You’re in an on-base percentage league, and maybe you’ve switched that stat from average to OBP on your calculator and are totally ready to go. The thing is, some people are either working with a value sheet that was derived for batting average leagues — and even if they aren’t, we are all human, and our brains will let old habits back in once we leave our value sheet behind. In other words, there are obvious values that fall in OBP leagues, every time.

It might be a good idea to point them out.

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Here, let me bare my flaws to you. Let me be your guinea pig. Here, laugh at me for my mistakes. I’ve made a few. Here, please let’s point and smirk at my final player on my American League LABR squad. He deserves multiple question marks and perhaps a few exclamation marks. Here, let’s learn from this. So we don’t do it again.

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It’s a tale as old as fantasy sports: pay attention to nine of the ten categories on draft day and you can dominate those categories and win. There are some accepted tenets to this strategy, called ‘punting,’ but as it is with all these things we hold for granted, it’s useful to look at what the numbers think of our Conventional Wisdom.

For one, which stats to punt?

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The easiest way to tell you who I like is to actually tell you how I like every pitcher, I guess. So, by popular demand, here are my starting pitcher rankings. With a few toys that could be useful to you.

When making these rankings, I started with z-score style rankings based off of Steamer projections. You can find those yourself by using the Pauction Nalculator, for example. That’s a good way to keep your feet grounded in reality, since Steamer projects to the middle.

But breakouts happen. And so I’ve added a couple stats that help me spot breakouts. Strikeout minus walk rate was the backbone of the first ERA estimators ever put together (kwERA), so they aren’t new. And they might be a little better for in-season prediction versus season-to-season. Either way, they are clearly important and can give us a good snapshot of talent, even in a small sample.

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Prepping, traveling, interviewing, transcribing, and then writing up those interviews with ballplayers (not to mention editing FG+, which you should check out) is taking too much of my time, which is why you won’t see my name on the rankings. But this column isn’t going away, and so I still have my bully pulpit.

So, here I am, staking claim to pitchers I like. With the entirely unmethodological methodology of scanning the rankings based on steamer projections, looking at the projections, and then telling you why I like the dude more than his projections. We’ll start with mixed leaguers today, and do the deep leaguers later on.

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If you bought FG+ — and you should have, because all those player caps and all that research would help you dominate your leagues this year — you might have sallied over to the player page for Nicholas Tropeano. And if you did that, you probably would have noticed that the player cap and the grades from Kiley McDaniel don’t quite agree.

You can probably just ignore the player cap. Some idiot probably wrote it.

But suppose there’s opportunity there? Suppose that disagreement really means that Tropeano is a guy that should be on your radar?

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It’s time for our Depth Chart Discussions to begin. In an effort to suss out every team, we’ve divided them into four parts (infield, outfield, bullpen, and rotation) and will begin breaking them down for you over the next few weeks. You can find them gathered here.

Maybe Boston’s treating their outfield like most teams treat their starting rotation — their depth is astounding. They could fill the outfield twice over with players that could be above average given the time. The trick then, for us, is to try our best to figure out which ones will play the most. There might not be a lock in the crowd, but there’s a lot of talent.

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We’ll be filling these in over the next month! You can find this guide later by looking at the Draft Tools box on the right. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s time for our Depth Chart Discussions to begin. In an effort to suss out every team, we’ve divided them into four parts (infield, outfield, bullpen, and rotation) and will begin breaking them down for you over the next few weeks. You can find them gathered here.

The Boston infield practically has to hand out name tags this spring. Even the guys that are returning to their old positions are probably hoping for different results this year. There’s opportunity here in droves — with a nice home park and a lineup that could mash, the park and team effects line up well. Considering there probably isn’t a player that will cost top-50 prices in the bunch, you could call this a list of sleepers, even.

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We’ve already unveiled round one, and talked about Michael Brantley vs Ryan Braun, and there’s more analysis about specific picks coming.

But now it’s time to look at the second round as a thing. Because maybe in the early decade, it seemed like the sure things bled into the second round. Now it seems you can’t get out of the top ten without questions.

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