READER SURVEY: Responses to your comments

Your survey comments are insightful and help shape the content on this site. Rather than have those comments just sit in a file on my computer, I thought it might benefit everyone to take a peek behind the curtain. In this way, you can see how others view BABS and the website, and what issues they are having. This also gives me the opportunity to respond and clarify to everyone’s benefit.

In addition, many of you had suggestions for improvement. I’ll list some of the more interesting ideas here and hopefully you all will provide even more feedback. If something below triggers your urge to respond, PLEASE DO! Post a comment below. Drop me an email from the Contact Us page. We are all in this together!

About BABS

CLARIFICATIONS are comments that seem obvious to me but obviously are not. They harken back to the BaseballHQ.com surveys, when someone would cancel their subscription because they were angry the site did not contain player projections. I view these as 50% “please people, just click on the link that says Player Projections” and 50% “there must be something wrong with the navigation.” Given that RonShandler.com is a newer site, I’d accept a 40/60 split on these comments:

The BABS information came out too late to help me in most of my drafts this season. The timing last season was a lot more helpful.
The first BABS spreadsheet came out on January 20 and was updated on February 24, March 17 and March 31. This was exactly the same schedule as last year.

I would love to see the in season updates presented in a ranking order like the draft rankings.
Provide separate AL and NL charts.
Update it during the year.
Group by player positions.
If there’s a possibility of separating batters and pitchers it would make the draft process a little easier.
All of these comments are answered by the BABS Database. I encourage you to go there, read the instructions and play around with the options. It’s quite a powerful tool, and we’re only getting started with it.

I can appreciate that some players are riskier than others. But I never quite understood the concept of “risk budget”. Perhaps you could further explain how one might determine what your budget could be/should be.
With your membership, you also received the free ebook, “The BABS Project.” While I can’t force people to read a 100-page book, pretty much everything about BABS is driven by the concepts described there. The concept of a risk budget and how to set one is detailed in Chapter 6, pages 60-61.

I don’t think I could use BABS on her own. There were too many players ranked pretty high that didn’t belong in my mind. How can Jose Peraza be ranked ahead of Paul Goldschmidt?
Peraza is listed in the sheet just ahead of Goldschmidt but they are in different asset groups. I have encountered some people who try to use the spreadsheet as a straight ranking list and not consider market value. Displaying the breaks between the groups better will help (see below), but I probably need to have more BABS education material on the site. For those who’ve mastered BABS, what do you think would help?

INTERESTING IDEAS are comments that I agree with and could implement, or ideas that merit further analysis. If anyone wants to offer help here, I’d welcome the assistance.

The BABS spreadsheet needs to be more useful at draft time. I should be able to look up a player by last name, rather than dig through the list to find him. With 90 seconds to draft it is not time to dig around through 100’s of names.
For those who are “old school” pen and paper drafters (I lean that way too!), I agree that BABS is a bear to use manually. At minimum, I encourage you to at least try to use the spreadsheet, where the CTL-F (PC) or CMD-F (Mac) function makes finding a player much easier. Any old-schoolers there who have found a way around this?

Hitters that are extremely weak in power (HRs) and pitchers that are extremely weak in power pitching (Ks), should be assigned an ineffectiveness grade for these areas in the same manner as AV and ER liabilities.
This is an intriguing idea. I have also received emails from folks who wish that the negative AV and ER ratings appeared on the assets side of the ledger. Anyone have comments on these?

Needs to be an easier way to sort profit opportunities and potentially toxic assets. More clearly define the groups.
This is something I really need to do. Asset groups should be separated by a space, a line, color-coding, something. This is a programming issue but something I need to find a way to do before next draft season.

There should be a closer grouping of asset groups regardless of playing time. Would it make sense to show players with “M” playing time right below players with “F” playing time and the same skill set? Sometimes the line between “F” and “M” gets pretty blurred. Same with pitchers??
I can see the value in this. I will run some tests before next year and see the best way to handle it. I almost see it having potentially more value with pitchers.

Rework the injury risk component to separate chronic injury from one time injury.
Good idea, tougher to do. Maybe I need to get Rick Wilton back on staff.

I’d like to see the liabilities updated as the season progresses.
Keeping up with the liabilities in-season is problematic. The pre-season ratings are all historical and it’s tough to determine the extent to which an in-season variable will have a real impact. But I get your point. I’ll have to think about this some more.

NON-STARTERS are requests that are either invalidate or are in disagreement with the BABS concept or things that I just can’t see happening, at least not in the short-term.

The BABS ratings are confusing. Why can’t you use A+ = 3, A = 2, a = 1, or just numbers (1-3) instead of instead of letters, or something like AAA, AA, A and PPP, PP, P, etc?
As noted in the eBook, numbers denote precision, which BABS rejects. In addition, converting a (P+,s,AV) rating to (3,1,2) is even more confusing. Yes, I could have used AAA,AA,A, but (PPP,S,AA) takes up more space in your spreadsheet. It’s really not that hard to remember that lower case ratings are lowest, ratings with a plus are the highest, and double letters are in the middle.

You need a more intuitive presentation. I don’t have the regular hours working with BABS required to be able to look at the long string of acronyms and recognize exactly what they mean.
There were a handful of you who said that the BABS ratings are too complicated. It always takes some time to learn a new system. But I guarantee that it won’t take more than a half hour to learn BABS. Many readers here will tell you that the half hour investment is worth the payoff.

