About a week ago, I compared rankings with some actual ADP. One player which stood out was Rougned Odor. He ranked 47th overall (AVG vs OBP league) and it’s tough to rank a person so high who hit only .204 last season. Steamer projections currently have him back up to a .255 AVG. Acceptable but not great.

Additionally, Odor comes to the plate hacking and rarely walks (4.2% for his career) so almost all of his value comes from his BABIP. If his batted balls don’t fall for hits, he’s not getting on base. Since his value is so BABIP driven, I decided to see what the BABIP bounce-back chances were for low-walk hitters.

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In my last article, I examined the potential value differences between the top-50 rank players and their average draft position (ADP). Today, I will examine the next 50. While the first list contained quite a few players moving up, today’s list is a little more balanced with over and undervalued players.

One of the biggest takeaways from the first article was the extra replacement value catchers receive in a 2-catcher format. To simply explain the idea, I will turn to Joe Bryant who goes through a fitting example but with football.

The league’s bottom catchers are so bad so any catcher who can hit has good value. Evan Gattis being ranked #17 got most of the scrutiny in the rankings. As was pointed out, the projection may be high on the plate appearances but the process was still sound. Here is how Gattis compares to the last catcher ranked (Yan Gomes) and Francisco Lindor compared with the last middle infielder (Kolten Wong).

Yan Gomes is such a sink, especially with a total of 55 Runs+RBIs. It’s imperative to understand and value catchers correctly for each league formats. It’s a potentially huge advantage for those owners who spend the time. Read the rest of this entry »

“Long ago, Ben Graham taught me that ‘Price is what you pay; value is what you get.’ Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks,

… or fantasy baseball players

I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.” –Warren Buffett

Collecting as much value (talented players) from as little possible resources (draft picks or auction dollars) is the key to starting off a winning fantasy season. From now until each draft, owners should be trying to calculate player values and the possible range of outcomes. With these value ranges in mind, owners can use their draft resources to get the best deals. It’s time to start finding those deals.

To find the bargains, player values first need to be calculated. To create the values, I will use the average final standings from the 32 leagues in the 2017 NFBC Main Event (15 team, 5×5 roto with AVG).

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I had participated in a too-early industry mock draft that ended a couple of weeks ago. Then I attended First Pitch Arizona (FPAZ), which I reviewed and at which I participated in another arguably too-early draft. This post is about that latter draft. Sorry for all the reviews lately.

The draft, which took place live at FPAZ, is hosted by the National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC). It’s a 15-team league, but instead of being a standard 30-round draft (seven bench players) with in-season transactions, it’s a 50-round draft-and-hold with no transactions (don’t worry, this only covers the first 23 rounds). I won’t say it completely changes the dynamic, but it does, or at least should, dramatically alter the plans of owners who take a lot of risks and plan to hedge them using their free agent acquisition budgets (FAABs).

What’s worse is I had, and still have, done virtually zero planning for the 2018 season. Accordingly, I relied on a strategy I outlined in the previously hyperlinked too-early mock draft review. I’m a risk-averse guy, so I typically draft player who are boring — boring because they’re old and/or you know what you’re getting. Low variance, things of that nature. This strategy inadvertently exacerbated this tendency of mine in these drafts, and the draft-and-hold nature of this league further compounded it. Without looking, the average age of my team must be, like, 33 years old.

But I like it. It’s so unsexy, so unapologetically (actually, very apologetically) boring that it’s almost not worth review. Except when I talk about boring, unsexy teams, I hear from guys like Jeff Zimmerman, Mike Gianella and so on — guys in the industry expert leagues such as Tout Wars and LABR — who say this is their jam, and that’s reassuring.

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The Auction Calculator is now loaded with the 2017 end-of-season data along with some 2018 projections. I’m sure the preceding comment will be sufficient to keep many readers busy for a while. I’m glad some came back. While its output can lead down several different discussion paths, I’m going to analyze what I consider to be the third starting pitcher tier. I feel many 2018 leagues will be won or lost by navigating this minefield.

So far this offseason, fantasy owners have placed four starters (Kluber, Kershaw, Sale, and Scherzer) in the top tier, After those four, I believe there are a dozen or so pitchers who would make acceptable aces, especially if they can be doubled up with another pitcher from this tier.

