The Bookshelf Conversation: Ron Shandler

It’s no secret that I am not a huge fan of fantasy baseball. I have enough trouble balancing my checkbook without putting together a fake team and then keeping track of the day-to-day dealings and statistical upkeep that I would surely do — at least for a couple of weeks.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in analytics and finding new ways to judge who’s a cut above. It’s when I start thinking about it too deeply, that‘s when the headaches set in. Why does this formula attribute a figure of .73 to triples and not .75, or .64? In other words, who makes this stuff up, and why do we just blindly accept it?

Ron Shandler, who also runs Baseballhq.com, has been making a career out of providing data to fantasy general managers for more than a quarter century. I figured if anyone can make sense of this to me, it was probably him, so I asked him to school me on the world of baseball numbers.