The major league season is starting in just a few days. Fantasy owners are making the adjustment from pre-season to in-season mode. Before owners concentrate 100% on in-season topics, they should take a step back for a few minutes and reflect on their final rosters and the process they used to acquire them concentrating on what worked and what didn’t. Here are some areas to consider and how I struggle with them.

Player Valuation Process

This area is probably the one area I struggle with balancing the most. Do I over think the player values and more importantly do I make actual decisions based on these valuations? I start all my valuations by creating a composite projection system from several websites and generally probably lock myself into these projections to create player values depending on the league’s format. Usually, I just check each value and adjust them as I see fit.

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Here’s today’s chat transcript in which I only answered 1/10th of the Scott Kingery questions.

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After a relatively quiet start to Spring Training, injuries are starting to pile up. You may have already had a waiver run in your league, but even if not the first one will run this weekend and a lot of interesting arms have won fourth and fifth starter jobs. Plenty of them are already being drafted as potential contributors (Tyler Chatwood 204th in NFBC, Jordan Montgomery 213th, and Lucas Giolito 215th to name a few). I plucked a few who are intriguing to me and here are some thoughts about them:

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Every season, in addition to posting my standard bold predictions, I up the ante with my bold league leaders. If you thought nailing a bold prediction was tough, the bold league leaders are even more difficult! Just getting one right is worthy of celebration. Because these are bold, I automatically disqualify players I don’t personally believe is considered bold or is projected to finish top five in the category. So I challenge myself and it typically causes me to bat .000. This is more for fun and dreaming of what could be than any serious attempt at being right.

We’ll start with the hitting league leaders in each of the five categories, split up by league.

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The Roto Riteup hopes you find someone who looks at you that way Anthony Rizzo looks at Kris Bryant.

Just a couple dudes having a candid moment. pic.twitter.com/H4TrOTwUuM

— Chicago Cubs (@Cubs) March 26, 2018

That is the way I look at opening day. Read the rest of this entry »

Fantasy baseball is about having fun. One of my leagues is a head-to-head format against my former college teammates. I use this league as an opportunity to be (a little) less competitive.

My first few seasons – about a decade ago – were frustrating. My attempt to build balanced rosters led to a consistent top two roto score and a sub-.500 H2H score. Apparently, being good-but-not-great in every category is an excellent way to consistently lose over half the categories per week. Then, completely by accident, I stumbled upon a strategy I’ve been successfully using for the last half decade.

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Every year I put together a live draft at the best sports bar in San Francisco called The Wreck Room. It is a fantastic collection of industry professionals and regular Joe’s that compete in a league called BARF or the Bay Area Roto fantasy League. It is a day of drinking, laughs, but most importantly drafting.

This year had a dark cloud over the draft as everyone was a bit depressed by the fact they had been dominated the previous season.

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Time again to join us as we shop for bargains where others see only discards and dreck. Our specialty—or shtick, if you prefer—is finding $1 and reserve round bargains who figure to do better than the market says they will. You wouldn’t want to assemble a team full of these guys, except as an entertaining academic exercise. But there’s no denying that the 2017-model Scott Schebler, Delino DeShields, Jimmy Nelson, or Aaron Altherr, all of whom we touted in last year’s installment, would have toned up your roster right nice. So let’s pretend it’s an early-Spring Saturday morning in the ‘burbs, hop in the SUV, drop the kids off at lacrosse practice, tour the local yard sales, and see if we can unearth some rare 78s buried among the old Jethro Tull albums. As before, we offer you ten players that everyone’s ignoring, plus one pricier guy who still looks undervalued to us. In no particular order: Read the rest of this entry »

We continue our six-part look at the Top 10 prospects (by division) with the National League Central.

Previous Reviews:
AL West Top 10s
NL West Top 10s
AL Central Top 10s

The Pirates feature an organization that has nice balance, although the majority of its top prospects are nearing the MLB.

2018 Arrivals:
1. Mitch Keller | SP | 2018 Level: AA
2. Colin Moran | 3B | 2018 Level: AAA
4. Austin Meadows | CF | 2018 Level: AAA
8. Kevin Newman | IF | 2018 Level: AAA

2019 Arrivals:
3. Ke’Bryan Hayes | 3B | 2018 Level: AA
5. Cole Tucker | SS | 2018 Level: AA
10. Taylor Hearn | SP | 2018 Level: AA

2020 and Beyond:
6. Shane Baz | SP | 2018 Level: A-
7. Luis Escobar | SP | 2018 Level: A+
9. Lolo Sanchez | OF | 2018 Level: A-

Other Names to Know:
Sleeper: Calvin Mitchell, OF
Beyond the Top 10 Help in 2018: Nick Kingham, SP

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If you’re looking for my hitter predictions, you can find those here. Below, I wrap up my 10 bold predictions for 2018 with five pitcher predictions. Read the rest of this entry »