Welcome!

So for the past decade or so I've been reading and studying fantasy baseball as much as possible and I simply cannot get enough!  This past year I've come across two conclusions:

1. I know as much or more than a lot of the fantasy writers out there.  I'm not really trying to toot my own horn on this as much as question some of the people's stuff out there that I've been reading recently.  I don't want to name names but I am definitely not referring to any of the Yahoo or ESPN fantasy writers, as I believe they do an excellent job on their stuff.  There are some other writers that I question for many reasons, whether that's because of regional bias, old dogmatic view-points, incompetency or many other reasons.  So, I feel a strong desire not to keep my viewpoints to myself anymore.  It's very possible any readers bored or intrigued enough to stumble upon this site might come to the same opinion about me, but I'm very curious to see where this goes.
2. Lots of writers talk about 6x6 leagues here and there, but no one that I've found is wise enough to take the time and actually put out rankings for this.  We'll get into how much 6x6 leagues can vary later, and maybe that's why, but I still think there's enough of a market out there for these rankings.

My name is Ben Antal.  Joining me in this blog will be my co-worker and friend, Ben Northrop.  We both live in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area and work for a sports company called SportsData doing data entry.  He will be by far the smarter half of this blog, and is the first person I go to when I don't understand something in baseball, like Encarnacion's BAPIP (Look it up, I dare you!).

Lastly, let's take a quick look at the categories I'm talking about.  For batters, we have R, HR, RBI, SB, AVG, and OPS.  For pitchers we have Saves, K's, ERA, WHIP, Wins, and Holds.  The reason why I've chosen these twelve categories is simply because they are the most common in 6x6 leagyes and it seems like a good idea to have some common ground.  Tristan Cockcroft has mentioned he prefers OBP and SLG as the last two categories for hitters and QS and K/9 as the last two for pitchers.  I am in a league with OBP and SLG and I much prefer it over AVG and OPS but it's simply not popular enough yet.  For pitching I do hate wins as much as the next sabermetrician but replacing it with QS devalues relief pitching so much and doesn't really do that much better of a job because a pitcher that pitches 5-shutout innings or a pitcher that goes that extra inning and gives up a forth run in a blow-out game to save the bullpen is drastically devalued.  Until wins become less of a big deal in the real sport I think we have to keep them around in ours as well.  Finally, I like holds because so many teams are now putting their best pitcher in the set-up role because they can get more value out of them and use them in more situations than just closing games.  If anybody wants to argue that Kenley Jansen is not the best relief pitcher on the Dodgers I'd love to hear it.

I guess the real point here is that I prefer my fantasy players to have a similar value to what they do in real life and going with a 6x6 format is the best way I've found to do that.  On a real team, a player is not gonna win a job just because he can steal 50 bases in a season, nor is he going to be valued similarly to a guy that can hit 20 home runs.

Well, that's enough writing for today.  Later this week I'll be doing an early ADP analysis and hopefully within the next two couple weeks we will finish our rankings and have a few other things posted on here.