Fantasy Baseball: Breaking down Head-to-Head vs. Roto

Writer’s Note: I don’t know why I went with a picture of Einstein here. I guess I just knew that this would involve some math and I wanted to give myself a lot more credit than I deserve. Don’t judge me.

Head-to-head vs. Roto. The differences between the two seem great and in some cases, they may be. If you’re new to fantasy baseball and have only tried one and not the other, I figured I would show you how a head-to-head league would look in roto, to see if it makes any difference.

Nash has written about the two, and even gone into great deal about how to manage head-to-head vs. roto. Clave hates head-to-head as much as I hate stolen bases.

My ultimate theory is this: If you’re just purely looking to see who the best team is, roto is better. If you’re in a league with a lot of friends and are really interested in creating and building rivalries, head-to-head is better. Roto leagues run the risk of getting boring if there’s a dominant team, as it making up ground is exceptionally hard. It can quickly turn into a race for second, and I don’t like that at all. But I’m torn, because I do like the best teams being rewarded with championships, which rarely happens in sports today.

Now, I am not sure which one is the greater test of a manager. In roto, you could conceivably draft a good team and lay back for most of the year without making moves and may possibly win a championship. That strategy is not going to work in a head-to-head league.

Last week, Nash wrote that I sometimes look through our head-to-head league to see what it would look like if it was a roto league. I also had a reader email me trying to help him figure out where stood in his head-to-head league’s playoffs and I told him to do exactly that.

So, I figured I would do that right now with the head-to-head league that Nash and I are in. The purpose here is just to see if things are looking any differently now than they’d look if this was a roto league. So, without further adieu, let’s get to it.

Note that I am not using team names here. The team listed as “1st Place,” is first in the head-to-head league, and so on. Get it? Got it? Good.

Hitting:

Pitching:

We’re going to come back to this analysis in a second here, but there are a few things I would like to point out first.

One: Note that the top six teams are the same in roto as they are in head-to-head, although they do come out in a different order. The seventh place team is only a wins behind the fifth and sixth place teams, but I wouldn’t call that team’s chances all that great.

Two: This league has potential to show off the problems of either roto or head-to-head, depending on what your preferences are. If this was a roto league, it would be a battle for second place. You’re simply not going to make up eight points on a first place team this time of the year. He has by far the most complete team in the league.

Now, you can certainly make the case that that makes things a little boring at this point, but if you’re a person who likes the idea of the best team being crowned as the league’s champ, you may not be liking this too much right now. Other than a bye week getting the tiebreaker in a matchup, the top seed gets no advantage. In terms of roto points, the sixth place team is barely closer to the first place team than they are to the last place team, but he can pull a championship out.

Now, let’s assume for a second that the standings remain exactly the same. Let’s see how the playoffs would likely shake out.

(PS: I am not looking at consolation matchups).

(PPS: X means team is slightly favored. XX means team is heavily favored. — Means Matchup is an actual tie).

Week 1: Byes – First Place, Second Place

No real shockers in place here. The six seed could pull the upset here, but it would take a lot. The third place team has four categories that he should win easily in. Since a tiebreaker goes to the higher seed, he would only need two more wins to guarantee a spot in the finals. An upset is possible, but not likely, which adds up well, given their seedings in the head-to-head standings and a nearly 20-point difference in hypothetical roto points.

As you’d expect from the standings, this is a pretty tight matchup. Not only would each team win six categories, but each team has three blowouts in their favor, and three swing wins (this is an election year, after all), in their favor. If this holds, the fourth place team would advance based on being the higher seed, so that’s what we’re going with here, but this matchup could go either way.

Week 2:

The result here isn’t terribly surprising. The First Place team really is the class of this league and should at least advance to the finals. What is somewhat interesting is that this team includes Matt Kemp, Miguel Cabrera, and Robinson Cano, and would still only tie the offensive categories. Now, his pitching is solid, too (Cole Hamels, Johnny Cueto), but the offense being that close definitely grabs the eye of someone familiar with the league.

The matchup would appear to be overwhelmingly in favor of the second seed, but this one is close. Other than the matchups that involve my own team, no matchup would interest me more than if these two happened to lock up. This has potential to be one with a lopsided final score that easily could have gone dramatically different. But as it is, not only does the number two team have more wins (even if they are close), but he also holds the tiebreaker. So, they advance here, setting up a 1 vs. 2 matchup.

Week 3 (Finals):

While we’ll of course have to revisit this in September, this actually looks pretty good. The team that’s been the best and far and away has the best roster would take the crown, which is right. On paper, they would beat the fifth best roto team in the finals, but look at that again, 2-5 are separated by 1.5 points, which is barely noticeable.

This is a fairly new league. In its first year, the team that was in first place would have also been the best roto team, and they won it all. In the second year, the team that won was very good, but they weren’t really the best in the league.

But after doing this, I have to say that while the chances are better that the top team will fail to win it all in head-to-head than they would be in roto, the differences between the two forms aren’t as great as you may believe, even if the managerial styles differ.

On a personal note, if you play in more than one league, I’d advise at least one of each. Things can get a little stale if you’re in the same kind of leagues without a different look. At least give both a try at some point, and move forward based on that.