If you went here more often your team wouldn't be in 7th place

I know something that you don’t know.  I know, without a doubt, that in my fantasy league Jayson Werth is more valuable than Ryan Howard.  But how?  How can I possibly know such things?  Apples and oranges, right?  What if I could tell you that the most valuable closer on my fantasy team is Andrew Bailey, who has delivered nearly four times as much value as Fernando Rodney?  Welcome to the world of Ziguana, my friend; a brave new world where the fantasy playing field has been leveled and first website you need to visit before your upcoming draft or prior to  pulling the trigger on that blockbuster deal you’ve been working on for the past two weeks.  With the proliferation of more exotic stats and Roto leagues often employing more than just the standard 5×5 categories it’s getting harder and harder to know who is good and who is just empty stats (Freddy Sanchez, I’m looking at you).  Of course, just having a beast of a database at your fingertips will only do you so much good–but the boys over at Ziguana have come up with an impossibly simple league upload feature where you can see in an instant how your fake teams match up against your leaguemate’s fake teams.  Does it get any better than that?  I vote for no.  Over the past week I’ve been emailing with Cassidy Morris, one of the Founders of Ziguana, to get his insight into just how much Ziguana can do for those of us without a PhD in Statistics.

BG: Break the idea behind Ziguana down for those non-math geniuses out here and let us know how it can help us win our fantasy leagues?
Cassidy: In most of today’s fantasy leagues, winning one category is as good as winning another. Ziguana uses this principle to rank players by making it so comparing categories is no longer comparing apples to oranges. Where before you were looking at 10 rebounds per game verses 2 threes per game, now you have two comparable “zScores”, such as 1.90 and 2.20… meaning the 2 threes per game are more helpful to your fantasy team. In this manner we can rank players based on any combination of categories! What’s nice about Ziguana is we do this for every player on your team and every team in your league. Then we spit out some simple diagnostics that help you figure out how you’re going to win that championship.

BG: Give our readers the gist of what it is that Ziguana can do for their fantasy team and what sets it apart from something like Y! default rankings and ESPN’s Player Rater.
Cassidy: I think addressing the differences in rankings is a good place to begin. There are two key components to what we call zRanks that we believe sets us apart from our competitors like Y! rankings and ESPN’s Player Rater:
1. Customizability – Simply put, Ziguana allows you to choose from a wide variety of categories in which to evaluate players. Yahoo and ESPN assume the standard 5×5 categories for baseball and set of 8 for basketball. But, if you’re like me, your league has some crazy combination that includes holds and K/9, and since every category counts just as much as the next it would be foolish to not rate players based on this.
2.  Weighting Ratios – Being a fantasy sports veteran, I’ve grown tired of seeing Erick Dampier at the top of my fantasy league in FG%. Let’s be honest, his 3 shot attempts a game aren’t really going to give you an edge. After some tricky manipulation, I’ve got Ziguana accurately rating players based on how valuable they actually are in these “ratio statistics.” So, at last you’ll find Dwight Howard far above Dampier in FG% value even though he shot about 8 percentage points worse last season.
This concept for ranking players is the basis of Ziguana. From there, we’ve added team and league analysis (where loading your league is as easy as the push of a button), head-to-head matchup predictions, trade evaluation, and more.

BG: I remember my very first year of playing fantasy basketball when I knew something was wrong with the default Yahoo! rankings when Doug Christie was ranked as a top 40 player for the majority of the season despite the fact that he basically sucked.  Has your evaluating system/algorithm changed your view of certain players over the years?
Cassidy: Everyone at Ziguana got a good chuckle out of this one because we can all so easily relate. This is going to depend on your league’s categories, but for me personally, I will not comprise a team without Shane Battier. Laugh all you want (my friends definitely did), but after winning the last three seasons no one is laughing any more. The key is how much my league depends on “efficiency” categories, such as TO and PF. While Battier never put up huge scoring games, he managed to contribute across the board while performing at a very efficient level.

BG: Outside of Big Game Shane, any other players you try to get on your roster (depending on league specs of course).

Fantasy Savior????????????

Cassidy: Tough question, I’ll try and answer by giving you a few more helpful words of advice here. For basketball the key to winning is in the percentage categories. I could write an essay on this (and probably will someday), but the point is this strategy leads me to continuously targeting Dirk Nowitzki with my first pick and snagging Jason Terry, Ray Allen, and Grant Hill later on. In baseball, the key is getting top tier starting pitching. I know everyone preaches hitting over pitching because of consistency, but that’s exactly why I pick two aces… they are the only consistent source of fantasy pitching. So, it used to be Johan Santana, Jake Peavy (always on my team, even this year unfortunately) and Roy Oswalt heading my staff, but now it’s all about Tim Lincecum.

