MovieManifesto

Fantasy football is by far the most popular fantasy sport around. This saddens me because, of the three major fantasy sports (baseball, basketball, and football), football is by far the worst. Its immense popularity can be attributed for the most part to its head-to-head format. Unlike baseball and basketball leagues, which utilize the Rotisserie format (whereby owners attempt to gain points in different categories, for the most part ignoring performance of other teams), in football two teams match up against each other every week. (Yes, I acknowledge that some baseball and basketball leagues employ a head-to-head system – I won’t get into exactly why this mechanism is flawed for those sports, but trust me that such leagues are reprehensible.) As such, every Sunday you wind up obsessively following not just your own team’s performance on an absolute basis, but how your players are faring compared to your opponent’s. Since you’re actively playing against a friend, sibling, or colleague, this mode of direct competition can be legitimately exciting.

Unfortunately, it is also completely unfair. The randomness inherent in head-to-head matchups often rewards inferior teams at the expense of superior squads, as teams’ schedules can be as crucial a component to their success as the talent of their actual players. By way of example, two years ago my friend Omar squeaked out an 8-6 regular season record and wound up making the playoffs, finished third, and won prize money; meanwhile, five other teams outscored him by greater than 100 points, only to finish 7-7 or 6-8 and watch the postseason from the sidelines (figuratively speaking). Similar inequities arise constantly in fantasy football – weighting matchups on a weekly basis will inevitably result in standings that range from mildly skewed to downright fallacious. Read More

The great thing about fantasy sports is that they provide you with verifiable data with which you can better insult people. I’ll readily label anyone who defends Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain a complete moron, but those who disagree with me can always supply some half-assed, wildly pretentious defense about how Aronofsky brilliantly inverted the conventionally accepted apparatus of narrative filmmaking in order to achieve a greater level of surrealism. Yeah, that’s bullshit, but without any raw numbers to back up my point (other than perhaps to mention that watching The Fountain physically damaged my eyelids), I can’t categorically win the argument, so I wind up just getting frustrated/beaten up by someone bigger than I am.

(For the record, other movies that fall into this category include, but are not limited to, I Heart Huckabees, Elephant, The New World, and The Darjeeling Limited. And yes, all of these films received positive reviews – if not outright raves – from the New York Times. Just further proof that I could never be a professional film critic.) Read More

The All-Star break generally signifies one thing in my life: misery. With baseball taking a three-day break, exactly zero of the major sports that I like are currently in season, unless you count NBA Summer League games (which can actually be perversely enjoyable if you want to see if guys like Darrell Arthur can actually pick up 10 fouls in a game). Since The Dark Knight doesn’t arrive in theatres until this weekend (or Friday at midnight at the Common, to be precise), I decided to spend a little bit of time analyzing the first half of the baseball season from a fantasy perspective. In related news, I’m single.

(By the way, I’m not going to get into a philosophical discussion about the merits of fantasy sports – either you play them or you don’t, and that’s that. I’m also not going to go all Dolores Umbridge on you and patiently explain how roto leagues operate, so if you aren’t interested and want to skip this post, I assure you I won’t be offended, and I’ll get back to movies next time. I should mention, however, that many people who play fantasy sports and take them seriously are surprisingly normal. I am not one of those people. Anyway.)

I’ll wait till the end of the season to unveil my massive round-by-round analysis of the fantasy draft (always worth the wait), but with the Mid-Summer Classic being played Tuesday, it’s only apropos for me to announce my selection of fantasy all-stars. Obviously, this is focused purely on fantasy statistics – defense is utterly irrelevant, as are other commodities (situational hitting, slapping groundballs to second to move runners along, running hard down the first-base line, spitting tobacco 437 times in a single inning, etc.).

My league is a typical 5×5 roto league, with the exception of OPS replacing batting average. If you happen to be in the batting average camp like most of the statistically retarded rest of the world, well, I honestly don’t feel like justifying the substitution of OPS – to quote David Paymer from The American President, I could explain it better, but I’d need charts and graphs and an easel. Just take my word for it that I’m right and you’re wrong.

As such, the hitting categories are runs, home runs, RBI, stolen bases, and OPS, and the pitching categories are wins, strikeouts, ERA, WHIP, and saves. As far as the sample goes, I took the top 200-ranked batters and pitchers according to Yahoo’s enigmatic “Rank” statistic and calculated some Z-scores, then broke everyone out by position. I weighted steals half their value for hitters (I’m not sure if that’s statistically viable since I’m using Z-scores, but lord do I hate steals), and I actually weighted saves 1.5 times their value for relievers, since saves are pretty much all relievers are good for in fantasy league given how few innings they pitch. For the record, I thoroughly enjoyed performing all of these calculations. God, Microsoft Excel rocks.

Without further ado, the Manifesto presents the 2008 Fantasy Baseball All-Star Team:

C: Brian McCann, Braves. This one’s a no-brainer. After a relatively down year last year that saw his OPS drop nearly 200 points (from .961 to .772), McCann is currently leading all catchers in home runs (18), is second in OPS (.940, slightly behind Ryan Doumit of all people), and third in both runs (42, tied with Doumit) and RBI (53). He doesn’t give you speed, but with the exception of Russell Martin (10 steals on the year), no catchers do.

Runners-up: Geovany Soto (56 RBI to lead all catchers), Russell Martin (49 runs to go with the steals), Joe Mauer (only because my boss will fire me if I don’t put him on here).

1B: Lance Berkman, Astros. If McCann was a no-brainer pick, Berkman is Rain Man at a math bee. The top-ranked hitter overall, he leads all first basemen in runs (79), OPS (1.096), and … wait for it … steals (15). In his career, Berkman had never stolen 10 bases in an entire season. Now he’s on pace for 26. Oh, and he’s also second among first basemen in home runs (22, tied with Adrian Gonzalez) and RBI (73). Read More