After that, there are no guarantees. They are the rare pitchers still throwing innings or more and enjoying the full benefit of this swing and miss generation of MLB hitters. Meanwhile, the bulk of starting pitchers are seeing fewer innings and subsequently fewer wins and a smaller share of the strikeouts. It definitely hurts to bypass some of the great hitters along the way, but with more hitting positions to fill, you can make up for it along the way. For many of the same reasons the elite starting pitchers have gained value, so have the really good middle relievers.
The best part? These middle relievers are almost free! I remember the days when the middle infield was Derek, Alex, and Nomar, and then a bunch of garbage. We just have to treat it differently. Back then it meant grabbing one of those scarce elite options to gain a huge advantage. Realmuto if he goes too early. What you can do is try to keep an eye on the positional needs of the owners who draft in close proximity.
For example, if you know the owners drafting before and after you already have two closers, you might wait on the closer you want and grab your second starting catcher. I like rotisserie because I think it allows for a lot more strategy from us. Points Leagues probably do a better job of reflecting the value of players in real baseball and allow for more smack talk with weekly matchups. I have to say, I have been in a single league, head to head, 12 teamer, points league, lineup sets once a week for the matchup.
At first people think it is odd, but every member of the league has stayed the entire 11 years because it is so much fun. My comment on strategy is more geared toward roto vs. H2H categories does involve quite a bit of strategy. Points leagues are simply about fielding a team that produces the most points. In roto you might not have the best team, but can manipulate categories to gain an advantage.
Targetting categories where you can gain the most and lose the least later in the season, etc…. I was looking for statistical advantages as I have no strong team loyalties. Elite level players in first rounds as a best available, safe bet scenario. Include a 1B and two SP. Replacement value at each position helps you identify how steep the drop off is if you pass on one player in favor of another.
For example, in a team mixed league that starts nine pitchers of any kind, I know that the th-ranked pitcher including relievers will be the last one used in a starting lineup. If we posit that roughly 30 relievers will be used, that means if I pass up drafting Sonny Gray in Round 7 and instead take Brian Dozier , I know I can get the 78th ranked starting pitcher as a worst-case scenario with my last pick in leagues where starters are drafted separately from reserves.
By knowing the depth of the player pool at each position, I know not only the value of the players I'm contemplating drafting, but also the opportunity cost of the ones I let pass. Trades — Whether your league allows trades and whether your league-mates are apt to trade for anything resembling fair value will determine the importance of drafting balance across your league's categories. If trading is liberal, you can largely opt for value, even if that means nabbing four top closers at a bargain.
If trading is not allowed, you'll have to shore up categorical weaknesses at the expense of marketable surplus. As such, you'll need to have some idea of how many home runs, RBI, saves, steals, etc. For example, if home runs is typically good enough for an "9" out of "12" in that category, then when you get to projected homers in the 14th round with five hitters left to draft , you should probably switch gears and target another category in Round But leagues with daily moves change the equation as they typically come with pitching innings limits, and therefore high-strikeout pitchers gain value and even good low-strikeout pitchers are largely undraftable in shallower leagues.
Draft Slot — Many drafts like the NFBC give you the choice of where you'd want to pick and also advance notice of the slot from which you're picking. Most years there's an advantage to picking early in the first round as the drop-off in production is typically biggest at the top. But if you're especially high on a player whose ADP is toward the end of the first round and would rather not take him at No. No matter where it seems the drop-off is, often the market is wrong anyway, and so we wouldn't get too wrapped up in where you pick.
But once you know your slot, you have a chance to plan your draft to an extent. You can't know what people ahead of you will do, but say you pick fourth in , you might have a shot at Clayton Kershaw and can map out your strategy for subsequent rounds to decide whether you really want to use your first pick on a pitcher there's nothing wrong with it, but it will significantly alter the rest of your draft.
Mock Draft — You can go to various mock draft sites , practice drafting from different slots and see what you wind up with. It'll give you a sense of whether you really can lock up middle infield with Jose Altuve and Carlos Correa with your first two picks. Of course, every draft is different, but seeing owners react in real time and the decisions with which you're likely to be faced — and their consequences — will keep you clear-headed during your real drafts and reduce the chance you get stuck and make a panic pick.
Every draft differs, but ADP is a good general barometer of market value. If you're under the delusion you'll get Kris Bryant in Round 3, think again. As of this writing, his Yahoo! ADP is No. Being realistic about who will be available when allows you to plan for the likely choices with which you'll be faced. It'll also let you know whether a certain strategy — wait on starting pitching, but get bounce-back candidates like Adam Wainwright ADP 76 in the sixth round probably and Jeff Samardzija ADP in the 14th probably not — is viable.
