We’re entering the final stretch of draft season. For many of you, the so-called advice in this post may be too late. However, it’s my hope that everybody will enjoy discussing the options for good-natured trolling in auction drafts. The nomination process offers several ways to mess with your rivals.
Here’s the transcript from today’s 100 minute chat. See ya next week.
| 10:21 |
: Hello everyone, I’m going to take the next couple minutes to finally renew my MLB.tv, then we’ll get started
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| 10:26 |
: How worried should the Mets be about Steven Matz long term? I understand he is young and sometimes these guys just all of a sudden stay healthy for 3,4,5 years but this is becoming very troubling.
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| 10:28 |
: Pitcher health is always a pain for us fantasy owners. Everybody is a long term concern. That said, Matz certainly isn’t winning the “health as a skill” championship
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| 10:28 |
: I think it’s time to treat him like a Francisco Liriano – promising when everything is clicking, but so frequently out of sorts
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| 10:28 |
: Thanks for the bonus chat! 4th pick in a 12 team draft today. Kershaw Betts Altuve Bryant. Please rank assuming some are available
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| 10:29 |
: So…these are the types of questions I don’t like 🙂
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As promised on Tuesday, I’ve opted to produce two times the Bold Predictions, organized by positive and negative. The positive edition already exists in the etherwebs. Now it’s time to get negative. But first, I forgot to list my boldest positive prediction. Let’s strain to fit it among the negatives.
It’s bold prediction season! Josh Shepardson kicked off the party last Friday. I always find an excuse to write two of these posts. Last year, I supplied 10 Timid Predictions to complement my bold choices. For reasons that still escape my understanding, the timid predictions did not go over well. This year, I’ll take a more traditional approach, splitting my hot takes into positive and negative editions. Which do you think I’ll cover today?
With further ski doo…
Over the last week, I’ve participated in three drafts for similar 12-team keeper leagues. They all share the ability to keep as many players as you want at an escalating dollar cost. One of those leagues is FanGraphs Staff Two on ottoneu. This will be my fourth season with my fellow staffers. The others are my home league (11th season) and my college league (sixth seasons). In other words, these are long standing, fully mature leagues.
In ottoneu, player costs increase by $2 every year plus the results of an arbitration period. In short, other teams get $25 to allocate toward other rosters – maximum of $3, minimum $1 per team. For example, my $7 Charlie Blackmon garnered $5 of allocations for a total cost of $12 to keep. The other two leagues use a set of keeper rules I derived long ago. We use previous draft price + $7.
In time, I’ve slowly developed a strategy I call Stars and Scrubs and Keepers. It’s not so much a new technique as it is an explanation. Stars and Scrubs is a particularly potent approach in these leagues with uncapped keeper totals.
It has become fashionable to complain about two catcher leagues. In the last week alone, four people have made offhand comments to me, assuming I agreed with them. I’m sure more people will find the time to reach out and gripe now that I’ve written this article. And if it’s not clear, I’m very much a fan of the two catcher setting.
The classic argument against two catchers is that the position is too shallow. Even in a 12-team format, some fugly players will be rostered. That… is the point. One catcher leagues are boring – everybody has a good catcher? What’s the fun in that?
The double catcher opens considerable strategic variance. Here are a few of your options.
This article has happened before, and it will happen again. Every year, fantasy owners pour their resources into players on good teams. It makes perfect sense too. A “good team” scores a lot of runs, prevents runs, or both. That correlates nicely with most of the categories we track in the standard 5×5.
However, good teams also don’t take many risks on unproven talents. They start the season with extra depth, and they acquire more at the trade deadline as needed. Ryan Schimpf and Alex Dickerson wouldn’t have emerged as fringe-roto names if they had been in the Red Sox system. Today, let’s talk about some bad teams.
We’re getting ready to post our March fantasy rankings. I believe they’ll roll out starting next week. RotoGraphs isn’t the only place to publish my rankings though. Over at RotoBaller, we’re on our fourth round of updates, having started in December.
To accompany the February round, we ran a series of rankings disputes. Players with wide discrepancies like Albert Pujols – 60 picks between the highest and lowest (me) rankers – were debated. The point was to show how different player evaluation approaches can produce different projections and rankings. Instead, I discovered that I usually agreed with the other guy. Our different rankings had nothing to do with the expected stats. The issue was our managerial preferences.
Sometimes we know something is a bad investment, but there’s nothing we can do about it. Cars – especially new cars. Hideously expensive and they hemorrhage value as you sink more and more dollars into them. But with a few exceptions, you have to either buy one, waste a couple hours per day on buses, or live in the only U.S. city with a viable subway. So I pay to own a car even though I work 40 feet from my bed. I bought it for something like $15,000 a little over four years ago, and now it’s only worth half that. Soon I’ll have to perform expensive maintenance like replacing all the tires. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.
Yesterday’s post about delinquency was supposed to be today’s post about too many keepers. But first, I have some business to finish from yesterday. As I mentioned, three owners failed to select their keepers, one had yet to pay, and one couldn’t make the draft. My one day extension was enough for two of the owners to make their keeper picks. That leaves the guy who hasn’t paid and can’t draft. So it’s time to replace him.
I’m accepting short applications for his spot. Must have qualifications include an ability to pay $40 via PayPal (not Venmo) by end of today, willingness to select keepers by the end of today, and availability for the auction draft on Monday, March 13 at 7pm ET. It won’t hurt your application if you’re an active, successful fantasy player. I will select the person with whom I want to play by early afternoon.
Update: Thank you for your applications. I will be in touch with the winner shortly.
Onto today’s business…