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Fantasy owners participate in mock drafts to practice for their actual league drafts. Without the internet, neither mock drafts nor average draft position (ADP) data would be possible or available to us. The union of the two allow owners to understand approximately when they can expect players they plan to target and devise an appropriate plan of action.

What ensues when you draft for the next baseball season before the current season has ended and without ADP data and having not refined/run your 2018 projections yet? Chaos, namely. For the second year, the Honourable Justin Mason organized the Too-Early (#2early) mock drafts for me and a few dozen other analysts, the final ADP “data” (in air quotes, because a sample size of four drafts is not particularly strong data, and, as aforementioned, it is way too early to be mock-drafting) for which can be found here.

I drafted out of the 11th spot (of 15) in draft #4. I made a concerted effort to draft a good team, but I also deliberately avoided certain players just to see where other owners would draft them. (Had I drafted these players for my team, I would have a weaker understanding of how other owners valued them.) The lack of ADP data made it incredibly difficult to implement this plan. In a nutshell, my plan consisted of drafting the best player with a track record still available on the draft board (mind-blowing, I know), with a strong preference for hitting. There’s an objective basis to this that, rather than trying to explain, I’ll let reveal and define itself as I go. This plan served me admirably in all rounds of the draft.

Here’s my team, by round. “Rk” indicates a player’s draft rank within his assigned position. Columns labeled “All” and “Pos” depict players’ end-of-season values overall and by position, respectively, each of the last four years. These ranks come courtesy of Rudy Gamble, who concocts them for Razzball. If you’re concerned that these might somehow be inferior to ESPN’s Player Rater, know that Rudy won this year’s Tout Wars Mixed by a landslide, so I thoroughly trust his process.

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Yesterday, the Justin Mason posted the ADP from four of the slowest drafts containing industry experts and myself. One thought I had after a handful of rounds was the lack pitching available and how the good were the available hitters. I decided to go back and examine draft results from last year and these draft to see if pitching was being taken early. While it wasn’t, some other information could be extracted.

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This is the second installment of my Unlikely Pairs series. Last week I looked at Mike Trout and Freddie Freeman and their elite offensive production. This week we’ll be aiming a little lower in the draft, and maybe it will be more controversial.

Domingo Santana v Shin-Soo Choo.

These two players are on opposite ends of the career spectrum. Santana, 25 years old, just put up great numbers in his first full season in the majors.  Domingo Santana is a bit of a late bloomer, having spent full seasons in both AA and AAA, both with the Astros, prior to advancing. His AA season was particularly mediocre, as he suffered deep drops in both walk rate and batting average. The following season, age 22 in AAA, his walk rate and batting average both bounced back, but he was only given a total of 18 major league plate appearances. In mid 2015, still in AAA, he was traded to the Brewers as part of the Carlos Gomez/Mike Fiers trade. In 2016, Santana injured his elbow and missed most of the season. So, 2017 was his first real chance in the majors, and he certainly ran with it, hitting 30 homers, stealing 15 bases, and achieving 126 wRC+.

Meanwhile, Shin Soo Choo, 35 years old, enjoyed a bounce back year after an injury plagued 2016 campaign.  Choo established himself as a solid and reliable player in 2008, and put up consistent 20 HR, 80 R, 60 RBI seasons from 2008 through 2015 with two exceptions. Read the rest of this entry »

For the last three years I have run an industry mock draft during the month of September. It has been a fun exercise that suits two purposes.

1. It is an early look at what the industry feels about the next season, especially because most people don’t have ranks or projections prepared to rely on.
2. September can be a hard month to come up with things to talk/write about.
3. I am a masochist.

This year I decided to turn it up a notch. I started four separate mock drafts including 57 different analysts. Here are the mock draft (you can click the title of the of each table to go to each mock) and analysts involved: Read the rest of this entry »

Most people in fantasy baseball have tiers of players. You likely believe that certain players are roughly interchangeable, and others are definitely superior or inferior to one another. Sometimes the differences between players appears so vast that it is obvious where you would draw the distinction, and other times it feels more fluid and dynamic. Intuitively you might feel there is a strong distinction between the two tiers, but it may be difficult to find a precise line in the sand.

In the past few days I have been going through my xStats, looking at where certain players fell on certain metrics. In doing so, I have noticed several pairs of players. Players who have performed very similarly on several different metrics. Some of these pairs, arguably, cross skill tiers. And boy do I love when players cross tiers. Read the rest of this entry »