Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Fantasy Baseball and revealed preferences

Nothing makes me happier than when I can use economics to make a point that someone else is being an @$$. There is an owner in one of my fantasy baseball league who has a history of being a bit of a stick in the mud. This person is related to around half the league, and regularly hassles the other half. Long story short, she vetoed one of my recent trades (a veto is typically used in situations where a trade is clearly unfair and meant to undermine league stability) and accused me and the other owner of collusion on the league message board. Her, and her brother-who-joined-later's argument was that one player was "regularly drafted 4-5 rounds before" the other player. The thing is, in our league the players were only drafted 10 picks apart (less than one full round in our 12 team league).

Completely ignoring the fact that this is an opinion, that our rules are different than the ones the rankings are based on, that the intent of collusion is near impossible to prove, and that each player filled a need on the others team, I took issue on her statement based on revealed preferences. The players in question were Carl Crawford (CC) and Colby Lewis (CL). I checked on the "4-5 rounds apart" comment and it turns out the average draft position (ADP) of CC was 101st and CL was 148. At first, it would appear that the wench was right (148-101/12teams=~4 rounds). However, a large part of the trade was that CC was dealing with an injury and I didnt view him as the 101st best player in the draft, and neither did the person who traded him.

The actual draft positions were 130/CC and 140/CL. It appears that CL went close to his actual position, while CC somehow slipped a full 29 spots to 130. On top of that, both teams crying collusion chose outfielders with an ADP of 130-140 in the same round CC was taken. That's revealed preferences in its finest. Letting CC slip to 130 and not picking him is one thing, but choosing another OF ranked behind him pretty much damns the whole ADP argument. The crying stopped shortly after this was brought to light.

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