Ruminations of the early cellar-dweller

by Pat Cloghessy

Two months into the baseball season, and it’s not uncommon to encounter the malaise associated with poor fantasy performance.

This fantasy “depression”, as it were, can seep into the consciousness any number of ways. A fire start to the season has been put out in recent weeks. A rash of injuries derailed the season  before it even left the station. Swings and misses on major investments (high-round draft choices/expensive auction bids). You get the idea.

After two of today’s starting pitchers are pulled before the 3rd inning is out, self-loathing bubbles to the fore. Forget checking the live standings tonight. It will only serve as a miserable reminder of ineptitude.

Inevitably, it’s time for the next day’s games. The fresh start brings a tiny flame of optimism to the cold winter of a 2nd division fantasy team. Today is the day it turns around! Then, it does. Or it doesn’t. In reality, there is no one-day turnaround. In either direction. The team’s performance (and with it the owner’s mindset) builds upon the previous day’s games, and the week’s games before that, and the month’s before that.

So it goes. The ups and downs. When it’s going good, it’s impossible to wipe away the smug grin of fantasy domination. Standing in the middle of the kitchen, staring into the phone, repeatedly viewing highlights of this week’s fantasy MVP…is perfectly normal. And perfectly sane. Silent fist pumps and (not always silent) self-congratulations appear involuntarily as a visceral reaction to Edwin Diaz’ most recent houdini act.

But we who fancy ourselves dispassionate executors of a hard, data-driven plans do not fall prey to the whims of emotion, do we?

Well…it’s complicated. A game played and managed by humans is virtually impossible to separate from personality, and therefore emotion. However, the game lends itself so beautifully to numbers and empirical data. How could two ideas, seemingly at loggerheads, be so deeply immersed?

For so long (too long?), the game protected itself from the sabermetric revolution. Those in power were loathe to capitulate, despite the obvious utility of data analysis. Anyone who has read Moneyball is able surmise the reasons for this. Self-preservation.

And while we don’t have any proof that “the human element” plays into the statistical metrics we use to analyze the sport, the outright dismissal of it as a factor is probably not prudent. Relative to the whole, we know so little about the human brain.

This is not biology, it’s fantasy baseball!  

Right you are.

The larger point is that within the game, and without (here in fantasyland), the brain plays a major role. Our emotion would serve us best on the back-burner, but being of the brain, there could be something simmering that in some way informs us.

In sum, the brain appears to implement algorithms for collecting and assessing             information about the environment and encoding that information in messages that tell the body what to do. Somehow those algorithms allow the brain to conduct statistical computations that combine beliefs about the environment with the expected outcome of different behaviors.

We should distrust emotion when it leads to impulse decisions. At the same time the brain could be subconsciously aggregating information, and yes, data, that we have compiled in our earnest efforts to win fantasy titles. It’s also plausible to incorporate the above quote into a player’s mindset. How do we know the inner workings of their struggles? We don’t, and likely never will. It’s possible that they will never even know why or how they struggled or succeeded. Hell, science doesn’t even know for sure. Sometimes, it just clicks.

So, when it comes to the gambler’s fallacy, and when and how it applies to fantasy baseball analysis, we could do a lot worse than to tread lightly.

(ducks)

Which, in a sense, is what we do here. BABS utilizes hard statistical inputs, and produces asset identifiers in order to quickly identify who is who and what is what. But it’s a designed approximation based on uncertainty. BABS is here as a reaction to the uncertainty inherent in predicting this game we love. She does not (necessarily) ignore human emotion. Maybe she exists, in part, because of it.