“It’s better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.” ~ John Maynard Keynes
After playing fantasy baseball seriously for the past six years I’ve learned Mr. Keynes is one hundred percent correct. Odds are if you think Mike Trout will hit 40 home runs and he ends up with 42 or 38 your projection didn’t negatively affect your ability to win.
However, if you projected 30 and hits more 38 or more than your projection did hurt you. Every season there are players who put up fantastic numbers no one saw coming (I’m looking at you Peter Alonso and Tim Anderson). When you’re evaluating 300-400 players there will always be players you miss on. The key to winning is to be roughly right on more players than your competition. (I’ve found 65-70% in accuracy is the sweet spot for 12-team mixed leagues.) When I do my projections I ask myself if the 2020 season was played 100 times what would the average performance be for every player. That way, I have a great chance of being roughly right than precisely wrong.
Last season there were a record number of home runs hit in the Majors (11% more than the next highest year) and in Triple-A (57.4% increase compared to 2018). Both leagues played with a brand-new baseball. Major League Baseball commissioned an independent study to try to understand why the uptick happened.
The study said carry contributed to 60% of the home run increase and launch conditions to 40%. And a statistically significant link exists between the height of the seams on balls and the amount of drag they produce.
Last year there were 6,776 home runs. The next highest was 6,105 in 2017. The difference between the two is 671 home runs. Therefore, 403 of the home runs (60% x 671) was due to the changes in the baseball and 268 home runs (40% x 671) was due to launch angle.
As of December 15, I’m assuming changes will be made to the baseball and if that happens, we should see more home runs in 2020 than 2017. Therefore, all my projections will assume the home run environment decreases about 6%. I came to the number by removing by adding 6,105 and 268. Now, my assumption/projection may be incorrect but if I assume that rate for every player it shouldn’t negatively hurt. If I project Joey Gallo to hit 41 home runs and he hits 44; no big deal.
Since home runs should be really high again it depresses the values of power-only players like Gallo, Khris Davis, Jorge Soler and Nelson Cruz).
