In 2015, Wil Myers, Hanley Ramirez, Mike Napoli, Carlos Santana, and Chris Carter were pretty bad. HanRam and Santana were $6 players. Napoli, Myers, and Carter combined for about negative $14. This season, the quintet teamed up to provide $87 of production – a near $90 increase in value. And that’s ignoring Adam Duvall, Mark Trumbo, and Daniel Murphy – all of whom also experienced big gains. It was a good year for snagging a cheap first baseman.

With 2016 in the books, let’s look ahead at some 2017 breakout candidates.

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Last night I had a nightmare. I couldn’t get into a draft room because it was on a new site and Battle.net wanted me to complete a quest first. I had the fifth pick and the first guy was already on the clock. It was the most stressful dream I’ve had in years.

I think it’s pretty clear what Freud would say about it – my subconscious believes I’m not prepared for my fantasy drafts. Fortunately, I have another five months to get ready, and I’ve already built my Way Too Early Rankings. I started last week with catcher. We’ll move on to first base today. Oh, here’s what happened in 2016 at first base.

As a reminder, these rankings represent my first reactions rather than a truly rigorous approach. I’ve used an absolutely objective technique called mental math to compile the lists. I’m assuming a standard 5×5 format.

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Last week, we kicked off our review of 2016 with the ever-exciting position of catcher. Somehow, we accidentally tagged Roberto Perez with a negative $8.10 price. That was supposed to be a positive $81. At least, that’s the case for your weird postseason fantasy league. Where did you even find a postseason league?

Today, let’s shift over to the cold corner for some real actually interesting players. If you missed the first post in this series, I recommend giving it a quick skim. It has notes on methodological changes between this season and last. You can also go straight into the calculator to tweak values for your league.

For these articles, I’m going to assume a 12 team, 5×5, standard deep roster with a pitching cap of 1475 innings (most leagues are 1450 or 1500, I split the difference). I set the batter split at 65% because that produces what I consider to be the most realistic position adjustments.

Here we go…

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Gary Sanchez wasn’t the most valuable catcher in 2016. He earned his owners just $8.60 per the FanGraphs Auction Calculator. He also posted a ludicrous .299/.379/.657 line with 20 home runs 34 runs and 42 RBI in just 229 plate appearances. Obviously, the late start limited his earning potential. If we extrapolate over 600 plate appearances, a fair expectation for a healthy Sanchez, he was on pace for 52 home runs, 89 runs, and 110 RBI. That’s comparable to a more powerful Nelson Cruz, and he was on the fringes of the top 10 fantasy hitters this year.

Sanchez wasn’t just magnificent among catchers, he was comparable to a top 10 talent for one-third of a season. Now what do we do?

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Fans of the ‘Graphs are probably familiar with our Auction Calculator. It’s an intuitive tool, especially for standard leagues, but there are some quirks. If this is your first time hearing about the calculator, I recommend skimming this tutorial. I’ve also penned an advanced version of the tutorial which includes tips and tricks for converting the auction values to snake draft tiers.

Recently, we added two big updates to the calculator. I also sat down with site owner/dark overlord David Appelman to talk about some of the assumptions made by the calculator and how to get around them. For the remainder of the article, I assume you have some experience with using the auction calculator. If you’re new to the tool, I recommend you familiarize yourself with it before reading on.

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Now that we’ve evaluated how catchers performed in 2016, it’s time for some way too early 2017 rankings. These represent my first reactions rather than a truly rigorous approach. I’ve used an absolutely objective technique called mental math to compile the lists. I’m assuming a standard 5×5 format.

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With the regular season over and the postseason rumbling along, it’s time to look back at the top performers of 2016. As is usually the case, we’re starting at the catcher position. For those of you who are familiar with this series from previous offseasons, we have a major change to the way we’re calculating values. Let’s talk about that first before diving into the numbers.

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In what has become an annual tradition, today I will hold myself accountable to you the reader by publishing the results of my 2016 fantasy season.

In the 2015 version of this post, I decided I did too many leagues to give any the proper attention they deserved. Even though I whittled down my total commitments, an increase in dynasty-type formats meant I had needier children.

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Ottoneu arbitration begins tomorrow and runs through November 15. This omnibus is a one stop shop for all the strategy and tactics you need to get through the next month. The following omnibus is a recreation of the one I published last season. While we’ll likely have a couple new articles on the topic, we’ve mostly said everything there is to say over the course of over 10,000 words. But first, some background.

Perhaps I jumped too quickly into the details. Ottoneu is the award-eligible fantasy platform hosted by FanGraphs. Think of it as dynasty-lite. You get a 40-man roster, a $400 payroll, and way too much freedom to manage your team your way.

Over the offseason, the price of every major league player increases by $2. Minor leaguers increase by $1. Then there is an arbitration process that can be done one of two ways. Most leagues use the allocation process which ultimately adds an additional $11 to $33 per team. This omnibus is intended for both forms of arbitration, but the allocation process does open more possibilities for strategery and thus has more words dedicated to it.

As I mentioned, there are two systems of arbitration: voting and allocation. An asterisk indicates that the article is intending for voting leagues. I’ve organized the omnibus into sections: intro, intermediate, and advanced. Read the rest of this entry »

September is Head-to-Head playoffs month. Just like the major league postseason, a lot is riding on tiny little samples of performance. If your team was anchored by players like Bryce Harper, Gregory Polanco, Sandy Leon, Travis Jankowski, and Michael Saunders, you likely suffered an ignominious defeat. That quintet would have gotten you to the playoffs, but they were conspicuously absent for the month of September.

Let’s talk about the players who played hero in the final month. There’s no analytical angle here. These guys simply stepped up (for your fantasy teams) when it counted.

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