In last week's edition of Outside the Box, I made available for download the Average Draft Position numbers from both Yahoo and ESPN leagues. At the end of the article I said we'll compare the ADP numbers to the actual end of season ranks to see which site had better drafters. I was not lying, that is exactly what we are going to do this week.

Although finding out which site's ADP numbers are more accurate would not necessarily tell us which site had smarter people drafting on it, but rather which site had better preseason rankings. I brought this up in last Saturday's article and instead of paraphrasing myself, I'll just reprint what I wrote last week.

Although the results would not indicate which site had smarter people draft, but more so which site had better rankings. The order of available players in the drafting window probably influences the ADP numbers more than anything else.

So now we know what the results will tell us, but the question remains how to get the results. We could just look at the numbers and just tell by mental note which site seems to be doing better, or we can do it technically.

I'm in the mood for some number-crunching so I'm going to determine the better site by finding the standard deviation of each sites ADP numbers to final rankings. The lower the deviation, the better so whichever site checks in lower wins.

Standard deviation is a pretty common calculation in statistics classes, but I understand not of you have taken a statistics class or maybe you just didn't do very well in the subject. That's okay, I'll run through the operation quickly right now and also give you a link to a clear and concise Wikipedia page on Standard Deviation.

Here is the link to the Wikipedia page and for those too lazy or good for links, I'll do a quick rundown of the steps:

1) Find the mean (average) of the numbers
2) Subtract the mean from each number
3) Square the numbers resulted from Step 2
4) Find the mean (average) of the numbers resulted from Step 3
5) Take the square root of the mean calculated in Step 4

There you have it, the five steps to calculating Standard Deviation. Now let's move onward.

To save me some time, I'm only going to use the first 100 players drafted and for players like Victor Martinez whose rank is extremely bad because of injuries, I'll set their final rank at the somewhat arbitrary 400. Let's see those results!

~~~ Standard Deviation ~~~
+----------------------+
| Yahoo  ~~~~~~ ESPN   |
+----------------------+
| 123.24  ~~~~ 116.92  |
~+----------------------+~

As you can see from the spiffy chart I created, ESPN narrowly edged out Yahoo. The difference between the pre-season ADP rank and the final season rank based on stats was about 6 spots closer in ESPN leagues. Notice how off the ranks were, though.

I'm not saying these sites give bad advice because I don't believe any other drafting site has significantly better numbers, but just realize how difficult it is to predict future performance. Perhaps fantasy Baseball is not the best thing to put your money on.