An Interview with The Fantasy Baseball Generals Editor Patrick DiCaprio

What do Napoleon, Sun-Tzu and fantasy baseball have in common? More than you might think, according to The Fantasy Baseball Generals Editor in Chief Patrick DiCaprio, who recently engaged in an email interview with me. DiCaprio's Web site http://www.fantasybaseballgenerals.com/ has enjoyed a tremendous surge in popularity this year and he shared with me his thoughts on fantasy baseball, the Web and of course, The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.

How long have you been playing fantasy baseball?

PD: I have been playing since 1985 so about 23 years.

What made you decide to start a fantasy Web site?

PD: I started the site because I saw a big gap in fantasy analysis and I thought that most fantasy analysts were misguided. The gap I saw was in the realm of fantasy theory and strategy; there quite literally was no writing at all that I have found on the topic of the underlying theory of the game; issues like "is value a real concept" or "what exactly is "value" and "is it subjective or objective." Analysts were also misguided in many ways because they fall into logical traps and fallacious reasoning, the primary one being that most analysts do not understand how significant a role chance and randomness play, and so they come up with explanations after the fact to justify what has happened, which is logically fallacious.

Why the war and generals theme?

PD: The War and Generals theme came from three strategic figures; Sun-Tzu, Napoleon and Clausewitz. Sun Tzu and Clausewitz tried to do for war what I hoped to do in fantasy baseball; namely to devise a theory of war that explained not just tactics but the fundamental theoretical underpinnings from which the tactics are derived. Generals have to think on second and third levels; something that is espoused by Sun-Tzu; and that is what most fantasy players do not do. They think only on one level, not anticipating what their opponents will do in response to their moves, or what they can do in response to what their opponents will do. This is fine in weak leagues, but not for tough ones, and the target audience was players looking to move into tough competition and seeking to improve their analysis.

You frequently talk about experts. What makes for a fantasy "expert"?

PD: This is a complicated topic but when I am judging whether someone is an expert the primary thing I am looking for is the breadth of information that informs a judgment and how detailed the thought process is. For example the "buy low sell high" theory is where I think many analysts show that they do not fit what I would call an expert because this only represents one level of thinking.

How much of fantasy baseball is strategy and how much is luck? If you could make changes to alter the ratio - would you eliminate luck?

PD: This is a tough one, and it depends on the skill level of your opposition. In garden variety leagues for low stakes there is a lot more skill, maybe it is 70-30 skill for a given season. In tougher leagues with competitive owners or for high stakes it is probably the reverse in a given season. When the competition is tough, let's say in a 12-team expert league, the lucky owner will win and there is nothing the others can do about it. I think people fall under the spell of the Sharpshooter Fallacy, ascribing success to skill when in fact it was luck.

If an experts league is mostly luck - why would experts strive to play in one?

PD: Honestly, I think it is for bragging rights and exposure, or because they believe that the guys involved are not real experts. If they were truly experts they would play for the biggest stakes they could find rather than just playing for bragging rights. Plus there is some skill, but like everything else it depends on the quality of the opponents. There is such a small difference in skill among experts that it gets dwarfed by the randomness factor. In leagues like the Fantasy Baseball Search Expert League this is even more true because of the format; in leagues like Tout Wars it is less true but still a fact. If two experts have a 5% difference in "skill" then that marginal skill is not nearly enough to overcome randomness in one season, and I doubt that any two real experts (by my criteria) are separated by 5%, the number is probably lower.

If you have twelve owners, all of whom know the players in and out, have great auction skills, manage their teams appropriately and know what to do on the waiver wire, then who wins will not be based on skill but on how things play out, over which the fantasy owner has no control. It isn't that skill doesn't matter; it is that there is such a small difference in skill that the difference in skill only makes marginal differences. Things like injuries, matchups etc dominate.

Guys who play poker at high levels know this well; the results of any one session or one year will largely be determined by luck/randomness. The guy that wins the WSOP is almost never the best player; it is the guy who got the luckiest. Skill will win out in the long run only; but the sad fact is that many poker players never play long enough to know whether they are truly winning players or not. In fantasy, one season is not nearly the long run nor are 30; we make the best decisions we can but the results will largely resemble dice rolls in the short run. Even fantasy experts do not understand how significant the role of chance is in any one season.

That said, why do people gamble and play poker? They want to prove themselves and winning an expert league, even by chance, confers a status that means something in the industry. Plus it is fun to play against the best competition!

If you were going to start a league from scratch, how would you set it up? Would you try to make it mimic real baseball as much as possible or should there be a distinct line between real and fantasy baseball?

PD: I am not sure what I would do. The primary structural problem with fantasy leagues is that there is no good way yet developed to value middle relievers or set-up men. But I would ban ten team mixed leagues if I could! I think fantasy players who have never played in deep auction leagues are really missing out, and to go back to the expertise question, one cannot be "a fantasy" expert without expertise in auction leagues. You can be a "mixed league" or "draft" expert but not a true fantasy expert.

Most fantasy players also root for a real team. How should they handle it when one of their fantasy players is going up against their favorite team?

PD: I am not a guy that thinks people who root against their team are crazy. This is a vestige of the old fuddy-duddy guard of baseball. I will have no hesitation in rooting against the Yankees when one of my players is against them. But I will say that this mostly occurs in high stakes leagues where first place is 5K or more so I can be forgiven for this indulgence! It might be different if I were in a $25 Yahoo league.

There's a great overlap between fantasy players and those who enjoy statistical analysis of the game. But for the parts of the two camps that don't overlap, my opinion is there is a lot of mistrust/scorn of the other side. Do you agree with this? If so, what can be done to bring the two groups closer together?

PD: I think this issue is overblown for the most part.

The Supreme Court just refused to hear a case on fantasy baseball which would require Web sites to pay MLB for the right to use players names, stats and pictures when running fantasy games. This is obviously a huge win for the industry but what is your personal take on the issue?

PD: This is a tremendous win, but not one that was unanticipated. I think anyone who went to law school saw the writing on the wall, and no one really thought that the Supreme Court would take the case, unless they were smoking something.

Explain why Draft/Auction Day is the best day of the year.

PD: Simply because it is an absolute blast! There I no greater fun day than auction day. Plus I think I it is cathartic in many ways, as the preparation and angst that it took to get there is released. But primarily it is the fact that it is fun.

What do you do to promote your site and attract new readers?

PD: The primary thing I do is to try to expose as many other fantasy sites and experts as I can to the writing and analysis we generate. I think that the quality we put out is better than most fantasy sites so that when we expose the industry to our content we will stand out. I think this has worked. Were it not for the great content we have though this would not have worked; success in this industry is still based on how good your content is. It is natural selection at work.

What advice do you have for someone about to start a Web site, whether the site is fantasy-related or another field entirely?

PD: If you want it to be successful then get ready to do far more work than you anticipate! It is almost a full time job to promote the site and to continue to build its reputation in the industry. But with hard work and excellent content I think success can be relatively assured, depending on what your definition of "success" encompasses. To be fair though it takes a lot of good luck too, especially in finding and recruiting good writers. In one year the FBG site has gone from an overall rating, according to alexa.com, of below 4M to 400,000 on the entire internet and of the mid tier blogs we are one of the top ones in traffic. That is not too bad for one year's time, as traffic has been up over 2,000% and our rank is still climbing. But it has taken a lot more work than I ever dreamed of.

**********

I'd like to thank Pat for taking the time out of his schedule to chat with me. And in the interest of full disclosure, I'd like to note that I am a contributor to the site.