Last year, I started a series here at FantasyPros about behavioral science and thinking, and how we are able to apply different cognitive biases and ways that our brains work to fantasy baseball.
For myriad reasons, I needed to step back from certain aspects of writing, and the behavioral series was one of those aspects.
But I’m here to pick it up again with Part 4 of the 13-part series.
The pieces are evergreen, mind you, so you can get caught up pretty quickly.
You can read Part 1 on Anchoring Bias here, Part 2 on Availability Bias here, Part 3 on Outcome Bias here, and Part 4 on Groupthink here.
Before we get into Part 5 today, it’s important to talk about the idea of this, and give credit where credit is due.
My big escape in 2020 during the early part of the pandemic was reading. I always enjoyed reading books, but I ramped it up in 2020 and have continued ever since. There were a ton of great books that I read (here are some of my recommendations), and one that stood out the most was a baseball book.
Well, kind of.
It was “The Inside Game” by Keith Law, baseball writer for The Athletic. This is Law’s second book, as he wrote “Smart Baseball” in 2018.
With “The Inside Game,” Law combines different areas of behavioral science that are talked about heavily in the book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, which, as Law mentions, is required reading for everyone in a Major League front office.
Law borrows 13 chapters from Kahneman’s book, and he applies the critical thinking and cognitive biases that are a part of everyday life to baseball.
It’s a fascinating book, and Law does a fantastic job tying the two together to make it easy relatable reading for baseball fans who aren’t big on behavioral thinking.
It’s a book that I enjoyed so much, I read it twice. I recommend you do the same, too.
When reading it, though, aside from how I could apply the lessons in my personal life, I realized that all 13 applied to fantasy baseball as well.
Over the next few months, I’ll be covering these different biases in a way that will help you apply them to your fantasy baseball managing to inform your decisions.
I’ll touch on the cognitive bias, touch briefly on how Law applies it to regular baseball (I won’t give away his entire book. You need to buy it and read it!), and explain how we can apply that thinking to the fantasy game that we love.
Now, let’s get into Base-Rate Neglect.
Base-Rate Neglect
The fifth chapter in Law’s book is “For Every Clayton Kershaw, There Are Ten Kasey Kikers: Base-Rate Neglect and Why It’s Still a Bad Idea to Draft High School Pitchers in the First Round.”
Before we get into the relevancy it has for fantasy, or how Law applies it to baseball in general, let’s look at the term itself.
Evolve Consciousness defines Base-Rate Neglect as: “the tendency to ignore base general information, in favor of specific (new, novel, attention-grabbing) information. The base rate neglect is also known as the base rate fallacy.”
How Does Law Apply It
The title of the chapter should explain enough, but the way that Law discusses it first is looking at the risk factors that come with selecting high school pitchers in the MLB Draft.
Law notes that “The truth of the matter seems pretty clear: high school pitchers selected in the first round have a higher failure rate than other categories (high school position players, college pitchers, or college position players) and do not offer high upside.
That’s not to say that it is always wrong to take a high school pitcher in the first round, but that such players should be pushed down on draft boards to reflect the greater risk of them failing to reach the majors or produce first-round value once they get there.”
Law discusses how it can be easy to point at Clayton Kershaw, Madison Bumgarner, or Zack Greinke as success examples, but overlooking players like Matt Hobgood, Chris Gruler, Clint Everts, and more.
Law also touches on forecasting in the big leagues.
From managers seeing what they want to see when a player is “due,” to a team signing relievers to long-term contracts despite the lack of year-to-year success and longevity for relievers.
How Can We Apply it to Fantasy?
For fantasy, Base-Rate Neglect can come in different forms. The two that stand out are:
- Dynasty leagues
- Ignoring the flaws
The first bullet is broad, so we are going to spend some time on this one in a few areas.
The first is how you are building your team.
First-year player drafts are always a highlight of any dynasty league, as you’re able to draft the players who were just selected in the MLB Draft and International signings, assuming that your league doesn’t have an open universe.
This can relate exactly to Law’s thoughts about high school arms, and why they are always the riskiest picks you can make.
Like he mentions with Kershaw and Greinke, you can always point to exceptions. Jack Flaherty is one recent example of a high school pitcher who was drafted, made the big leagues, and has been a success for the Cardinals and fantasy managers alike.