Position Scarcity — Obviously, big-hitting outfielders are easier to come by than big-hitting shortstops. The question is how much one should adjust for the scarcity of production at certain positions. In an NFBC-style team league with five outfielders and a utility player, who is an outfielder roughly half the time , you're dealing with the 66th OF as replacement level.
Scarcity matters to an extent, but as you can see, you don't want to overdo it. As you get deeper into your drafts, and you need to shore up a particular category, it's also important to be aware of the depth in categories.
There are 21 players — given healthy seasons — projected for 30 or more homers, there are 12 players assuming health projected for 30 or more stolen bases.
And 30 is obviously an arbitrary cut-off, but it illustrates the point. In sum — there's no substitute for deeply researching the player pool, and you absolutely must know your league parameters and their ramifications. How specific you get with your draft plan is a matter of personal preference — I usually prefer to target a few players I think will overperform in the context of what the draft gives me, but I see no problem with being more precise about category and positional targets.
Either way, you should have a good grasp of market values and your league's positional and categorical depth. Next up, we'll take on the topic of player valuation.
There are but three components to player valuation: 1 Assessing a player's skills and situation; 2 Creating a stat-line for him for the upcoming season; and 3 Figuring out what those stats are worth in your league's particular context.
Assessing Skills and Situation. A player's personal history isn't always enough, especially with younger players like Jorge Soler or even Yasiel Puig.
One must look at how baseball players at certain ages, experience levels and skill sets perform generally. Once you've gathered the relevant facts about a player's skills and context, you might want to translate that into a statistical line for the upcoming season.
There are two kinds of stastical lines one can create, and each has its merits and flaws. Projections — a player is given a stat line that's the average of his many possible seasons. It's his 50th percentile season, neither exceeding nor falling short of what his skill set and situation likely portend. The virtue of doing projections for every player is the process is ostensibly unbiased - i.
You're not playing favorites, giving one player his 75th percentile season and another his 25th. Put in baseball terms, someone will probably win 20 games, hit.
If we give everyone his 50th percentile season, it's likely no one will achieve those numbers. But we know that someone will have his 95th-percentile season, and someone will have his 25th percentile one.
As such, we'd like to have a set of numbers that reflects that. Which brings us to:. Predictions — Here we assign players stat lines that mimic the real distribution of player stats in an actual season. We predict who will have his 75th-percentile season and who will have his 25th.
We give someone 20 wins and someone just as good 13 wins because that's how it goes in real baseball. The flaw in this is that it's completely subjective and arbitrary to decide what player will have a breakout and what player will be a bust when both have similar skill sets and find themselves in similar situations.
Instead of giving us each 50 cents, you're saying you're going to win a dollar, and I'm going to win nothing — when it's just as likely that I win the dollar and you win nothing. A hunch can be considered a disproportionate emphasis on a particular skill, stat or contextual detail, one you wouldn't apply generally but that jumps out on you in a particular case. Aggregating the disparate facts — not all of them easily quantifiable — into a projection is part art as well as science, and we know that certain factors work in combination, so that a beneficial change in ballpark doesn't affect all players the same way or to the same degree, for example.
Leave room for hunches, but be realistic about their fallibility. Volatility and Reliability — By condensing an array of disparate numbers and facts about a player into a 50th percentile statline, you lose some important information. A projection by itself just tells you the player's average season.
But not all averages comprise the same distribution of highs and lows. Although the numbers might be similar, Adrian Gonzalez 's projection is more reliable than Puig 's.
Puig has more upside and more downside. Early in your draft or in an auction when you pay top dollar for a player , you might want to pay more for reliability and less for upside, though I'd probably still opt for Puig because I project him more highly than most. In the middle and especially toward the end of your draft and with cheaper players at auction , the projected average numbers aren't nearly as valuable.
You want the player to be capable of far more in his 80th or 90th percentile season, even if the possibility that he loses his job outright, i. For that reason, year old Trea Turner , who didn't do much in , is worth having on your team mixed league bench, while year old J. Hardy is probably not. Straight projections alone are not enough to inform a cheat sheet.
You must know about a player's volatility and reliability. Translating Performance into Value. Once you've put together your projections for the entire player pool, you need to figure out how to turn that into a cheat sheet or list of dollar values. While it's pretty easy to see Miguel Cabrera 's projected stats put him near the top of your list, it's not obvious whether they're better than Andrew McCutchen 's, and if so, by how much.
It's also not immediately evident whether a. The problem of comparing players relative to the overall player pool and across categories isn't something we can solve by eyeballing it. Value Over Replacement — This is the margin by which a player is better than those who are freely available on the league's waiver wire. In other words, if you're in a team mixed league that starts 14 offensive players, that means the top offensive players are starting at any given time.
