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February 6, 2013

Fantasy Beat

Comparing Mock-Draft Data

by Jason Collette

On the most recent episode of the Towers of Power Fantasy Hour (or 2), Paul Sporer and I had the opportunity to interview Greg Ambrosius of STATS LLC. Ambrosius runs their National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC) events, which feature the all-stars of high-stakes fantasy baseball. While the industry may not be as lucrative as the World Series of Poker, NFBC’s top players have made a rather nice living though the competition. The most famous of the players may be Lindy Hinkleman, a pig farmer from rural Idaho who was featured in a USA Today article last season. A few years ago, he pulled off an improbable sweep of both the live and online events, and earned a check for $241,500 from NFBC.

During the podcast, Ambrosius mentioned that NFBC hosts its own mock drafts on the site, as their players wanted to have the opportunity to do research while interacting with other like-minded players, rather than with the diverse communities at places such as MockDraftCentral, CouchManagers, and RTSports. Ambrosius maintains that the ADP data that his users produce is more meaningful than what happens elsewhere, because it is data from live individuals—rather than bots that fill empty spots in mock drafts—and the participants are unlikely to employ wacky strategies to skew the data, such as filling all pitching slots before drafting hitters. Given the fact that MockDraftCentral is the most widely known of the other sites, I decided to do a comparison between NFBC and MDC data to see how different the two sets truly are.

There are two caveats in comparing the data between the two sites. Many of the MDC drafts only go 256 players deep (12 teams, 23 man rosters), while NFBC events are typically at least 450 players deep (15 teams, 30 man rosters). Of the 427 players listed in the most recent ADP report at MDC, 258 of them went undrafted in at least one of the 140 mock drafts run in the last five days. It is understandable that Corey Hart would go undrafted given his knee injury, but players such as Coco Crisp,