BG: The traditional baseball 5×5 roto league and 8 category basketball leagues seem to be slowly going away–have you guys played in any leagues with bizarre settings recently?  How has Ziguana helped you compete in those leagues?
Cassidy: When I’m the commissioner I choose categories that attempt to attest to how skilled a player really is. Unfortunately, there’s always the friend or co-worker who forces you to join their custom league because they need “just one more manager.” Of course, on draft day you realize that their league has 25 categories, half of which have to do with stolen bases! Needless to say, despite this league’s screwy set-up the first 50 players off the board are almost identical to your standard 5×5 league. Knowing I won’t have time to manage this team, I simple pull up the rankings from last season based on the custom set-up and watch as my team lands most of the top player’s from the previous year. It’s really that simple… you’d be surprised how negligent people are to their league’s setup. Now, I exaggerated a bit, but last year I won $500 from some friends of friends who fell right into this very trap.

BG: For a variety of reasons I derive the least amount of enjoyment from fantasy football even though it is far and away the most popular fantasy sport.  Are there any plans to incorporate football metrics into Ziguana or does the H2H, point based scoring sort of mess that up?
Cassidy: I’ll be honest with you; none of us at Ziguana are football junkies either. Of course we want to incorporate the biggest fantasy sport into our system, but the “fantasy point” system used by most football leagues isn’t too conducive to the zRank format. Now, we have plenty of ideas for offering a great service by simply doing league analysis based on fantasy points, offering a football trade evaluator, and some new football only features. The biggest problem is time, but eventually you’ll be seeing fantasy football on Ziguana.

BG: Talk about some of the feedback you’ve received from fantasy owners who have utilized the site.
Cassidy: We love user feedback–that really is the key to almost all the improvements we’ve made at Ziguana. From simple things to adding their “Watch List” to features like export to spreadsheet, all have been suggested by our users. We also get asked a lot about supporting other leagues (other than Yahoo). This is something we’ve been working diligently on in the past week and we should actually have ESPN league upload in the next few days!
BG: I can attest to your ability to add new stats–I emailed you about Quality Stats and I think about a week later you’d added them to the matrix.

BG: How did the braintrust of Ziguana get together?  Random Craig’s List message board posting?
Cassidy: The core four of us, have been friends since as early as elementary school. Bret and I even longer, seeing as how we are brothers We went our separate ways for college (all four of us attended different universities), but we wanted to stay in touch… Ziguana couldn’t have been more perfect for the task.

BG: What do you guys do when you’re not doing fantasy?  (Yes, I know that’s a trick question because if you’re like all the rest of us fantasy sports is something that has no OFF switch).
Cassidy: Haha so true, now try managing a fantasy website on top of that. Surprisingly enough, we are big into actual sports… meaning getting some exercise ourselves. In fact, for at least 10 years now, we’ve been playing basketball every Saturday with some other friends… of course we keep our own stats too I fancy reading a good book every now and then too. If you haven’t read the Ender’s Game series, I’d advise you to check it out!

BG: What’s the next step, any plans for the future of the site?
Cassidy: When it comes to the future, the question always is short term or long. Of course, we have plenty of short-term goals. The biggest of which is a new and improved trade evaluator (that truly will blow your socks off!). As far as long term goes, the site will never be finished (constantly improving is the key to a good business), but we would like to become the place for fantasy sports analysis. Everyone knows our competitors: rotowire, basketballmonster, etc. We will not rest until Ziguana is unanimously the place to be. It’s our personal passion and our users deserve that from us.

There you have it folks, a website that will revolutionize your fantasy team, right at your fingertips.  However, if you draft and stubbornly stick with Chris Davis, Scott Kazmir and Chien-Ming Wang…well, Ziguana helps those who help themselves.  And those three heathens don’t help anybody.

The Hotseat

After running roughshod over CNBC’s Jim Cramer earlier in the week, John Stewart has picked a new foe in the form of ESPN’s Talented Mr. Roto.  Berry, ESPN’s Senior Director of Fantasy Operations, is known for both his bombastic personality and questionable fantasy advice.  The fireworks began immediately as Berry settled into the hotseat.  “Two words for you,” Stewart began, “Jeff Francour.”  Berry immediately tried to change the subject, noting that he was right in predicitng Rick Ankiel’s 20+ HRs and touted his belief that Aubrey Huff would outperform Evan Longoria in the second half of last season.  “Did you or did you not, Sir, write before the 2008 season that “Andruw Jones [cannot] do any worse than he did last year“?  Berry’s eyes immediately filled with tears and he had to pause several minutes before speaking again.  Stewart siezed the moment and brought up Berry’s irrational love of Angel players Brandon Wood, Kendrey Morales and even Juan Rivera.  “Are these really the kinds of players you expect us to build our teams around?” Stewart prodded.  “Juan Freaking Rivera?  The only way I would ever play Juan Rivera in my outfield would be if I took your stupid advice in the first place and drafted Andruw Jones!  Where is the accountability!”  The largely partisan crowd roared its approval while Stewart smiled smugly into the camera.  After pulling out his Blackberry and updating his Facebook page, Matt Berry spoke in a somber voice and spent several minutes hyping “future batting champion” Howie Kendrick as a bouceback candidate for 2009 and rosterable in mixed leagues as a Middle Infielder and also touted every starting pitcher on the Minnessota Twins to outperform their average draft position.