Derek Carty writes for Baseball Prospectus and has been a Tout Warrior since 2010. He is part of a startup called FantasySquared, which is a new game that creates small stock markets that allow fantasy team owners to trade shares in their fellow owners’ teams, perhaps backing the winning team in their league as their own team fades.
The website has just launched, and one of the first leagues available for public trading is Tout Wars. You can sign up at the site and start building your portfolio right away. Rotoman bought a couple hundred shares of his team to win, because he’s confident, and 100 shares of Lenny’s team, because he bid up Rotoman’s prime stud hitter target, Hunter Pence, until he was out of reach.
Derek shared the implied odds thus far for all three Tout Wars leagues. Is there really wisdom in crowds? We’ll find out better once a critical mass has joined the site. But here’s the results of a small sampling:
Tout AL
Jeff Erickson 13%
Mike Siano 10%
Matthew Berry 10%
Rick Wolf/Glenn Colton 9%
Ron Shandler 9%
Jason Collette 9%
Andy Behrens 8%
Chris Liss 7%
Larry Schechter 6%
Steve Moyer 6%
Lawr Michaels 6%
Rob Leibowitz 6%
Tout NL
Nate Ravitz 9%
Scott Pianowski 9%
Peter Kreutzer 9%
Derek Carty 9%
Tristan Cockcroft 9%
Steve Gardner 8%
Mike Gianella 8%
Todd Zola 7%
Brian Walton 7%
Phil Hertz 6%
Dean Peterson 6%
Scott Wilderman 6%
Lenny Melnick/Paul Greco 6%
Tout Mixed
Ray Flowers 11%
Derek Van Riper 9%
Nando DiFino 6%
Fred Zinkie 5%
Nicholas Minnix 7%
David Gonos 7%
Cory Schwartz 7%
Paul Singman 7%
Tim Heaney 7%
Seth Trachtman 6%
Zach Steinhorn 6%
Scott Swanay 6%
Gene McCaffrey 5%
Patrick Davitt 5%
Eric Mack 5%
Hey, the rankings at fantasysquared aren’t based on algorithms, they’re based on bets people have actually made on the actual teams.
They aren’t terribly serious bets, since anyone can play, and it doesn’t cost anything, but that means if you care you can join and play, too. And if a good cross section of serious evaluations is accessed then maybe we’ll learn something knew.
Finding a good balance, so that peoples’ bets reflect their true valuation (and that they know enough to have a true valuation) are serious hurdles the fantasysquared folks are going to have to get over. But it seems to me it could be great fun as we understood how it works better and the pool of players grows deeper.
Whatever algorithms you’re using in your software, you need to go back to the drawing board… you rankings are so bad as to be meaningless.