Someone suggested to me that we should add OBP as a stat for our fantasy baseball league.  Here is my response:

Yeah I have thought about that too, but I don’t think we can change it.  Its true that in baseball OBP is important, but traditionally in fantasy baseball it never has been.  The traditional stats for fantasy baseball are HR, R, RBI, SB and AVG, and on the pitching side W, K, ERA, WHIP, and S.  I added TB because that factors doubles and triples into things, and to balance it out I added CG because that rewards a fantasy team if one of their pitchers has a really great game.  I could see adding OBP as a batting stat, but then we would need to add another pitching stat.  I did fantasy baseball one year when we had tons and tons of stats that were evaluated and it wasn’t very good and I’m afraid if we keep adding stats it will turn out like that again.

What you need to do as a fantasy baseball manager is understand what stats are counted ahead of time and draft accordingly, and manage your team accordingly.  Really it doesn’t matter what stats are counted so long as everyone understand them ahead of time.  If we chose only to have SB and AVG as a category then we could have an OK year and people would just draft accordingly with SB guys being very valuable and HR guys not being valuable at all.  There are lots of things in fantasy baseball that don’t quite match real baseball and OBP is one of them.  Remember that just as adding OBP would make some guys more valuable it would also make a lot of other guys less valuable.

Also I think the truth is that if a guy like arod is slumping your team SHOULD be negatively effected, even if he is managing get walks.  If you add too many stats then it doesn’t matter how your guys are doing they will be doing SOMETHING good and the outcome of each head to head match up is more of a coin toss then a judge of which team plays better.

Ok so now that I have thought about it a little more here is the long answer:  The more stats you add the less important each stat becomes.  Also, the more stats you add the more players move into the “really good” category.  For an example right now Albert Pujols pretty much stands alone as the best player in baseball in standard 5×5 leagues.  He rules HRs, R, RBI, and AVG.  That is 80% of the batting stats, and so he is extremely valuable.  If you add OBP to the stats that are counted then suddenly Pujols becomes a little bit less valuable.  his OBP was 431 last year, which is good, but is not incredible.  Pujols now dominates only 66% of the batting stats.  He instantly became less valuable.  Lets say there is another guy who wont hit as many HRs, but will get as many Runs, RBI, and AVG and in addition have an incredible OBP.  That other guy will now be dominant in 66% of batting stats.  He is thus just as valuable as Pujols.

There is already some of that happening because SB is a stat.  Albert Pujols is ranked first because he rules 80% of 5×5 stats.  Jose Reyes is ranked second and almost as high as pujols because he too is projected to dominate 80% of batting stats, since he dominates R, RBI, AVG, and SB.  The fact that he doesn’t get as many HRs is offset by the fact that he gets tons of SB and his value is increased to that of Pujols.  The more stats you add the more players move up into that top tier of really valuable players, and by the same token the less valuable each player in that highest tier becomes.

If you think about fantasy baseball you are dividing up players that play for 30 teams among 12 teams.  This means that already each fantasy team has many more elite players on it then an average MLB team.  If you add more elite players to the fantasy pool (as adding a stat would do) then it would become harder and harder for one fantasy team to be better then another.  For example lets go back to comparing Pujols and Reyes.  Lets say SB isn’t a stat for a second.  If SB wasn’t a stat then the team that had Pujols would clearly be better then every other team (if everything else was equal) because Pujols would dominate 100% of the batting stats.  Once you add SB as a stat then the team that has Pujols becomes worse and the team that has Reyes becomes better.  The more stats you add the more the good teams are made worse and the more the bad teams are made better.  If you have too many stats then all the teams become about the same, with some teams dominating some stats and other teams dominating other stats.

By the way I am not advocating removing SBs.  I think with the standard 5×5 stats there is a perfect balance and it allows for just enough elite players for 12 teams.  This is why so many leagues adopt the standard 5×5 stats.

So that is the long explanation as to why adding another stat would be bad for the league.  I know that adding OBP wouldn’t be the end of the world or anything, but when you have the perfect balance with 5×5 stats then why change?

Also by the way I am not trying to discount the value of OBP to baseball or player evaluation.  You may find it as a very useful measure of a hitters patience and his likely hood of scoring runs and increasing his avg.  But in drafting and managing your team don’t draft someone or leave someone in the lineup if all they have is a great OBP since that stat by itself isn’t counted.

By the way if a player goes 0-1 but walks three times it does impact your score because walks don’t count as ABs, so your AVG is increased (by virtue of it staying the same rather then going down.)  Also if that guy walks then he has a chance of scoring a run, which increases your score, or getting an RBI (walk with the bases loaded), which increases your score.  He can also steal a base.  So a walk, though it does not directly impact your score, can secondarily impact every batting statistic except for HRs.  If Arod goes 0-1 with 3 walks then he will also have a couple of runs, his average will only drop a tiny bit since only one AB is counted against it, and he might even have an RBI or a stolen base.  If Arod goes 0-4 in four ABs (more likely then his average drops quite a bit and he has no chance for a run, an RBI, or an SB.  So OBP is counted secondarily, just not directly.

For all the reasons that I stated above I think that we should remove TB and CG from the stats that we count in our league and go with the traditional 5×5 stats.