Friday, May 30, 2014

This Week In Happy Jack: May 23 - May 30

To keep the blog somewhat active on a regular basis, I’ve decided to do a segment called “This Week In Happy Jack”, where I condense all the information from the “News” section of the webpage in one convenient master-list, as well as other goings-on of note from the past calendar week. This segment will appear every Friday (or maybe Saturday, but it will consider games from Saturday AM to Friday PM2).

Scoreboard
Heating Up: 32 teams tied for the best winning percentage, at .000 (0-0)
Cooling Off: 32 teams tied for the words winning percentage, at .000 (0-0)

Game Highlights
886 players tied for the league lead with 0 Game Highlights this week

Transactions
Waivers:
None
Free Agency:
None
Promotions:
None
Trades:
None

DL Report
Placed on the DL this week:
None
Returned from the DL this week:
None

Noteworthy Games
None

Misc

  • jeff2106 and elgman joined our ranks, reducing our number of openings to 3 (NL West, AL North, AL South)
  • To further reduce that number I would encourage people to engineer swaps in which one of us joins another world in exchange for someone else joining us.

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Who Is The Real Happy Jack MVP?

There may not be 100% agreement on how to fix the issue, but there is something very close to that when it comes to agreement among us that there is something wrong with the requirements to be considered for MVP. Jesse Walsh and Pedro Zorrilla are certainly very valuable assets and great guys to have on the field for your team, but are they really the Most Valuable Player in Happy Jack's AL & NL? I decided to find out.

In order to do so, I used the spreadsheet that I talk about here to determine a Wins Above Replacement value for every single player in Happy Jack. This way, all of the variables that people discuss in MVP voting can be accounted for and quantified into a comparable statistic. Here's a slightly more in-depth look at what this stuff really means:

For hitters, the spreadsheet uses Plate Appearances, OBP, SLG%and Position Played to generate an initial number. I then created a formula that takes into consideration the home ballpark & base running ability to supplement the initial number and create a final one. The end effect is that each player gets credit for playing more and a harder position where appropriate, all in a neutral park.

For pitchers, a simpler yet equally effective strategy was used. To start, the spreadsheet generates an initial value using the pitcher's role (starter vs. reliever), Innings Pitched and ERA. I then adjusted these numbers to account for their home ballpark as well.

In the end, I came up with the following Top 5 for each league:

American League
1. Russ Fitzgerald, C-Salem, 6.8515 WAR
2. Jesse Walsh, RF-New Britain, 6.8510 WAR (actual MVP)
3. Donaldo Lee, RF- El Paso, 6.84 WAR
4. Matty Rodriguez, DH-Arizona, 6.56 WAR
5. Marc Mattingly, SP-Fargo, 5.83 WAR

National League
1. Hector Johnson, ?-Buffalo, 7.47 WAR
2. Lonney Perez, ?-Jacksonville, 6.76 WAR
3. Pedro Zorilla, 1B-Cheyenne, 6.23 WAR (actual MVP)
4. Daniel Rey Knowles, SP-Norfolk, 6.07 WAR
5. Calvin Brown, CF-Oklahoma City, 5.79 WAR