Fantasy Baseball All Luck?

So Bill brought up a good point on the message board today.

I think I read something somewhere that the experts picks preaseason (this one in particular anyway) are only right on about 42% of their picks over the last 5 years or something like that. So even the people that get paid to do this are right less than 1/2 the time on players being at, or outperforming their preseason value. I thought that was interesting.

This got me thinking, and I went ahead and googled a 2009 pre-season ranked list of players. What I found was definitely pretty interesting.

Lets take a look at Starting Pitchers.

Look at all of these players that didn't live up to their ranking.

1. Johan Santana - Santana was good last year, but no where near #1 overall, wasn't even a top 5 pitcher in the NL league last year.

4. Brandon Webb - Season ended early due to injury

6. Jake Peavy - Another pitcher plagued with injuries.

8. Cole Hamels - Mediocre, up and down season. really good or really bad

9. Roy Oswalt - WBC & age caught up with him

13. Ervin Santana - was horrible

15. Edinson Volquez - TJS ended season

16. Dice-K - Injury, and just sucked

17. Carlos Zambrano - Pretty average #'s

18. Scott Kazmir - Injuries, and poor #'s

19. Chad Billingsley - 1st half good, 2nd half injuries and was awful

You could argue some of these guys, but that is 11/20 that didn't live up to their expectations. Pretty crazy. 55%




Then have guys ranked much lower, and I would have taken any one of these guys over above guys for last season...

24. Felix
25. Verlander
26. Wainwright
35. Josh Johnson
39. Vazquez
40. Greinke
41. Cain
54. Jurrjens
67. Kershaw
78. Carpenter
83. Wandy

There is definitely a lot more luck involved in baseball then there is in football. If you lose a Larry Johnson, a replacement like Jamaal Charles can step right in and produce same/similar #'s. Of course in Charles case he trumped LJ. In baseball, if you lose Brandon Webb for the year, you have no where else to turn.

Will 2010 be any different then 2009? My money is on no. You can't predict injuries obviously, but just because the KungFu Pandas has 4 pitchers in ESPN's top 15 does not mean that they will end there this year. Chances are that 2 of the 4 will either be injured or not live up to the hype.

The winner this year is going to be the guy who realizes that pre-season hype is just hype. Projections are just projections. The team that finds the most Wandy Rodriguez's will end up winning this year, as the waiver pool is so much less with the addition of the two teams.

So who is this years Wandy?