Nothing seemed to go right for the Chicago Cubs in 2013. While the team wasn’t expected to be good, it had a young core of players who could contribute to the next winner on the North Side. Virtually all of those players collapsed last season. Starlin Castro finished the year with a .280 wOBA, Anthony Rizzo regressed in his first full season and Jeff Samardzija failed to capitalize on his strong 2012. Both Castro and Rizzo are the more alarming cases. They were supposed to give fans a look at the team’s future before the next crop of talented prospects were ready. They’ll need to rebound if the team want to continue the long climb back to respectability.

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The Pirates starting pitchers were damn good last year. They posted a 3.27 ERA, good for third best in baseball and the National League, and delivered an intriguing mix of strikeouts and ground balls. If the entire staff was one pitcher, it would be exactly the type I love. A.J. Burnett may be gone, but the rotation is still composed of a high upside group.

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Episode 91

The latest episode of The Sleeper and the Bust is now live! Jason Collette joins Eno Sarris to preview the Seattle Mariners and the Miami Marlins.

As usual, don’t hesitate to tweet us any fantasy questions you have that we may answer on our next episode.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or via the feed.

Thanks to Ian Miller aka Teen Archer, for the new intro music

Approximately 67 min of joyous analysis.

ADP results from NFBC

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The Pirates have perhaps the best outfielder in baseball not named Mike Trout, but it appears that they’ll have to play mix and match in right field until their top prospect is ready to answer the call. Their outfield produced about 13 real world wins last season, and that was with terrible play from Felix Pie and Travis Snider. Fantasy owners will be hoping for a repeat in 2014.

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Heading into the offseason, the Cardinals didn’t seem to have too much work to do with their outfield. Sure, they were set to lose Carlos Beltran, but they had depth within the organization and there hardly seemed to be a need to go fishing on the free agent market. A quick trade to maybe give themselves some improvement in center field happened early in the winter, but everything else was left alone. Now here we are with less than two weeks before pitchers and catcher report and less than a month before position players make their way and there’s still no room for potential rookie sensation, Oscar Taveras. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cincinnati Reds bullpen offers little in the way of drama, unless you consider shut-down, lights-out closers to be dramatic.

Yes, it’s Aroldis Chapman atop the food chain in the Queen City, and there’s little reason to doubt he’ll once again be one of fantasy baseball’s premiere closers. Of course, there’s always the hope the Reds decide to use him more, further leveraging their $5 million investment for 2014.

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Monday night, we got some people together in a virtual room to pick real players for a fake baseball game — hopefully for your tangible benefit.

I struggled with how to present this. I’m unsure anyone wants to read through words on top of words on top of words for each round. So I’ll give you the participants, and the draft, and let you make the comments. This mock will help us in our analysis, and we’ll refer to it in future pieces. But to award a best and worst pick in each round just tells you what I think.

And the beauty of this mock is that it’s about what all of us thought late Monday night, February third. What do you think about what we thought?

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The following is a post about the 2014 Chicago Cubs bullpen, and specifically the usefulness of players from that bullpen in a fantasy sense. It assumes (of course) that the 2014 Chicago Cubs will win a game or two, which they will (probably). It also assumes that the 2014 Chicago Cubs will have enough leads to hold and save that the members of this bullpen might provide some (any?) value for fantasy owners.

No, this post is not intended as a joke. This is a real thing.

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There are two big stories when it comes to the Reds offense. One relates to an outfielder, which indirectly affects the infielders and their fantasy potential and the other involves an infielder that somewhat surprisingly still dons a Reds cap. Another less major, but still noteworthy, story is the changing of the guard behind the plate. Ryan Hanigan’s departure opens the door for Devin Mesoraco and now there’s simply no excuse to not make him the every day catcher and see what he could do.

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I read two articles the other day that helped clarify my thinking. For at least a year, I’ve been bothered by fantasy baseball’s obsession with rankings – especially preseason rankings. Imagine: here’s a list of the top 25 first baseman ranked in order of value. Except there isn’t much difference between the fourth best and the eighth best. After the 11th best it gets really ugly. Perhaps we should introduce some tiers, we’ll call them Great, Good, Average, Bad. But now there are tiers within my tiers and hidden tiers than span between my arbitrary tiers, etc. etc.

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