) the player qualifies

Expand full comment
founding

Arnold, When filling your roster, how do you tackle the trade-off between hitting and pitching -- a crucial margin. According to an old saw, "good pitching beats good hitting." My intuition is that it's a coin toss at the margin. (I'm assuming that, in each category, "good" has a clear, relevant meaning. Cardinal? Ordinal? Comparable across categories?)

Expand full comment