Measuring Impact of Skill (Part II)

Now that Yahoo Fantasy Baseball has launched for 2009, I want to do a few posts discussing strategy for that format, but first I'd like to take the discussion on measuring the impact of skill vs. luck in various format a little further. The last time I wrote about it, I discussed the idea of calculating the number of 'decision points' as a measure of skill. But all decision points are not created equally. Some are so obvious that there's no real decision. So what you really want to look at are what I would call 'reasonable decision points'. In a default format Yahoo league, there are 2880 decision points (180 * 16), but that's really misleading. If you have Albert Pujols, you're obviously never going to bench or drop him. What you're really interest in is how many decision points there are where there's a real choice about what to do. Estimating this is more of an art than a science. I would guess that on an average day there are probably 7 or 8 roster spots where you could reasonably plug in someone from your bench or a free agent. So the 'reasonable decision points' for default Yahoo leagues would be something like 1440 (8 * 180). Still a very "high skill" game.