Fantasy Baseball: Baseball HQ's Rebound Candidates For 2010-Pitchers

It’s Lindstrom and Zimmermann. Please know these guys’ names….

If he can replicate any of the work he did in the winter leagues he will rebound in nicely.

Surprised that Shandler gave permission to post material that his customers have to pay for. I’m no lawyer, but I’d be ticked if I made my living off this stuff. Just sayin’

a few names were taken from a list, there was no analysis taken, just a few players thrown out to advance the discussion.

i would also add that there is really nothing groundbreaking about expecting these guys to “bounceback” most were beyond awful or injured in 2009…what shandler is predicting is more of a dead cat bounce than anything else

i have no idea what your problem is. what ray posted is 100% ethical. he is merely using shandler’s list of bounce back candidates as a way to start a discussion. he doesn’t include any analysis or propriety formulas and if you actually read what ray wrote, he disagrees with some of shandler’s selections.

the only way become rich (like shandler) by writing about fantasy baseball is to have a lot of people talking and writing about your processes for picking players, etc. so while you think your $30 book is being devalued, shandler is probably thankful that someone is excerpting his work and generating discussion on his processes, which leads to more customers. For example I knew who Shandler was but I never bought his book or subscribed to his website until I saw a few posts on rotoauthority about baseballhq and i have been a customer of his for the last 5 years.

I absolutely understand what you are saying, and agree, in part. Maybe part of the problem is that, I originally popped open this page, saw the headline, “Baseball HQ’s Rebound Candidates” and immediately thought that Baseball HQ was providing this information. Then I start reading and realize, "hey, Shandler is not providing this info, some guy is taking the content I pay for and reprinting it with not even a link back to the site (which has since been corrected).

The more I thought about it, the more I decided that probably next to zero thought went into the ethics of posting this info. Shandler was never even contacted. Plus, I’ve played fantasy for over 20 years and know that Shandler has a reputation of being heavy handed when it comes to his IP rights, so I was surprised to see his material posted here.

Not that it matters what Shandler thinks or what he does. MY bottom line – When I pay for something, I don’t want to see someone else getting it for free. Period. Shandler provides tons of other free content (have you ever gotten his Friday email?) to get his name out. You don’t have to give the world free access to something I pay for.

Do you subscribe to the HQ site? There is an interesting and pretty much parallel discussion on the excerpting issue. It is the AL Only forums under PECOTA projections. In case you don’t get the site, a Baseball HQ writer (a Shandler employee) posted what he thought was interesting PECOTA (Baseball Prospectus) projections. Someone asked if this was ethical since Prospectus is a pay site. Here is his answer:

It’s a fuzzy line. It would be unethical to post all of someone’s subscription only projections. I tried to post a small percentage of BP’s projections and to just give snippets of what I thought made them interesting. I didn’t give any player’s complete stat line and haven’t gone into updating all of those projections even though BP already has updated them, saying the perhaps the initial projections should have been labeled as a “beta” version.

I’m trying to create conversion either about the specific players or about in general what it will be like for a BaseballHQ subscriber to compete against someone using BP’s projections. I’m a long-time subscriber to BP and am not trying to give away their content for free to those who choose not to pay for it.

I don’t feel accused either: you raise a legitimate point.

Then someone posts this:
Take the following list, which I will cull from HQ in an abundance of caution. These are the top 20 players who are projected by HQ to have an AB/HR greater than that spit out by Marcels. In other words, these are players who either programmatically or via human fudge factor, were deemed by HQ to over-perform their weighted means.

HQ HR Overperformers, sorted by total projected HR.
Code:
Name
Nelson Cruz
Ryan Zimmerman
Adam Lind
Matt Kemp
Ian Stewart
Billy Butler
Jose Lopez
Chris Iannetta
Brandon Wood
Matt Wieters
Dustin Pedroia
Carl Crawford
Delmon Young
Howie Kendrick
Carlos Ruiz
Nick Johnson
Andy LaRoche
Jake Fox
Nate Schierholtz
Now, technically, I haven’t given away any proprietary information. And if I did this for every service (which I have done) and provided links to player cards generated from Retrosheet data (freely available) I’m totally within the letter of the law. There are no stats next to these names.

Any yet, isn’t the essence of the projections there for all to see without having to pay a nickel?

Again though, this is really useful information, especially if you perform the analysis with every major service, and compare the results. It helps you to understand how owners might value players at the draft, and also gives you different perspectives on the player pool that you might have missed. All without poaching one line of stats. And the info isn’t readily available, since not everyone has a database set up, or the SQL chops to run the proper queries.

My question is: ethical, or not?

A Baseball HQ writer responds:

don’t see any ethical problems at all. The primary copyrighted material (the projected stats) are excluded, and the content is being presented in a way to foster legitimate discussion — the essence of fair use.

I received a response from the managing editor of Baseball HQ, a note that I believe he sent to you as well. It said – you did not ask permission, they reserve the right to refuse and you have been requested to remove these posts. PLEASE REMOVE THESE POSTS.