Last year April went by, Joe Mauer was injured, and life went on. Then May happened and Joe Mauer started to hit home runs. Not only did Mauer hit for more power than he ever had, he went on to have a career year, and very likely a top ten all time season by a catcher (probably one of the best by WAR standards, but we won’t focus on that).

In the Fantasy world Joe Mauer owners had to sit on a month with some likely back up catcher who may or may not have helped in anyway. When he came back he out hit all catchers by a massive margin.

Joe Mauer hit 5 more home runs than any other catcher, 11 more hits, and out walked all other catchers. He did this while missing a month. I only mention this over and over again because its incredibly impressive.

Here’s a quick rundown from last year at the catcher position and their wOBA based fantasy points.

Joe Mauer 491 (19.64 points a week)
Victor Martinez 441 (17.64 points a week)
Brian McCann 337 (13.48 points a week)
Kurt Suzuki 320 (12.8 points a week)
Russ Martin 313 (12.52 points a week)
Yadier Molina 310 (12.4 points a week)
Jorge Posada 288 (11.52 points a week)

and so on.  Joe Mauer did not play all season so he averaged 23.38 points a week if you subtract time spent on disabled list. Joe Mauer was so much better than every other catcher. If you were up against Joe Mauer and you were lucky enough to have Victor Martinez, you already had to make up 6 points. 6 points was roughly 2% of the total points in an average week scored.

2% does not exactly scream super awesome, Albert Pujols provided the same advantage on a weekly basis, but unlike Pujols. The 7th best player at his position wasn’t providing half the production. If you were not a V-Mart owner, and you had someone like Jorge Posada, or some blend of average catchers, you were more than 10 points behind.

Roughly 1.5 of the 6 match ups were decided by less than 10 points. This small advantage could have turned ~25% of fantasy matches.  Joe Mauer’s average draft position according to MockDraftCentral.com is 12. In the last 100 mock drafts, Joe Mauer was never taken before 4th overall, and as late at 19th.

While fantasy baseball is a lot on luck, and circumstance, and I cherry picked some of the stats, but Joe Mauer was pretty amazing last season, and even if he slows down this season, he’s so much better than other catchers, that he could be the best fantasy player in 2010, he was in 2009.

My fantasy league has evolved many times over its 6 year existence. Being a group of friends who loved fantasy football, we started with a Yahoo based, head to head weekly match-up with as many categories as we felt fit. We were not happy with a 5×5 setup, and so we added the rest to get somewhere in the neighborhood of a 12×12 league.

Thankfully this all changed last year when ESPN allowed us to do a points league and that’s where my work began. I had become pretty familiar with sabremetrics at least on small level of understanding. I didn’t know how they came up with the statistics they used, but I trusted that they worked and understood the results of the work.

Everyone knows that baseball is based on who scores more runs than the other team, but recently its becoming more popular to understand that preventing a run is just as good (if not possibly better) than scoring one. With that in mind I wondered why fantasy leagues couldn’t be based in the same manner. Baseball games aren’t won on lost based on categories, at the end of the day its runs scored vs runs scored.

Reading Tom Tango’s book taught me how his research allowed him to weight events that occur in baseball such as outs, singles, doubles, homers, etc. These values all have a value in how often they score runs. The nice thing about these numbers is that they are linear statistics so Tango scaled these into a statistic called weighted on-base average (wOBA, sounds like woah-bah).

Tango scaled wOBA to mirror on base percentage which most baseball fans are pretty familiar with, so that it wasn’t necessary to become familiar with another scale of good, average, and bad. I took the weighted values and turned them into points for a fantasy baseball league. Then I took fielder independent pitching (FIP, sounds like fip, not f i p) which measures the abilities pitchers have to get through games and prevent runs on their own. Pitchers get points for getting outs, strikeouts, get docked for giving up home runs, and walks.

It took me a solid week by I was able to get pitchers and hitters on the same level and hey, we have a new league. So like a good commissioner, I tested this league out by manually entering stats and scenarios and came up with some ground rules. Each week each team can only have 7 games started by pitchers. We limit each team to one free agent pick up per week, thus creating a strategy based league that requires quality over quantity.

The end result was very pleasing, even though nobody else in the league really understood wOBA or FIP, they understood the points and what they meant and were able to compete very well. My team rode a hot August and September from Felix Hernandez, Justin Verlander, and Ubaldo Jiminez get get a spot in the playoffs and then eventually win out. It wasn’t easy and 8 teams were pretty competitive all season, even my fiancee’s team turned up the heat late and before the season she could name more Cardinals from the 1998 team, then she could have from the 2009 team (now she has favorite players, and has a passion of dislike towards Brad Lidge, she’s awesome!)

For a fun friends and family league the first season was absolutely successful. Everyone liked the points format as they could better understand how they were doing each week, they saw how preventing runs came in handy, if not just as handy as scoring them. This year everyone wanted to continue with the system and we’re getting ready to draft here in 3 weeks, and by the keepers chosen, I can see that everyone has caught on. Back to the cellar for me? Well my fiancee is scheduled to face off against me in week one, and she plans on starting off with a win.