Understanding "Value"

wtapppp  3/19/2014 12:00 AM

Say my league settings comes out looking like this for the catching position. Sorting by Value, does that mean only 3 catchers would bring positive value to whoever they were playing for? All other catchers last year were hurting their teams?

I understand Z-scores I'm just having trouble understand the "Value"

silentjim   3/19/2014 7:36 AM

Simple answer is no. A Z score shows essentially where ever player is at in a scale. A player with a Z score of zero would be the average player out of the total player pool (However many teams there are times players per team). What you're seeing here is that only three catchers perform above the average fantasy baseball player. And because good catchers are hard to find you'll see that their positional value is increased quite a bit because of this.

It's been mentioned before, but essentially for catchers this means two things. You reach early and nab one of the good catchers, or you simply wait forever and take whoever else is available at the end of the draft.

wtapppp  3/19/2014 10:36 AM

Thank you. So is "value" an overall z-score of all the categories selected?  If you took the combined "value scores" of all the hitters and pitchers they would = Zero?

silentjim   3/19/2014 10:46 AM

Value would be an average z score for all of the categories that a player would qualify in. In baseball, for example Mike Trout isn't penalized for not getting pitching stats like wins, ks, etc, and vice versa.

If you added up all the value scores in a player pool they would not equal zero. For one z score or the value column is an average score of the z score for each category the player participates in. But then z scores are based on averages and standard deviations so more than likely if you added up all of the z scores in HR for example you'd probably get a negative total since a huge chunk of players don't hit for power and thus bring negative value since they fall below the average player.