Bill James defined sabermetrics as "the search for objective knowledge about baseball." Sounds like something you might want to employ for your fantasy team, right?
Yes and no. After all, your fantasy team is likely still measured by the traditional stats - batting average, ERA, home runs, strikeouts, etc. Conversely, such sabermetric-invented stats such WHIP (walks plus hits divided by innings pitched) and OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging) are already used in many fantasy leagues.
So in your draft preparation and during your in-season evaluations, it's obviously most important to evaluate the players on the stats that your league actually uses. So don't worry about a pitcher's DICE (that's defense-independent component ERA) or a hitter's ISO (isolated power) when all that really matters is ERA and total homers.
"There's an awful lot of brainpower going towards those flawed stats," said Christina Kahrl, co-founder of Baseball Prospectus, to Forbes.com. "But fantasy baseball has become the great schoolhouse for sabermetrics. In a sense, these stats become gateway drugs, and it lets us introduce people to more interesting metrics and expand their horizons."
The baseline sabermetrics statistic is James' win shares, and while it's an interesting statistic to determine a players' value on a team, its application to fantasy baseball isn't clean and is probably misleading in some area.
That said, there are sabermetrics statistics that can help you, especially in comparing players on draft day or in trades.
VORP: Value over replacement player. For hitters, it's the number of runs contributed beyond what a replacement-level player at the same position would contribute.
Let's say you have a player starting out cold. Is it time to cut your losses? That's where VORP comes in. It compares a player to other players in the same position, and can help you decide whether he's in a catastrophic slump like Andruw Jones in 2007 or whether he's due for a bounce back.
And if you draft based on scarcity of talent at a position - and you certainly should to a certain extent - VORP comes in very handy.
Based on VORP, see the top 100 hitters from 2008, and the top 100 starting pitchers.
MLV: According to Baseball Prospectus, MLV is Marginal Lineup Value (MLV), a measure of offensive production. MLV is an estimate of the additional number of runs a given player will contribute to a lineup that otherwise consists of average offensive performers.
BABIP: Batting average on balls in play. It's the frequency of which a batter reaches a base after putting the ball in the field of play. For pitchers (a measure of the hitters they face), it's a good measure of luck. So pitchers with high or low BABIPs are good bets to see their performances adjust to the mean. The flaw in BABIP is that pitchers who rely on strikeouts have higher BABIPs, and Ks are a fantasy statistic in just about every league.
See the top 50 starting pitchers from 2008 in BABIP, both the highest and lowest.
Baseball Prospectus has a great tool for sorting players based on VORP, MLV, BABIP and other stats, both conventional and unconventional.
PECOTA: An acronym of Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm. And it's also an homage to journeyman baseball player Bill Pecota, considered a baseline average player. It's an incredibly complex formula that forecasts a player's performance in all of the major categories used in typical fantasy baseball games, and also forecasts production in advanced sabermetric categories.
Because it forecasts future statistics, PECOTA can be very useful to fantasy players, but it is a proprietary statistic by Baseball Prospectus, so to avoid copyright infringement, it can't be published here. You'll have to subscribe to Baseball Prospectus here.