But just because you can look at Flaherty’s success doesn’t mean that you should expect that with all high school arms.
Ian Kahn is one of the smartest fantasy minds that exist – especially when it comes to dynasty. I was listening to an episode of “Under the Radar” where he discussed how he will always, always flip the young arms in dynasty leagues, and he can live with the results when they make it to the big leagues and are good.
He can live with it because the smart play is to not invest in young pitchers, but rather to trade for arms once they are in the big leagues.
Law looked at every first round of the MLB Draft from 1985 to 2012 to find players who compiled 10 WAR in the big leagues.
Law wanted to get more granular, so he looked at just the elite players who were drafted in the top 10.
Those numbers are … stunning. But they shouldn't be.
As Law said, it’s not that you shouldn’t draft a high school arm, but you have to know the risks that come with it.
I take the same approach in my rookie drafts. I compare the high school arms to each other first, and then I incorporate them with the other players in the pool, but they get pushed down automatically.
If you do take one, the smart move is to flip them shortly after you draft them while their value is the highest.
Sure, you could take Mick Abel or Jackson Jobe, and they could be frontline starters and anchors for your dynasty team.
Do you know who else they could become?
Forrest Whitley. Or MacKenzie Gore.
They could become the next Tyler Kolek, Brady Aiken, Kodi Medeiros, Grant Holmes, Riley Pint, Braxton Garrett, Jason Groome, or Ryan Weathers.
Ignoring what we know for what we want to believe given the outliers is a mistake.
It’s the same with investing in short pitchers and relievers for your dynasty teams.
It’s another argument (civil, mind you) that I have with my friends often. Whenever I say I fade short pitchers and I don’t invest in relievers, they always go back to two names: Pedro Martinez and Mariano Rivera.
Yes, two names who are Hall of Famers are now the go-to examples of why we should invest in players instead of the long track record of players who underperform.
Short pitchers have long had trouble holding up over time, and aside from the occasional outlier like Martinez or Marcus Stroman, the longevity that they have in fantasy is hard to find.
The same can be said about closers. Closers are hard to gauge in redraft leagues because of the way that modern bullpens are used, but also because we have so many pop-up pitchers from year to year. The likelihood of a repeat performance from a reliever after a standout year is small.
Law says that “a pitcher who had 50+ innings and a sub-3 FIP was less than 50 percent likely to do so again in the subsequent season.”
As we talk about seeing what we want to see, let’s transition to the second bullet point here. While we can fall victim to groupthink (see Part 4), we also need to be open to new information.
That’s not to say that we need the information to overrule what we already have (the base-rate), but we should apply that with our base to formulate new conclusions.
I’ve been burned by this many times in the past and the biggest example of this was Zack Godley.
Despite a so-so track record, I fell in love with Godley because of his insane 55 percent groundball rate that he had in 2017. I ignored the other flaws because I saw a pitcher who generated a lot of groundballs, and I invested everywhere.
Guess what? Godley sucked, and I only looked at the new data I had and ignored everything else.
I did the same with Trevor Richards when I saw just how dominant his changeup was. With how competitive fantasy is, you have to find these little nuggets like Godley’s groundball rate and Richards’ changeup. But you should use those to formulate an opinion on a player with the other data that you have and use it to get a leg up on your competition. But you shouldn’t use it as the be-all, end-all by ignoring everything else.
Look at Jazz Chisholm in 2022, for instance. He’s a fun player. He’s an exciting player. He’s a good fantasy player.
But if we are only seeing what we want to see, we only see the highs that he offers and not the lows.
We can look at the makeup of Chisholm and realize that he has major red flags that could find him back in Triple-A in short order if he doesn’t improve his strikeout rate and contact rate.
Another example of this is older players who have breakout years. Take Frank Schwindel, for example. Schwindel had a solid track record in the minors, but he’s a 29-year-old who hasn’t done a thing in the big leagues until 2021.
Now, should we ignore him? No, we shouldn’t. But should we say “but Jose Bautista sustained it” when we talk about late-career breakout guys? No, we shouldn’t.
The thing is, it sounds so simple, yet we do it every single year.
Literally, every single year.
The shiny toys and the shiny data are fun, but we all need to learn how to comb through it more and pair it with what we already know - myself included.
Michael Waterloo is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from Michael, check out his archive and follow him @MichaelWaterloo.