How to Weigh Career Stats Versus Recent Stats
“How much should I pay attention to recent performance, and how much should I pay attention to career stats?”
This is a complicated conundrum.
This will be one of the shortest lessons I write.
You know why? Because this is not actually a complicated conundrum at all.
Whenever I discuss research and/or statistics on Twitter or in my articles on RotoGrinders, I tend to get a handful of questions asking for my thoughts on this topic. This is something people seem to struggle with, probably less because they “feel they are doing things incorrectly,” and more because they simply have no idea.
That’s the funny thing about baseball. Because of the nature of variance, you can make “the right call” several days in a row, and can still lose all those days. If you were a robot programmed to make the right decisions in DFS each and every day, this appearance of the negative side of variance would not have a huge, negative impact on your decision making as you could continue making the right decisions, knowing that these decisions would lead to profit over time (Wait, do robots “know” things? I guess this one does; you cool with that?).
Because we are not robots, however — and are furthermore not pre-programmed to know what “the right decisions” are — we are required to conduct (and subsequently trust and stick to) our research for each slate. This is great when things go well, but issues arise when things go poorly. “Was it just the result of variance? Or was something wrong in my process?”
This leads people to have a difficult time determining if they are actually looking at the right stats, or if their good or bad run is simply the result of things just breaking that way for a little while. This is where the question of whether or not you are paying attention to the correct stats becomes a bit more difficult to assess and answer on your own as it can be tough to determine just how fully your results back up the idea that you know exactly what these “right stats” are.
That’s a long way of saying it’s understandable if you have wondered in the past how heavily you should weigh recent stats.
Wow. It would have been a lot easier for me if I had just typed that, huh? Ah, the curse of being long-winded.
But I have good news for you. You ready?
The good news is this: it’s really very simple.