While we’re generally quick to throw out early-season performance as a matter of small sample size, doing so universally risks throwing the baby out with the bath water, to shoehorn an expression into a place it doesn’t really fit.

While small samples generally aren’t very predictive or revealing of true talent – the quickest metric to stabilize is strikeout rate, which requires about 60 plate appearances to cross the 70 percent reliability threshold – they do matter. An 0-for-20 stretch can doom a player, a 12-for-20 stretch earn him a great deal of leash with a manager. Small sample sizes have meaning for many players.

A week into the season, a handful of players are seeing far more playing time than was expected. How they are performing in these small samples could very well determine the fate of the rest of their seasons.
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Ahh, the first true Sunday of the baseball season. Is there anything better than a lazy Sunday with 15 games? Sure, it’d be nice if they were staggered a little better (there are only two 4 p.m. starts), but your day from lunch to dinner should be pretty damn sweet.

It’ll be extra sweet if you can make a few ducats, so let’s take a look at the daily fantasy situation, where we’re projected to go rainout-free with sunshine all around the league. It’s like the sky is one big Munenori Kawasaki smile today.

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Baseball is back! It is, it’s true. Yasiel Puig is hitting ridiculous bombs and Jose Fernandez is throwing ridiculous breaking balls and everything. Guess what else has happened three days in? This daily fantasy player has had a night where everything went well and one where everything went wrong. Such is life in the world of daily fantasy, which is why playing daily is nearly a must – stuff is gonna happen in a single day, like Aaron Harang busting your four-player Milwaukee Brewers stack with an inexplicable 6.2 innings of two-hit ball. Anyway, keep with it. Now let’s look at some stolen base stuff.

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With one day in the books, you’ve already got one prediction right when it comes to the shortstop position: Yes, Jose Reyes will get hurt at some point this season. On the first at bat of the season, to be precise.

While Reyes’ injury history was surely priced into his ranking and projections already, his opening-day-uhh-why-did-he-play-on-the-weekend-at-less-than-100-percent injury serves as a reminder that things can change quickly. Chris Owings is a full-time starter, Alex Gonzalez surely earned himself some additional early PAs, and Hanley Ramirez is the bustiest bust to ever bust.

It’s technically a day too late, but here are the moment-in-time shortstop tiers for the 2014 season.
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Baseball is here!

Well, okay, baseball was technically “here” last weekend, but for all intents and purposes, today marks the official start of baseball season.

With it comes the start of daily fantasy games…tomorrow. Patience. With a fresh season on our hands, it’s worth going over a few strategic points before we dive in for the first week of daily fantasy.

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On Tuesday, I wrote about wrinkles that I tried to add to the so-called Dewan Rule, hoping to leverage spring training statistics to help predict breakouts. It didn’t work, as was somewhat expected. In fact, Dewan himself admitted on Wednesday that the rule no longer seems to work.

However, a suggestion in the comments section led me to study the same data from a different angle, and it now seems a bit more promising.
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Alternate Titles
What Do They Call Doing The Same Thing Over And Over Again And Expecting Different Results?
How Blake Spent Four Hours On A Monday And A Poll If He Should Smash Computer
Do Spring Stats Matter? The Answer May Surprise You
Five Reasons Your Dog Can Identify A Power Breakout
No Signal In Spring Power Noise

Back around 2005 or 2006, John Dewan, founder of STATS Inc. and co-founder of Baseball Info Solutions, made a very fantasy-relevant discovery: He could predict power breakouts with a 60 percent success rate based on spring training statistics.

His methodology – simply finding a player whose spring slugging is 200 points higher than their career mark (minimum 200 career plate appearances and 40 spring plate appearances) – was simple and easy to understand. It also made it easy for those drafting late to identify breakout candidates.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work.
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If you’re in an auction keeper league, preparing for your draft doesn’t end with producing a dollar value for each player in the player pool. Keeper leagues include keepers (shocker), and those keepers can drastically change the auction marketplace.

The key final step in keeper league auction preparation is adjusting for “inflation.” Inflation in this sense means that because owners are, in theory, keeping players at below their market cost, the relative value of the remaining player pool increases.
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Is everyone Bold Prediction’d out yet? No? Good. I thought with a mid-week slot I’d be alright this year, but six other writers dropped their gutsy dice-rolls on Wednesday so here I am, again somewhat late to the party and risking repetition. On the bright side, this year I’m able to post mine while they can still help you with your draft (or destroy it…probably destroy it).

Last year’s success rate wasn’t excellent, but when it comes to these deep dives, hitting three or four out of 10 provides more value than the six or seven wrong ones cost you. That’s the hope, anyway. So hit control-B, people, and let’s get bold as love. Here’s hoping they’re bold enough (spoiler: they never are).
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It may not be in time for all drafts but hopefully this latest update is in time for your draft. Because that’s all we care about – you.

What you’ll find in this spreadsheet is the consensus rankings by position, as ranked by Eno Sarris, Mike Podhorzer, Zach Sanders and Jeff Zimmerman. You’ll also notice an accompanying stat line, which is the average projection of the Zips, Steamer and Fans projection systems (and just Steamer and Zips where a Fans projection wasn’t available).

You’ll also notice “composite” tabs for batters and pitchers, showing these average projections for a larger pool of players. Finally, there is a “sanity consideration” tab which simply shows the sum of each system compared to the 2013 reality – in short, be wary of the Zips playing time projections, which also work to slightly inflate the playing time for lower-ranked players (note that this can be useful as an “if they play” exercise, it’s just worth keeping in mind).

Click here to download the spreadsheet, and happy drafting!

Important Note: Until 9 a.m. Eastern, the sheet pulled BB for pitchers instead of K. It has been fixed and re-uploaded, sorry for the temporary inconvenience.