Unless league rules require it or an owner plays in an NL West-only league, owners don’t use their starters in Colorado. This stance may be a little extreme but the league’s aces should be the only started used in Colorado. Pitching in Colorado adds one run to pitcher’s ERA. Owners know this but visiting team must send out a starter to get sacrificed. I’m going to go over some of the pitchers affected the most by being the sacrificial lamb.

This past season, I owned Jeff Samardzija in a couple of leagues. His 4.42 ERA was just above league average (4.36 ERA). The effect on my team wasn’t that much though. There is no way I was going to start him in Coors and I missed out on his 1.94 WHIP and 11.91 ERA over 11.1 IP. With the starts removed, his ERA dropped to 3.98. While not a great ERA, it represented the true effect it had on my team.

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Thus far this offseason, I’ve been in a late-round target mood. Part of that is due to the fact I won’t dive into creating my own player rankings until next month. Therefore, I’m not yet taking an in-depth look at the top players, and I won’t have fantasy analysis for them until I start to dig into their stats. Instead, I’m still combing over leaderboards and adding players to keep an eye on to a growing list. Two more players who recently joined that list are a pair of rookies, Jesse Winker and J.D. Davis. Winker narrowly retained his rookie eligibility with 121 at-bats in 2017, and Davis received a smaller cup of coffee and remains rookie eligible, too. Oddly enough, Davis isn’t even my favorite blocked third base prospect in Houston, Colin Moran fits that bill and was discussed a few weeks ago. Nonetheless, he’s an intriguing player in his own right. Read the rest of this entry »

The offseason begins with a decent bit of uncertainty in the closer’s role for many teams. The free agent and trade markets could shuffle a lot of 9th inning plans across the league for contenders and pretenders alike. Looking at the free agent market, I’ve identified four middle relievers who I think have a real shot at landing a closer gig this winter.

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Every year we have a number of players who make their debut towards the end of the season, wildly exceed expectations, and leave us wondering what the future may hold. Last year we had Gary Sanchez. This year, Rhys Hoskins.

Hoskins hit the ground running. I mean, how many guys reach double digit homers before they reach double digit singles? I could probably look it up, I’m not going to. I don’t want to know. Hoskins did it, and that’s good enough for me.

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I had participated in a too-early industry mock draft that ended a couple of weeks ago. Then I attended First Pitch Arizona (FPAZ), which I reviewed and at which I participated in another arguably too-early draft. This post is about that latter draft. Sorry for all the reviews lately.

The draft, which took place live at FPAZ, is hosted by the National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC). It’s a 15-team league, but instead of being a standard 30-round draft (seven bench players) with in-season transactions, it’s a 50-round draft-and-hold with no transactions (don’t worry, this only covers the first 23 rounds). I won’t say it completely changes the dynamic, but it does, or at least should, dramatically alter the plans of owners who take a lot of risks and plan to hedge them using their free agent acquisition budgets (FAABs).

What’s worse is I had, and still have, done virtually zero planning for the 2018 season. Accordingly, I relied on a strategy I outlined in the previously hyperlinked too-early mock draft review. I’m a risk-averse guy, so I typically draft player who are boring — boring because they’re old and/or you know what you’re getting. Low variance, things of that nature. This strategy inadvertently exacerbated this tendency of mine in these drafts, and the draft-and-hold nature of this league further compounded it. Without looking, the average age of my team must be, like, 33 years old.

But I like it. It’s so unsexy, so unapologetically (actually, very apologetically) boring that it’s almost not worth review. Except when I talk about boring, unsexy teams, I hear from guys like Jeff Zimmerman, Mike Gianella and so on — guys in the industry expert leagues such as Tout Wars and LABR — who say this is their jam, and that’s reassuring.

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Before the 2017 season, I decided to switch up my typical “Steamer and I” series posts where I discuss one player in which my Pod Projections differ from Steamer. Instead, I compared my projections in specific fantasy categories to identify upside and downside guys my forecasts hinted at versus Steamer, representing the crowd. Let’s begin our recaps of the new series with the home run upside group, which are those hitters I projected for significantly more home runs than Steamer. Note that I extrapolated the actual Steamer home run projections to match the same number of at-bats I projected, so playing time differences wasn’t a factor.

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The Auction Calculator is now loaded with the 2017 end-of-season data along with some 2018 projections. I’m sure the preceding comment will be sufficient to keep many readers busy for a while. I’m glad some came back. While its output can lead down several different discussion paths, I’m going to analyze what I consider to be the third starting pitcher tier. I feel many 2018 leagues will be won or lost by navigating this minefield.

So far this offseason, fantasy owners have placed four starters (Kluber, Kershaw, Sale, and Scherzer) in the top tier, After those four, I believe there are a dozen or so pitchers who would make acceptable aces, especially if they can be doubled up with another pitcher from this tier.

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In a general and simplified sense, some players take longer to develop (and subsequently break out) than others. But there’s obviously no shortage of examples throughout the sporting world where that breakout never occurred. Is that something that the Philadelphia Phillies should be concerned about in relation to one of their (still) young position players? In a number of different respects, Maikel Franco was the worst third baseman in baseball among qualifiers in 2017. The Phillies third sacker finished with the worst Off rating among the group that features 22 qualifiers, with a -22.4 mark. The second worst figure on the list of qualifiers came from Yolmer Sanchez, at -5.1, and at least he had the defensive game to at least help things balance out a little bit. Within that group, there was only one third baseman that finished with a negative WAR for the season; it was Franco’s -0.5.

There was a lot of hope that Franco would break through in 2017 for a Phillies team that folks see as the next up-and-coming product of a total rebuild. While they didn’t take too large a step forward, some of their young players did, and more are on the way. Which certainly murks up the picture for Franco somewhat moving forward. With the production and some of the trends that we’ve seen from the last two years in regard to Franco, though, it’s probably time for current and prospective owners to call it quits on the Phillies’ third baseman. Read the rest of this entry »

My review of a recent Ottoneu dynasty prospect draft continues today with highlights from rounds 10 – 12.

Dynasty Prospect Draft Review: Rounds 1 – 3

Dynasty Prospect Draft Review: Rounds 4 – 6

Dynasty Prospect Draft Review: Rounds 7 – 9

This draft should help you “discover” a few prospect names to keep an eye on going forward.  If you have specific questions about players or the thought process of why they were selected, fire away in the comments section, as I’ve asked each owner in the league to be on standby to provide feedback as we review the rounds.

Before I review my own thoughts on the draft, you should know this Ottoneu league uses the “FanGraphs Points” scoring system based on linear weights, so offense is heavily slanted towards wOBA skills (and speed is almost a non-factor).  We also somewhat arbitrarily removed the Top 12 overall offensive prospects to save them for the standard 40-man auction next spring.  Otherwise, any minor league player without one (1) MLB PA or IP is eligible to be drafted. You can read more about the custom rules of this dynasty league here, and follow along with the draft here.

A few of the prospects below are also featured on the 2018 Top 100 Fantasy Prospects list.

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Back in February of 2015, I wrote the first edition of this article – I Don’t Get It: Avisail Garcia. Three seasons later, that article has held up really well. Avisail Garcia has posted less than four WAR over his last 1,615 plate appearance. However, since his 2017 campaign checked in at 4.2 WAR with strong four category production, fantasy owners are going to jump back onto the Avisailwagon. I’m here to advise caution.

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