We chatted!

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It’s not a secret – I hate rankings. I’ve been writing this post once a winter since 2014. I’m pleased to finally see a few others in the industry publicly eschewing the rankings-based mentality. My quest against rankings is finally gaining some momentum. So, contrarian that I am, let’s work on making rankings actually, uh, work.

There are many reasons why traditional attempts at rankings are broken. The biggest is simply this – they’re one size fits all. Running a team is about managing categories. Rankings aggregate all that information ordinally in perhaps the least useful way conceivable. Attempts to use tiers scarcely help matters, especially since the location of those tiers often has more to do with name recognition than expected output.

A projection-based rankings system isn’t sufficiently novel, but it does at least take us a step in the right direction. And it’s what we’ll use for today’s thought experiment as we try to take a second step along the path towards relevance.

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I got the idea for this post while writing a player caption for Nate Eovaldi (more on him in a moment). As I outlined the glass half full scenario for the upcoming season, it occurred to me that 1. Eovaldi is free even in the deepest leagues and 2. pitchers like Eovaldi sometimes spontaneously become useful. Excellent even.

Charlie Morton and James Paxton immediately came to mind – they were always injured and then suddenly they found health and reached acedom (*cough* Paxton is broken again). Those are just two poster children for the upside. Carlos Carrasco, Hyun-Jin Ryu, Lance Lynn, Mike Minor, Eduardo Rodriguez, Frankie Montas, Jameson Taillon, and Homer Bailey are all variations of this profile.

And so, without further ado, I present five always broken starting pitchers who might just might have something left to give.

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Most of you are probably familiar with the concept of slow drafts. Even if you’ve never seen one in action, it’s a slow… draft. Ya draft slowly. Got it.

As a writer, I’m contractually obligated to explain it in excruciating detail. Instead of allowing one to two minutes per pick, a slow draft grants owners a much longer period – often three or four hours. The clock usually “sleeps” during the overnight hours (picks can still be made). I guess that wasn’t too excruciating.

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The chat is complete. Digest this transcript if you dare.

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Parity is apparently on the rise in Major League Baseball, and the NL East is one of the poster children for this new wave of competitive baseball. Four clubs are poised to take a shot at postseason glory while the Marlins have improved from horrific to merely bad.

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This winter, I’ve gotten in the habit of running polls about interesting trades in my patron dynasty league DTBNL. It’s a 25-team, keep-30 format. It’s a certified “deep league.” There are deeper leagues of the 30-team variety, but they are rare. By virtue of these polls, I’ve noticed some apparent misconceptions about prospect value in ultra-deep settings.

Yesterday, for an unknown league, Shelly Verougstraete ran a poll pitting Trevor Bauer against Jeter Downs, Taylor Trammell, and Josiah Gray.

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Last spring, an industry consensus emerged – if you wanted to win, you needed to invest early and often in starting pitchers. When a consensus becomes too commonplace, a profitable contrarian approach is often available. And so I explored the possibility of finding an advantage by investing in cheaper pitchers. I dubbed it nuLIMA. To be certain, it was meant as theorycrafting, not gospel. Check it out if you’d like to revisit an old idea that might still have legs.

The setup to that article still applies.

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Alas, today’s keeper-themed chat is complete. Check out the transcript.

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When trades go painfully awry – in the kind of way that causes serious leaguewide drama – it’s often because a fantasy manager has misread an opportunity to leverage a premium player.

You know the story. A rival announces they’re shopping an elite player like Christian Yelich. It’s the offseason so let’s frame this as a winter swap. That means we’re playing keeper or dynasty. You indicate you’re willing to “pay the price at any cost.” Then a trade is executed without your involvement. Perhaps it’s a bundle of blue chip, modest-ceilinged prospects like Luis Urias, Ke’Bryan Hayes, Cristian Pache, and Taylor Trammell. You know you would have offered more. It’s frustrating.

An alternate scenario: a Yelich trade is announced out of the blue. No warning. No, “hey, this is about to happen.” Blissful peace is torn asunder without warning. The Cranberries show up to sing. ~With their tanks and their bombs and their bombs and their guns. In your head, in your head, they are crying.~

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