Birchwood Brothers 8.1: As We Like It

….[T]he icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say….

“….pitchers and catchers arrive next week!” One of us, who happens to hate cold weather, also happens to live in upstate New York—that’s right, bad planning—where, at the moment of composition, it is a biting 4 degrees below zero with churlish wind gusts of 30 miles per hour. And the moment before the moment of composition, the goddamn dog decided he wanted to go out. And he—the Birchwood Brother, we mean, not the dog, who was well insulated to begin with, and on whom the Birchwood Consort had inflicted a cute pink doggie sweater with his (we mean the dog’s, not the Birchwood Brother’s) initial–accordingly shrank with cold. But was he disheartened? Did he, upon thawing out, reach for the Liquid Plumber and end it all? No, because he was thinking contentedly about paying $1 for Harold Castro, whom he expects to hit .350 at home, playing for the Rockies.

Ah, but we see that yet again we have begun too abruptly. We are the Birchwood Brothers, honest-to-real siblings who are probably old enough to be your father if not your grandfather, and who have been bonding over baseball stats, and eventually fantasy baseball, since Casey Stengel fell off that barstool. Since 2015, we’ve been defacing Rotographs with our scrawls about the fantasy aspects of the run-up to the baseball season, and we’re here to scrawl some more. Deep drafts are what we live for, and our specialty is identifying and recommending to our readers the unloved and underappreciated—reserve-round players whom we deem undervalued by the market.

As should be clear from the foregoing, we like to screw around. Why should you put up with us? Because—we assert with such modesty as we can muster—we know what we’re doing. In the four years we’ve played in The Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational—a fantasy-pundits-only affair that, last year at least, had upwards of 400 teams—we’ve finished in the overall top 20 three times, a record equaled (all right, surpassed, if you insist) only by the amazing Dylan White, who in the last three years has finished 5th, 2nd, and 13th. Moreover—and this is the proudest achievement of our fantasy careers—we finished 11th overall of the 4815 teams competing in the NFBC Draft Champions contest, in which you draft 50 players before the start of the season and are stuck with them all year.

For the next three weeks, we’ll be going through MLB team by team, trying to identify at least one reserve-round guy who might be worth your and our attention. Right now, though, we want to share with you an interesting piece of research with which we whiled away the tedious off-season hours. This question has vexed people since the very first Rotisserie players developed tiny legs and crawled from the primeval slime: how much should we spend on hitters, and how much on pitchers? What’s the optimal split?

Thanks to Jeff Zimmerman and Tanner Bell, whose fantastic book The Process is a must for serious fantasy players, we had a suspicion of what the answer might be. As they note, what with the quick hook, openers, etc., streaming pitchers from the waiver wire is nearly impossible in a deep league. Conversely, they argue that, as a result of, among other things, the universal DH, hitting is substantially more available on the waiver wire than pitching. They conclude by suggesting that, in a league like NFBC’s Main Event (15 teams; 14 hitters and 9 pitchers in the lineup; 7 reserves), the optimal drafting strategy is to “[h]oard starting pitchers that can be used during the season.” And the corollary to this strategy is to allocate additional resources to pitching in the draft.

But is this true, empirically? And if so—or even if not—what’s the optimal allocation? We decided to try to find out, by looking at the allocation of draft resources in the Main Event, and see if in fact increased pitcher allocation leads to enhanced fantasy performance.

