Finding True Value in Fantasy Baseball — A Primer
Part 1: The Problem With Projections
TRP — True Relative Price: True Value. Market Pricing. No Noise.
Billy Beane didn’t discover OBP. He discovered that other GMs were bad at pricing it.
That’s the real insight from Moneyball — not that walks matter, but that markets misprice assets. People anchor to reputation. They overweight last week’s highlights. They confuse popularity with value.
“The market for baseball players was rife with inefficiencies… players were often wrong about themselves, coaches and managers were wrong about their players, and owners and general managers were wrong about their teams.” — Michael Lewis, Moneyball
Fantasy baseball is the same market, just smaller. Every draft pick, every trade, every FAAB bid is a pricing decision. And most of us are pricing things badly.
Photo by Austin Hervias on Unsplash
The Projection Trap
The fantasy industry has spent two decades refining projection systems. Steamer. ZiPS. ATC. THE BAT. All chasing the same question: What will this player do?
They’ve gotten good at it. Surprisingly good. The differences between top systems are marginal — a few percentage points of accuracy separating them. If you’re hunting for edge in the projections themselves, you’re fighting over scraps.
But here’s the thing: knowing what a player will do doesn’t tell you what he’s worth.
Projections are inputs. Value is the output. And the fantasy industry has obsessed over refining the inputs while leaving the conversion to vibes, gut feel, and “trust me, I’ve played for 15 years.”
That’s the gap. That’s where the edge actually lives.
A Draft Day Decision
It’s round 8 of your draft. Two players are sitting there, both projected for solid seasons:
- Player A: 24 HR, 92 RBI, 5 SB, .345 OBP, .465 SLG
- Player B: 22 HR, 85 RBI, 4 SB, .330 OBP, .450 SLG
Player A is better across the board. More power, more counting stats, better on-base skills. Easy call, right?
You take Player A.
The guy picking after you takes Player B.
Four rounds later, you both need to fill the same position — the one you didn’t draft yet. You look at what’s left. The best available option at your position: 14 HR, 48 RBI, .295 OBP. Meanwhile, your opponent grabs a guy projecting for 21 HR, 68 RBI, .325 OBP at his remaining position.
Let’s add up the totals.
Your two players combined: 24 + 14 = 38 HR. 92 + 48 = 140 RBI. .345 + .295 = .640 OBP (we’ll average to .320).
His two players combined: 22 + 21 = 43 HR. 85 + 68 = 154 RBI. .330 + .325 = .655 OBP (averaging to .328).
He’s beating you. In every category. Even though you took the “better” player.
What happened?
The Reveal
Player A — the one with the better stat line — is a first baseman.
Player B is a catcher.
That changes everything.
When you took the first baseman in round 8, you left yourself exposed at catcher. By round 12, the catching pool was decimated. You got stuck with a replacement-level guy — barely rosterable, dragging down your totals.
Your opponent took the slightly worse stat line at catcher, then grabbed a first baseman later who was nearly as good as yours. First base is deep. Catcher is a wasteland. He understood something you didn’t:
You’re not drafting stats, you’re drafting edges over replacement.
The 22-HR catcher is +12 HR better than the next-best catcher available in round 12.
The 24-HR first baseman is only +3 HR better than the first baseman available in round 12.
The stats aren’t equal. The marginal value is wildly different.
Why Roster Constraints Create Value
Here’s the thing fantasy managers forget: you don’t get to build the optimal team. You get to build a legal team.
If roster construction didn’t matter, you’d just draft the 20 best hitters regardless of position. Stack outfielders. Ignore catchers entirely. Optimize for raw stats.
But you can’t. The rules force you to start one catcher, one shortstop, one second baseman. You can only play 3–5 outfielders depending on your league. The constraints are the game.
And constraints create scarcity.
There are maybe 8 catchers in baseball worth rostering in a 12-team league. There are 30+ outfielders. When you draft a top-tier catcher, you’re not just getting his stats — you’re denying your opponents access to a scarce resource and forcing them into the wasteland.
