Equivalent Fantasy Average: Learning as we go

My nephew loves board games. (I do, too, which is handy.) He does, however, have a bit of a problem with strategy.

See, the first time we played Monopoly, he noticed that the person who ended up with Boardwalk and Park Place won. After that, that was Grant's only strategy. He set his sights on those properties every time. That's all well and good - they're the best properties, after all - but Grant would do anything to get them. He would have two full monopolies on a corner of the board - say, the yellow and green bunches - and trade the lot of them for those two. "They are the way to win," he would say.

It had worked once, it was the way to play, and there was no questioning it. He's done it with other games - Carcassone, Settles of Catan, even Life. If something made him happy the first time, then that was his strategy forever. It took Grant several losses to realize he had other options.

Now, I'm a big fan of Eric Hosmer. If you've hung around this site for more than a few days, you know that.

So when I started fiddling around with a new sorting metric that I have since taken to calling Equivalent Fantasy Average, using math that made sense, and it gave relatively believable results that were all "Yay Hosmer," I was pretty daggone pleased with myself.

As I messed around with EFA, Hosmer did well. Jonathan Lucroy - another personal favorite - scored highly. People reading about it here responded favorably. I had Boardwalk and Park Place, and I was winning.

Of course, I'm good at math - but I'm not perfect.

If you read the comments section of the first-base EFA breakdown a couple weeks ago, you might have seen a small exchange about my approach. After I explained it, a commenter - very helpfully named "Mathete" - pointed out a flaw in my methodology. I separated players by position, then calculated the position's mean and standard deviation, using those numbers to formulate the final EFA.

Unfortunately, as Mathete pointed out, doing it that way meant that I was just weighting contributions like Hosmer's - a handful of stolen bases at a non-steal position - unnecessarily highly. It's good that Hosmer steals bases. It doesn't make him better than Joey Votto.

No, what I needed to do - and, if you look below, what I have done - is find the standard deviations across all the statistics, then use those with the positional means. That still gives extra credit to guys who do things others at their position don't - Hosmer, Paul Goldschmidt, Lucroy with the steals; Ian Desmond and Troy Tulowitzki with power - without making them into statistical demigods.

Blah blah blah, lots of explanation. Whatever, I made EFA better.

Starting with the shortstop piece from yesterday, our positional rankings going forward will include the update EFA projections. Below, I'm listing the revised EFA projections for catcher, first base, and second base. All the numbers are based on the 2014 statistical projections from Rotobanter. And Mathete - or any wannabe Mathetes out there - feel free to chime in if I'm still not quite there with my math.

After all, Grant's gotten better at Monopoly, but he still hasn't figured out the real key to the game: Hotels on the orange properties. (People go to jail. They roll to get out of jail. The most common rolls are those in the range of seven. Seven plus/minus spaces out from jail is the orange properties - St. James, Tennessee, New York. You build on those, you're golden.) So I'm all ears.

Catcher

First Base

Second Base

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