So here’s what we did. We took the 47 Main Event drafts from 2022, and for each team—705 in all—and each of the 23 non-reserve-round players drafted (16,215 of them. What can we tell you? We have no life.), we used the Average-Draft-Position-to-Dollar-Value formula proposed by Zimmerman in The Process and on Rotographs itself. This gave us, for each of the 705 teams, a value for each player drafted. This enabled us then to determine the hitter/pitcher allocation for each team. We did so, and then divided the teams into quintiles according to percentage of pitching allocation. And wound up here:

Quintile 1 (average pitching percentage 50.80%):
Average Overall Rank: 318.56 Average League Rank: 7.6 Won League: 9 In The Money: 36

Quintile 2 (average pitching percentage 44.39%):
Average Overall Rank: 319.4 Average League Rank: 7.37 Won League: 12 In The Money: 40

Quintile 3 (average pitching percentage 40.62%):
Average Overall Rank: 360.85 Average League Rank: 8.17 Won League:12 In The Money: 27

Quintile 4 (average pitching percentage 37.24%):
Average Overall Rank: 358.23 Average League Rank: 8.08 Won League: 8 In The Money: 19

Quintile 5 (average pitching percentage 32.42%):
Average Overall Rank: 387.77 Average League Rank: 8.62 Won League: 6 In The Money: 21

But wait, the mathematically-inclined among you may be saying: It’s generally accepted that drafting early gives a “first mover” advantage to the teams that do so. The Zimmerman formula accounts for this via the use of natural logarithms. We found that the team drafting first accumulates $264.69 in value during the draft, while a team drafting 15th winds up with $244.54. So someone drafting first who’s allocated, say, 40% to pitchers, spends $105.88, whereas the poor soul drafting 15th, to match that dollar outlay, would have to spend 43.3%, which is a non-trivial difference. So we did the same quintile analysis, except by dollars spent on pitching. And it makes the results even stronger:

Quintile 1 (average pitching dollars $126.46):
Average Overall Rank: 310.62 Average League Rank: 7.11 Won League: 9 In The Money:40

Quintile 2 (average pitching dollars $110.42):
Average Overall Rank: 348.25 Average League Rank: 7.49 Won League: 12 In The Money: 34

Quintile 3 (average pitching dollars $101.40 ):
Average Overall Rank: 360.15 Average League Rank: 8.17 Won League:10 In The Money: 25

Quintile 4 (average pitching dollars $93.18):
Average Overall Rank: 360.18 Average League Rank: 8.04 Won League: 10 In The Money: 24

Quintile 5 (average pitching dollars $81.20):
Average Overall Rank: 385.6 Average League Rank: 8.63 Won League: 6 In The Money: 20

So it sure does look like the more successful teams are the ones that allocated more to pitching. Twice as many teams finished in the money in the highest quintile as did those in the lowest, and the average league rank was 1.5 spots higher and overall rank 75 spots higher. And it sure is hard to see how allocating less than 40% to pitching is a winning strategy.

Compelling as this information is, though, there are two more questions we are hoping to answer as the preseason unfolds. First, what does it look like if we separate the drafted pitcher allocation between starting pitchers and relief pitchers, and what draftin strategy does that suggest? Do you, at one extreme, draft two elite closers? Do you, at the other, punt saves on draft day and hope to get unexpected closers via FAABs? And the second question, which quite possibly won’t have an answer, is: With respect to starting pitchers, what about Stars and Scrubs vs. Spread The Risk?

Pretty interesting, eh? But we like to think we know our readers, and we think our readers like it when we recommend particular players. There’s lots more of that coming over the next three weeks, but for now: If you’re stocking up on pitchers, you’re skimping on hitters. This places even more of a premium on hitters who have multiposition eligibility (MPE). In our first article last season, we noted that the elite projection systems—ATC and The Bat=X—don’t factor MPE into their projections, and thus undervalue them. So we (1) looked at the average draft positions of MPE players; (2) converted those to dollar values using Zimmerman’s formula; (3) derived dollar values from the stats predicted by the projection systems; and (4) identified MPE players who are also, according to those systems, being undervalued by the market. We did this last year, and the results weren’t brilliant: we recommended Ryan Mountcastle and Jorge Polanco. But we’re undeterred, so let’s try again: Thairo Estrada, Tommy Edman, Seth Brown, and, incredibly, Fernando Tatis Jr. And—that’s right—Harold Castro.