Bill Buckner and Steve Bartman know better than most that baseball is a haunted sport. Downright spooky even. Curses range from the Bambino to the Billy Goat to Seattle-area Etsy witches, baseball fans subscribe to and are victims of decades long vexing hexes.

And by baseball standards, the Home Run Derby Curse is akin to the curse of being on the cover of MLB the Show. FanGraphs writers have taken hacks at diminishing this curse over the years, but the popular consciousness still loves to tout it. Their theory is fairly straight forward, relying on the idea that derby participants change their swing to try and win the derby, and can’t find their game swing again in the second half, leading to a slump.

In this article, I’ll seek to answer two questions:

In recent years, has there been a fall off between halves for derby participants?

And is there a way to try and predict who will fall off to help us humble fantasy managers sell high?

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In fantasy baseball, it’s sometimes safest to avoid platoon hitters. That’s the conventional wisdom, anyways. And in many cases, that’s the right advice. 

During drafts, hitters tagged with platoon risk, like Jarren Duran and Oneil Cruz, are often best avoided, as their upside is severely capped. In shallower leagues, when chasing upside and  racking up counting stats is particularly important, they should be especially eschewed. 

But there are formats and circumstances when platoon bats are worthwhile.

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Last week, a trade was accepted in my home league. It nearly split the league in two. 

Jack’s Cool League, the JCL as it’s lovingly known amongst friends, is a home league that is going on 14 years of competition amongst 10 teams, conducted in the endlessly entertaining and frustrating head-to-head categories format. 

As you may have guessed by the name, I’ve been commissioner of the league since its inception. Various rule changes have reshaped strategy over the years. 

We added quality starts. Then OPS. We expanded the default Yahoo lineups to add additional IL slots and NA slots. We increased the active roster size to 25, and then to 26, to keep pace with our colleagues in the majors. We instituted a minimum weekly innings threshold. And moved up the playoffs to end the season before major league teams start resting their stars. And this year, we rebalanced the number of utility and bench slots to try and make streaming starting pitchers more of a calculation. 

The only other change has been moving from the Commissioner having discretion to veto egregious trades to having each team having a chance to cast a vote to veto within a two-day trade review period. 

It is extremely rare for a trade to be vetoed in our league, as I believe it should be, but it has happened. Teams will use their voting power and rally other managers to vote if they feel one team is benefitting so much that it dramatically shifts the balance of the league.  Read the rest of this entry »

Writing about red hot chili players can be fun. When an otherwise mediocre Curtis Mead starts slamming the ball, that is objectively entertaining. Especially for the fantasy manager, players who are far exceeding their draft price or FAAB cost just give us a bit of extra enjoyment when they perform well. 

Junior Caminero is certainly red hot. And considering the 45 home runs he hit last year, in his first full season, which he finished as a 22-year-old, this really shouldn’t be a surprise.

Sure, the fact that he’s hit bombs in six consecutive games, and that the stretch in question started with a three-homer game, is wildly impressive. But it’s easy to forget there were some who doubted the phenom third baseman. 

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With three full months in the books, it’s time for some of us to move from active participation into reminiscing, wishcasting, and dreaming. 

Opening back up the draft board. Peeking back, ever so reluctantly, at your preseason rankings. The notes you left yourself to take a flyer on a handful of spring training stud pitchers, from Kyle Harrison to Johan Oviedo. The highlighter on your desk reminds you of when you used it to circle Kyle Tucker as a late first-round bargain as a bat in the middle of the Dodgers order. 

We’re coming up on July, and for some of us, if not the majority of us, the World Cup is offering a pleasurable respite from what has been a miserable start to the fantasy baseball season. 

That is to say, we’re getting the likeliest outcome for what we signed up for. The 50th percentile outcome. We weren’t going to win! But the point is to try. Chasing that little smidgeon of hope like it’s the golden snitch. 

In this article, I’ll redraft the first round for the rest of the season. To get there, I’ll meander back through the projected first rounders from the preseason, wind down into the current top performers according to the Fangraphs Player Rater, and finish with how I’d redraft the first round today, for the rest of this season, with all of the benefits of hindsight, a little foresight, and a gentle drop of dreaming on unrealized upside. 

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There aren’t many refrains more common for fantasy sports writers than describing a hitter who is performing well during the summer as one who is “heating up with the weather.” 

And the thing is, more often than not, it is justified. Ballparks across the country become more hitter friendly as the weather heats up, and cold morning games and windswept, foggy night games become hot, humid oases for home runs. 

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Tyler O’Neill homers on Opening Day. Mike Trout homers on his birthday. And new dads homer what feels like all the time. 

So in honor of Father’s Day, I’ll comb through the Fangraphs Transaction Tracker to find a few newly minted pops, check in on how their season has been going, and offer a bit of not at all fatherly advice. 

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I fought the law and the law won. And that law is the law of starting pitcher attrition. To make up for losing starters to season-ending injuries and the regression monster, turn to IL stashes.

This article won’t be for all of you, or at least the advice won’t be universally applicable. For those of you with limited IL room, or limited IL slots, this may not be as actionable today. But for most of these pitchers, you can likely hold off a few weeks before others in your league are ready to pull the trigger. 

But if you do have room to hold onto a player with a little upside, you are unlikely to be outbid in FAAB at this point. That would be the biggest value add of bringing on these pitchers now — not having to outbid opposing managers once more news is out. 

I will run through a handful of pitchers worth considering, sticking to blurbs unless a pitcher excites me to the point of digging in a bit deeper. I will focus on players who are rostered in less than half of CBS and Yahoo leagues (sorry Kris Bubic and Logan Henderson). 

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With all of the preparation that goes into draft season, it’s easy to throw that all out of the window when you come into June and a guy is hitting .180 and has fallen far outside of the top-ranked players in the majors. 

This is especially true for managers in 10- and 12-team leagues. In these formats, the quality and depth of the waiver wire is never better than it is in April and into early May. 

Contrast that with the struggles and small sample size bloated ERAs and miniscule counting stats, and it is easy to see why so many of us contemplate dropping players we considered ourselves excited to draft just a few weeks before the season. 

In this article, I’ll look back at some of the hitters the industry liked heading into this season, noting their current roster rates and player rater values, and why you should consider buying back in while you still can. I’ll start with players who have already demonstrated some value of late and wrap up with blurbs on some names who could be next.

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You must be able to see it, Mr. Manager. You must know it by now. You can’t win. It’s pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Manager? Why? Why do you persist?

Because you choose to. Because sifting through recently discarded hitters is your jam. Because the occasionally interesting platoon bat may just be set up for an interesting occasion. 

So, why do we persist? Because we all do. Why play fantasy baseball if not to savor the constant oneupsmanship. Oh yeah, pal o’ mine, you’re going to burn your FAAB on the hot young prospect? So what, I’ve got the entire Rockies lineup in Bing Bong Ballpark in Vegas this weekend. 

Beat that. 

In this article, I’ll use the Fangraphs Lab Baseball Sim tool to highlight some potential hitters to stream in this weekend’s juiciest matchups. And I’ll show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes and the extent of how you can use the Sim tool yourself. 

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