There is a long list of things for which you will not find us useful. On that list are, among other pastimes, auto repair, ballroom dancing, cat sitting, and identifying with microscopic precision how good players whom the world already knows to be good are going to be this season. We mention this because we are starting to see articles identifying “sleepers” for the coming season, and most of the guys identified strike us as being wide awake.

For example: we like Kolten Wong a lot. Indeed, as we will come to discuss in the fullness of time, we drafted him in our slow draft. But he’s a good example of the players who are turning up on sleeper lists, when in fact he’s well known to anyone who played Fantasy Baseball or followed Reality Baseball last season.

Here’s a young, highly touted prospect with a good minor league record who’s given the starting second base job in St. Louis, craps out, is banished to Louisville, comes back refreshed, and performs well. Why wouldn’t you have him in your sights?

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Welcome. We are two brothers, aggregate age 122 years, of which roughly 106 have been spent as stat geeks and baseball fans, probably in descending order of intensity. One of us, Michael, resides in Manhattan and is a former academic economist, self-described as an idiot savant in econometrics. He’s why you’ll keep reading, if you do. The other, Dan, resides in Albany, New York, the hub of civic virtue, and knows how to type. He also knows just enough about economics and statistics to translate for the multitudes when his brother is speaking in tongues.

Astonishingly, Michael was a Fantasy Baseball virgin until last year, when his brother tarnished his theretofore-unsullied innocence by recruiting him to replace an owner who went AWOL at the last moment in a $50 buy-in league. It might as well have been an introduction to freebase, and overnight, homemade multiple regression analyses started popping up like toadstools. We’ll share the results of one recent study with you next time: an attempt to identify hitters who were pitched to differently, and reacted to the pitches they saw differently, in the second half of the 2014 season, betokening (we surmise) a newfound respect among their opponents. You don’t need our help to figure out that you might want to draft Nolan Arenado or perhaps Jedd Gyorko. But how about Ender Inciarte, Ike Davis, and Delmon Young, all of whom we recommend?

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