Originally Posted by Steve B.
I'd be very surprised if the Giants won, but with Greinke out indefinitely one never knows
I decided to go w Baseball Digest because of Nate Silver's performance in the election...
I have not paid attention to Silver's work, but as I understand it his big thing is predicting future player performance. I can see why that would make him valuable in building a fantasy team. "Classical" sabermetrics are less useful in that regard, because they analyze (and often reject, in large part) the utility of traditional statistical metrics in valuing a player's contributions to the team's success. In other words, if your fantasy league uses strike-outs and rbi's as scoring categories, then you want someone who will help you predict accurately how many strike-outs or rbi's a particular player is likely to generate regardless of whether you think those stats are useful measures of non-fantasy productivity.
But to be clear, that's not why I was recommending
James. For that purpose, you're probably better served by Silver. James and similar analysts are interesting for the questions they raise about whether you're actually capturing useful information when you track rbi's or strike-outs, and whether there are more valuable ways to measure player productivity (which in this context means contributions to the team's likelihood of success). Totally different concepts. The latter is (to me, anyway) interesting but is generally of limited practical value in fantasy baseball.