Spending the past week running correlations while learning new spreadsheet formatting techniques can only mean one thing — I desperately need the baseball season to start (on American soil). Before we kick off, another hat tip is in order for the fine men and women working behind the curtain here at The Athletic. In an age of saturated and generic content, very few pieces nowadays are dedicated to progenitorial work aimed at developing a new metric or idea. And it makes sense — most flop and wind up in the dustbin of fantasy history … but not this one (I hope).
Despite dedicating every winter to fantasy baseball research, there’s seemingly never enough time to cover it all, especially when the eleventh hour hits. Consider my newest brainchild, Pitcher Season Rating (PSR), an invention out of necessity. We’ve all been there in the draft room. You’re a few picks away in a snake draft with a handful of hitters in the queue until it’s suddenly empty. When it comes to batters, the industry has created more than one all-encompassing stat for a shorthand comparison, whether it’s Weighted Runs Created-plus (wRC+) or Weighted On-Base Average (wOBA). Granted, it doesn’t fully account for our fantasy perspective, namely steals. However, it will almost always steer you…