Because the th player might be a steals specialist with no power, or a big power bat who hits. As such, any starter's value is determined by the extent to which his stats exceed or fall below these benchmarks again assuming these are the numbers you came up with for your league parameters.
Once we subtract out replacement value stats from all of the hitters on our list, we now have their real stats insofar as they inform our values. A player like Ben Revere might be projected for 1 HR, and thus his true home run total is -9 for purposes of his value. But this still doesn't help us answer the original question as to whether a. Essentially, we're asking which stat is a bigger outlier relative to the player pool, i.
For that we need our second concept: Standard Deviation. Standard Deviation — this measures the average amount the data points, i. For example, if the average number of homers in the usable player pool is 15, and the player pool consists of four players, two with 20 HR and two with 10 HR, then the standard deviation is five HR.
But if the average were 15, but there were two players with 30 and two with zero, then the standard deviation would be As you can see, in the former case, the data points are more clustered together, and in the latter, they're further apart. This has implications for the value of stat-lines because in a case where the data points are clustered together, e. The standard deviation for that player pool was fairly small.
But Babe Ruth led the league in HR that year with 59! You can see what Ruth would do for your fantasy team in that context - he'd win homers for you virtually all by himself. Looked at in terms of standard deviation and value above replacement, we can see why this is.
If we say replacement value was roughly five homers, then Ruth had 54 homers above replacement. And if the standard deviation was about four, then Ruth was a whopping Had the players been less clustered together, and the standard deviation were 10 HR, then Ruth would have been "only" 5.
The more clustered together the data points are, the bigger the impact of the rare outliers. We can do this for every player in every category, figuring out his outlier-ness both positive and negative in each and add up the true extent to which he helps or hurts your team. Which brings us back to the original question: Is 28 HR above replacement worth more than 75 points of batting average in at-bats let's assume at-bats is the average number of at-bats in the pool so we don't need to make a volume adjustment?
The answer depends on what the standard deviation is for each category. Using the RotoWire projections from it was about nine for HR, and about 18 points for batting average. Based on those numbers, the 28 homers is 3. Clearly, given these ballpark replacement levels and the RotoWire projections, the batting average would be worth substantially more than the HR.
Sticking with Cabrera's projection last year's will work just fine to illustrate the point and saves me a lot of busy-work , he'd be about 20 HR, 58 RBI, 39 runs, -7 steals and 56 points of batting average in at-bats roughly 1. So we go down the line and add up his contributions in each category. That brings it to 4. When you add it up, Cabrera's projection got you 2.
We can compare that number to that of every other player in the league, e. Now we have a basis for our cheat sheet, i. To generate dollar values for an auction, there are a couple further steps. You'll probably end up with a result like 3. Then you multiply each player's score by 3. They all did.
And that's all it'll be for hitters: an historical oddity, a blip. For pitchers? Well, what normally happens when a pitcher misses a significant portion of a season, whether because of injury or something else, like a global pandemic? That's right: He feels it the next year, too.
I don't mean literally feels it, as in ouchie, that hurts. I mean that the lost season typically begins a multi-year buildup back to a typical workload. Yes, another reason for the widening gap at starting pitcher is the strict management of innings as a way to reduce injury. Organizations generally don't like to increase a pitcher's workload by more than innings from one year to the next. Of course, it happens from time to time, but it raises red flags and is generally frowned upon.
So what happens after a year in which the league leaders got only 80 innings or so? What happens when most every pitcher is looking at an increase in excess of innings? Suffice it to say it won't happen for some of them.
I'll go as far as to say most of them. One of the big reasons that drafting a pitcher early was long considered verboten in Fantasy is because the inherent risks at the position make for a high turnover rate. Thus, the bulk of the pitching crop isn't so well established. Many of the most interesting targets beyond the elite would have been subject to an innings limit anyway, so after the season that was, I can't predict to what lengths some organizations will go to protect their long-term assets.
There won't be some clear-cut policy that's applied evenly from organization to organization, but they're all sure to respond in some way to this unique challenge. Some of the most likely tactics include early hooks, early shutdowns, skipped starts, phantom IL stints and strategic demotions.
Perhaps all of the above. The Dodgers have been running that playbook for years. Consider how careful they've been with Walker Buehler the past two seasons, having him more or less skip spring training and instead build up in-season.
You think they're turning him loose for innings after seeing him throw about 60, regular and postseason combined? And he's fairly established compared to much of what's out there. Here's a look at some of the pitchers who could suffer some of the most extreme innings limitations:. What if the Brewers aren't contending?
What are the chances Corbin Burnes throws even innings, much less the he'd probably need to justify his ADP? And I'm not even arguing he should go lower. Again, there are only so many starting pitchers capable of making an actual difference, and he's among them. But how long before he goes from solving a problem to presenting a new one? That's what makes the pitching situation so dire in
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