Suggestion: you might provide a 3-5 year comparison of individual annual outcomes between BABS and other respected player projections. e.g., Before the 2014 season, ESPN ranked/projected Mickey Mantle as the 47th best batter, while BABS had him 30th. By end of season, Mantle produced as the 14th best fantasy batter. 
BABS does not rank players. BABS ranks asset groups. Start by re-reading Chapter 5.

I realize this sounds anathema to the BABS philosophy, but more frequent updates to the in-season database. Things like injuries, rookies that are outperforming and thus getting more playing time, etc., will greatly change a player’s BABS assessment.
There is some value here, but I fear that more frequent updates will drive us to start making more decisions with smaller data samples. Have to think more about this.

About RonShandler.com

CLARIFICATIONS

Make it easier to find Ron’s ESPN articles on RonShandler.com that are for ESPN subscribers only.
These articles always begin with the line, “This is my ESPN Insider column for the week.” Do you also need them noted on the Members Only page? Quick rule of thumb is that every other article is an ESPN piece. (Of course, that worked every week except last week…)

I find it tough to tell if there are new articles without several clicks of inquiry. 
The articles are dated on the site, but the best way to zero in on the each week’s new material is in the weekly Friday e-newsletter. Each week’s new articles are always listed there.

Please include more general fantasy advice and tips. Not everything needs to be BABS.
And it’s not. My ESPN pieces almost never talk about BABS. But admittedly, BABS does drive the content here. It’s what’s unique to this site and sets us apart from the other sites that do contain general fantasy advice.

INTERESTING IDEAS

I would like to see more player premonition and profile type articles.
Those were fun to write! I wish I had to time to do these more often, but I’ll keep this note in my back pocket.

Could you write a “time to buy” or “time to sell” article on a regular basis as the season progresses?
Well, I already did a May article for ESPN, and the June one just posted last week. The problem with these is that they are highly speculative. The most problematic word in this comment is “time.” Nobody really knows “when” something will happen; we can only speculate.

Any way to provide BABS ratings for minor league prospects – if only approximately?
This is interesting, something I had not previously considered. It would be easy enough to convert minor league stats, or MLEs, into rough BABS ratings. Let me look at this for 2018.

I would be interested in weekly or at least monthly updates on your performance in Tout League standings–to see how BABS holds up in other leagues than mine.
I could do this. But are people really interested in “other people’s leagues”? Rotisserie Founding Father Dan Okrent once said, “There is nothing more interesting than your fantasy team. And there is nothing less interesting as someone else’s fantasy team.” FWIW, I was solidly in second place in Tout Wars until Freddie Freeman got hurt. I am around 5th place in both the XFL and the FSTA/SiriusXM leagues.

I would prefer that you wrote a paragraph every day or two, rather than an interesting article once a week.
I suppose I could do that if it’s the general consensus here. But I tend to write about deeper topics that would not be properly covered in a single paragraph. And I fear that if I start writing daily, it would quickly expand beyond what I could reasonably support.

NON-STARTERS

Need to see more content from more writers a la baseballhq.com; there is just not enough to keep me engaged sometimes.
I get it, but I am not BaseballHQ. If you want more content, I heartily encourage you to go to BHQ. I did receive many, many comments like this one, and suggestions for how to expand:

• Partner with a couple of like-minded analysts
• Peers that you see “eye-to-eye” on topics or matters that you respect their opinion
• Bring on top disciples from the BABS message boards

Then there was this comment: “I love your articles. More would be nice but I realize you are but one man. Bringing more writers on board could solve this but might water down the product.” Maybe.

Here is the problem with MORE…

MORE is not something I can do on my own. MORE requires additional coordination, editing, technical support and time. MORE often means additional customer service support. I did MORE this year, adding the BABS database and the forums, and all that did was create MORE growth, which now begets demand for even further growth, and on and on. I’ve already been in this place; I created one empire and am not in this to create another. Frankly, you don’t need another; you already have BaseballHQ.com.

But most important, MORE becomes more expensive to support, and in turn, would force me to raise the annual membership cost. $19.95 is a nice spot. It’s pretty much discretionary spending, and if you take a look at what you’ve gotten for it, you might consider it a steal. BaseballHQ provides a ton more, but it’s also $89 a year. My goal has always been to cultivate a sustainable entity here with limited boundaries. If you think that is unrealistic, or if you think there is a different/better way to accomplish that goal, I’d love to hear from you.

(Truth is, I probably could write MORE if I devoted all of my time to RonShandler.com. But I have several book projects that I put on hold for years while I was running BaseballHQ and I don’t want to fall into the same trap now. So I am working to find a balance. These books need to get written before my memory and/or my fingers succumb to impending geezerhood.)

Would love to see a fillable roster sheet that automatically calculates BABS for my fantasy team.
Me too. Perhaps this could be a long-term project but I don’t see it happening any time soon.

Please add DFS projections.
Not happening. Ever.

FINALLY

I couldn’t let this go without the best comment from the survey:

I only bought it to make sure I am not behind my opponents in my league. It is so complicated that I have nothing to worry about because I am a math major and I barely understand it. Although the theory is probably sound, I am not worried that someone will use it against me for an advantage. I don’t see it as usable.

Man, if I had unlimited time and energy, these are the types of leagues I’d love to join.

Thankfully, far more of you had positive comments. In fact, there were so many of them that I decided to create this Testimonials page.

Onward…