In case you were trapped in a coal mine or under a rock somewhere and hadn’t heard the news, Justin Upton was traded from Arizona to the Atlanta Braves on Thursday morning. Articles and opinions have wallpapered the internet discussing things like Upton’s home/road splits, his expected performance now that he’s playing side by side with brother B.J., and where he is now ranked amongst baseball’s outfielders in both real life and in fantasy. To me, it seems redundant to perpetuate the conversation. He’s a highly-regarded player with immense talent, is just 25 years old, and is heading to a competitive organization that has shown a commitment to winning. Is he suddenly going to suck? No. So long as he stays healthy, an issue that he has dealt with in his relatively young but seemingly long career, Upton is going to continue to be a highly-regarded player with immense talent, has youth on his side, and is playing for a winning ball club. If you own him in your fantasy league, you’re psyched, and if you need reassurances and your hand held any further on the matter, consider it done. But we’ve got a bigger fish to fry here. Read the rest of this entry »

For all the years that I’ve been playing fantasy baseball, I’ve never really understood the idea of punting saves. Not that I don’t understand the concept, but that I don’t understand the rationale behind thinking that it’s a good strategy. You load up on starters with the hope of locking up wins and strikeouts while doing your best to stay competitive in WHIP and ERA. Perfectly viable strategy, right? But what about the fact that Wins is, more or less, an arbitrary category and while your guy goes seven strong and exits with the lead, some clown of a set-up man comes in, walks the leadoff guy and then serves up a two-run shot to tie the game. A great game for your starter, for sure, but you make no advancement in a category you’ve supposedly built your team to excel in. Read the rest of this entry »

And six weeks later, a team was born…

That’s right. After just six short weeks and hundreds of emails, we finally finished the RotoGraphs Ridiculously Early Mock Draft — Slow Draft Style. The process was definitely cumbersome, to say the least, but we all made it through relatively unscathed. Our fearless leader and draft overseer, Eno Sarris, published the results five rounds at a time (the links to all can be found in this post) and now it’s time to reveal our teams. Well, I don’t know if everyone is going to do it, but here’s mine: Read the rest of this entry »

Right around this time of year I start to get that anticipatory giddiness that a six-year old gets in December when he starts counting down the days to Christmas. February 12 is the first day pitchers and catchers are allowed to report for Spring Training 2013 — just 27 days away. That’s less than a month. Calm, cool and collected on the outside; I’m doing back-flips on the inside. You feeling it too?  I thought so. This is our Christmas. Read the rest of this entry »

Through the first 10 rounds of the RotoGraphs Ridiculously Early Mock Draft, a draft for a single-catcher league, we saw a total of eight backstops come off the board. In an effort to see how our picks matched up with public opinion, we’ve been comparing the results to ADP found on both Mock Draft Central (MDC) and the National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC). However, given how unreliable MDC data is right now due to small sample sizes and the fact that they don’t differentiate between one and two-catcher league mocks, we’re basically casting that ADP data aside and just matching up with that from the NFBC, a two-catcher league draft. With the current depth at the position, it should have been safe to assume that the top backstops would go a bit earlier in our draft than in the NFBC, however, in looking back at the comparisons, that was not the case. In fact, save for everyone agreeing that Buster Posey was a consensus late-first round pick, nothing went as expected. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Eno Sarris posted another installment of the RotoGraphs Ridiculously Early Mock Draft — Rounds 11 through 15. You had the usual opportunity to comment on picks that you liked or didn’t like and while your silence with regard to my selections tells me that no one thought any of mine were either reaches or wasted picks, I would still like to do a little crowdsourcing here and find out where everyone stands on particular players and where they are going in drafts from now through the start of the 2013 season. Welcome to Bargain or Bust. Read the rest of this entry »

While the movie Office space made the phrase, “somebody’s got a case of the Monday’s” a modern day staple of the American workplace, I think it’s time someone in the fantasy baseball community made the adjustment and coined the phrase, “a case of the Januaries.” Because let’s face it, this month sucks, plain and simple. The GM winter meetings have come and gone, the majority of free agents have already signed, Spring Training isn’t for another month and a half, and the baseball news feeds are pretty much barren. The derivative distraction that is fantasy football is finally over and…well…neither the NHL nor the NBA come close to that glorious six months of MLB deliciousness. I’m bored. And boredom brings on depression. And depression brings on…the Januaries. Read the rest of this entry »

With a fair amount of attention paid to my Michael Bourn man-crush piece and so many of you saying how you prefer to grab power early and wait on speed, I decided to put your methodology into action and see where it took me. In another industry mock draft that took place just last night, I painfully resisted the urge to take Bourn, picked around the available speed and made a few different choices. While I cannot divulge the full results of the mock draft out of respect for the site that will be using it as part of its upcoming draft kit, I can discuss a few things in relation to my selections and this particular topic. Read the rest of this entry »

With Eno releasing the results of Rounds 6 through 10 of the RotoGraphs Early Mock Draft (you can find the first five rounds here), now is as good a time as any to take a look at some Average Draft Position (ADP) numbers for backstops and see where you can expect certain players to go in the first part of your draft. We’re not splitting the atom here. We’re just taking a look at a few early results — something we’re going to do from time to time here throughout the offseason. The results we’re looking at today come from an incredibly small sample size in comparison to the amount of draft data we’ll have even just a month from now, but it’s good to start keeping track now so that you can follow the upcoming trends and stay fully prepared for when you actually start drafting your teams this year. Read the rest of this entry »

The text came in on January 1, 2013 at 12:01 AM.

“Happy New Year! Michael Bourn in the 4th round? Dubious.”

“Happy New Year! Last of the true burners. Still a good value in roto-based leagues,” I responded.

“Juan Pierre in Round 20,” was what followed. Read the rest of this entry »