Sixteen million people play fantasy sports yearly, according to the Fantasy Sports Industry Trade Association. Thus, it shouldn’t surprise to most when I say "Rotisserie." No, not the cooking style—I’m talking about the fantasy baseball scoring format (refer to Yahoo!’s summary of Rotisserie scoring if you are unfamiliar).

As the end of the baseball season nears, it got me thinking: What if Major League Baseball were one big Rotisserie League? And is there any difference between a team’s Roto ranking and their ranking based on regular season wins?

So I did just that. I took each team’s stats (runs, RBI, HR, batting avg., and stolen bases, for batting; and wins, saves, ERA, WHIP, and strikeouts, for pitching; those are the standard 5×5 categories in roto leagues) as of Friday, Sept. 26, ranked them, and figured out their Roto value.

The Angels have the league’s best record, but are only fifth in roto value, and far behind the Cubs and Red Sox.

Now here’s the better question: Does Roto Value have any correlation with wins?

Using the past three years’ stats (trust me, I would have gone back to 2000, but it takes forever to calculate the RV, mainly due to ties), I figured out each team’s RV compared to their win totals. The regression equation to find predicted wins using RV is Wins =~ 0.18 * RV + 53 .

That yields a 3.92 RMSE in the past three years, compared to a 4.10 RMSE of the Pythagorean Formula in the same time frame.

The sample size is very small, but it does seem like RV can predict wins as good as, or even better than, the Pythagorean Formula. Until I find the RV for teams going back to the 1990’s or so, however, I’m not going to make any conclusions based on it.

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