We’re passing out awards this week at RG (we’re also delivering demerits, but not in this piece) and I’m looking at the Deep League MVP today. I share Eno’s position of what this award should be as he discussed in the Deep League Cy Young. What that means in a nutshell is that A.J. Pollock isn’t winning this one.

He had an undeniably fantastic season, rising up from a 104 hitter ADP to end up as the fourth-best hitter in baseball, but even factoring in pitchers only jumps his ADP 54 spots meaning he wasn’t exactly cheap despite being a tremendous return on the investment. Kendrys Morales was less expensive as the 226th hitter off the board, but he was drafted enough to log a real ADP on four of the six sites FantasyPros uses so he’s out, too, despite the incredible season.

I was a little lighter on my playing time requirements for consideration as we saw some guys do amazing things in fewer than 100 games this year, so I was looking for at least 400 PA. You can probably think of some of the top candidates immediately, especially if you won a league as the beneficiary of these free agent finds. The booming rookie class paid major dividends via the wire in large part because the arrival of several was well ahead of schedule, let alone the fact that they performed immediately.

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Back in April, the RotoGraphs staff made some picks for the season. Vague, I know, but I assume you understand what kind of picks I’m talking about.

And because I like competitions, I’m going to turn this into one. As the moderator of these picks, I’m judging it by my own silly subjectivity.

The rules are simple:

• One point for the winner of each category
• Most points wins
• No touching of the hair or face

That’s it! Now let’s do this!!!

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Today I’ll review another article focused on identifying hitters with home run upside. On Monday, I recapped the names based on my xHR/FB rate equation, while today I will discuss the list I cobbled together using ESPN Home Run Tracker. What’s always interesting is when both methods disagree and I’m not always sure which to believe. I tend to side with the xHR/FB rate equation though just because the formula uses significantly more data points.

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It’s accountability week for yours truly. Yesterday, I wrote/gloated about my winning roster in the ottoneu league FanGraphs Staff Two. I consider that post my reward for winning an otherwise free league. Today’s conversation is decidedly less celebratory. My DFS season didn’t come close to replicating my 40 percent ROI from 2014.

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It’s best of and worst of week at RotoGraphs. I’m here with 2015’s worst starting pitchers.

There’s a lot of ways to approach this. A lot of pitchers’ values are conditional upon their circumstances, so I’ve tried to keep this in mind when creating this list. When it comes down to it, though, this is all just one man’s opinion.

Fantasy Pros calculated the aggregate average draft position (ADP) using several premier fantasy baseball websites, so that’s the value upon which I’ve based my decisions.

But first, let us acknowledge 2015’s All-Injury Sigh Young Squad:

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To separate the deep league fantasy Cy Young from the regular fantasy one, and also from the real-life Cy Young, we’ll need to define the award. Fantasy Baseball is maybe all about value, and value is at least 50/50 cost, so we have to factor in cost to hand out this hardware.

And, in fact, for the deep league version, cost is even more important. Because the cost for a deep league draftee vs a mixed league draftee has to be much lower. Even if the output is lower, the Deep League Cy Young should not have been drafted in mixed leagues, optimally.

So even if Dallas Keuchel was ranked 257th overall going into the season and ended up ninth overall, making him a great contender if not the lock for the overall Roto Cy Young, Dallas Keuchel was a decently expensive deep league starter. We’re looking for that $1 wonder that led your AL-only staff to victory. We’re looking for 2014 Dallas Keuchel, not 2015’s version.

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Yesterday, I reviewed my preseason target list of hitters whose xHR/FB rates suggested significant HR/FB rate upside in 2015. Today I’ll recap the opposite end, those hitters who my xHR/FB rate equation suggested had significant HR/FB rate downside. These were the guys who most outperformed their xHR/FB rates in 2014 and were at risk of a decline.

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Episode 284

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live!

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Jason Collette are back to discuss Utley slide, some playoff standouts who are improving their 2016 stock, including Rougned Odor, Colby Rasmus, and Marco Estrada among others, and the playoffs at large (outside of the fantasy realm). And they finish the podcast discussing Jason’s bold picks from RW (AL, NL).

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In a runaway win, the player with the most value from a single tool easily goes to Billy Hamilton and his 57 SB. He was completely useless otherwise for his fantasy owners with a .226 AVG (.274 OBP), 56 Runs, 28 RBI, and 4 HR in 114 games. Even with those horrible numbers, he ended up 88th (~7th rounder) in ESPN’s Player Rater ahead of Robinson Cano, Jason Kipnis, and Alex Rodriguez. Those 57 SB are gold though with teams now running less and less.

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I told you last week that I made a lot of predictions, doled out a ton of preseason advice and published lists, lists and more lists filled with players to target or avoid based on that article’s theme. So you better believe that I’m going to review as many of those as I can to discover just how valuable that advice was! Today I review my target list heading into the season comprised of players I determined underachieved with respect to their HR/FB rates. That is, their actual HR/FB rates were significantly below their xHR/FB rates, based on the equation I developed.

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