When you draft a top-tier outfielder, you’re getting good stats from a position where good stats are freely available. Your opponent drafts the next outfielder and gets… almost the same production.
This is why positional scarcity isn’t a vague tiebreaker. It’s the foundation of value. A player’s worth isn’t determined by his stats in isolation. It’s determined by what he produces beyond what you could freely acquire at his position.
20 ≠ 20 (And Why That’s Not Crazy)
This still feels wrong. Twenty home runs is twenty home runs. Math doesn’t lie.
But we’re not doing math in a vacuum. We’re doing economics.
Kahneman and Tversky called it reference dependence: people don’t evaluate outcomes in absolute terms. They evaluate them against a baseline. The same outcome feels different depending on your starting point.
“The carriers of value are gains and losses defined relative to a reference point.” — Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky, Prospect Theory (1979)
In fantasy, your reference point is the replacement-level player at each position. That’s the baseline against which all value is measured.
A catcher who hits 20 HR when the replacement catcher hits 10 HR is providing +10 HR of value. A first baseman who hits 20 HR when the replacement first baseman hits 18 HR is providing +2 HR of value. The home runs are equal. The value added is not.
This is the same logic that drives WAR in real baseball. A 3-WAR shortstop is more valuable than a 3-WAR first baseman because replacement-level shortstops are worse than replacement-level first basemen. The wins are identical. The scarcity is not.
Positional scarcity isn’t a vague concept. It’s mathematically quantifiable. And if your valuation system doesn’t account for it, you’re leaving edge on the table.
The Category Problem
There’s a second issue projections don’t solve: categories are incommensurable — they’re measured in different units and can’t be directly compared.
Home runs are counted in integers from 0 to 60. Stolen bases are counted in integers from 0 to 80. OBP is a decimal from .250 to .450. You can’t add them together; 30 HR plus 20 SB plus .380 OBP doesn’t equal 50.38 anything.
But fantasy forces you to make exactly this comparison. You’re drafting a team, not a collection of isolated stats. You need to know whether Player A’s HR/SB mix is worth more than Player B’s OBP/SLG mix — and you need to know it relative to what’s available at their positions.
The standard approach is to wing it. Mentally weight the categories, squint at the projections, make a gut call.
That’s not analysis. That’s astrology with a spreadsheet.
What you actually need is a common unit — a way to express each category contribution on the same scale. Then you can compare them, aggregate them, and make decisions based on something more rigorous than instinct.
What Good Looks Like
A real valuation system needs to do three things:
- Establish a reference point. Define replacement level for each position so you’re measuring marginal value, not raw stats.
- Normalize categories. Convert HR, SB, OBP, ERA, and everything else onto a common scale so they can be compared and aggregated.
- Price the player. Output a single number — or a dollar value — that captures total value relative to the baseline.
Projections give you the raw material. Valuation gives you the price.
The fantasy industry has dozens of projection systems and almost no rigorous public pricing systems. Zach Sanders at Fangraphs made a serious attempt with Fantasy Value Above Replacement (FVAR), opens in a new tab, building on Keith Woolner’s original VORP concept, opens in a new tab from real baseball. But the methodology leaves gaps — particularly around how replacement level is defined and whether different categories should carry different weight.
TRP — True Relative Pricing — is an attempt to close those gaps.
At its core is the True Replacement Player: a methodical, mathematically defensible archetype for each position that serves as the baseline. From there, the system normalizes categories, accounts for positional scarcity, and outputs prices that reflect actual marginal value.
True value. Market pricing. No noise.
What’s Next
Part 2 digs into the engine that powers True Relative Pricing: how to construct the True Replacement Player archetype for each position, why the methodology matters, and how to get it right.
The math isn’t complicated. But getting the details right is the difference between a valuation system that works and one that’s just another spreadsheet pretending to be smart.
TRP is a valuation framework developed within the MTBL (Metaball) ecosystem. It consumes projections from any source and outputs market-calibrated player values for fantasy baseball.