How I Spent 6 Months Building a Pitch-by-Pitch Baseball Simulator

I think it started 10 years ago. I built my first lineup in FanDuel for $2 and hit submit. Then I lost.

I couldn’t let it go. I was so fascinated to find out why I lost. Why didn’t I see the obvious flaws in these players that I picked that caused them to play so poorly? Why did others pick better players? It took a long time for me to learn that it was mostly luck and variance at work, but that was only after I saw there was very clearly something there to predict.

My first simulators were very, very crude. I’d get some projections from RotoGrinder and pick out the floor, ceiling, and actual projection. Then I used those to generate a skewed normal distribution for each player, at which point I’d randomly grab a single value from the curve. That was his simulated score for the...

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