The second installment of my new series tracking the NFBC average draft position market will be formatted a little differently and you can let me know which works best. I will still highlight the biggest riser and faller, but then I’ll go position-by-position for a takeaway or two. Let’s see how that works compared to last week’s. Comment below on your preferred method.

Previous Editions:

• February 22nd

BIGGEST RISER: Neftali Feliz – +20 spots to pick 307

For the second straight week, the assumed Brewers closer is the big mover up the board. It’s not impossible to see why. His velocity returned last year, surging back to 96 MPH on average, and so did his strikeout (28%) and swinging strike (14%) rates – the latter being a career-best. The home run rate (1.7 HR/9) is worrisome, but a sky-high 19% HR/FB seems unlikely to repeat, even for a flyball pitcher like Feliz. Even with back-to-back big surges up the board, he’s still just 33rd reliever off the board so he’s likely to keep moving up. I suspect he’ll land somewhere in the mid-20s which is still cheap enough to invest, even with his flaws.

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Playing time can make or break a baseball player’s fantasy value. An elite player may not finish above replacement level if he suffers an injury and plays only half the season, and a lackluster player could finish above replacement level simply by playing every single day. This is all intuitive, and the fantasy community generally approaches these kinds of things rationally. In other words, most players are appropriately valued, outside of the market inefficiencies that inevitably warp player values.

One-dimensional speedsters — dudes who steal a bunch of bases and do little else — are much harder to peg. Their value is tied up primarily in one category, as stolen bases (SBs) do not directly correlate with other categories the way home runs would with runs and RBI, for example. The issue becomes all the more confounding when one considers the contemporaneous scarcity of SBs relative to home runs. There’s more to value than just SBs and plate appearances (PAs), but the fact of the matter is the two statistics by themselves correlate very strongly with a player’s end-of-season (EOS) value (which, here, are informed by Razzball’s Player Rater).

In the last five years, baseball has seen 75 player-seasons of 30-plus SBs — 15 steals a year on average, a trend that didn’t fundamentally change in 2016 (although that doesn’t mean SBs aren’t scarce). A simple linear regression of SBs and PAs, the latter of which serves as a proxy for other counting stats such as runs and RBI, against EOS value produces a remarkable 0.71 adjusted R²:

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This is a new series for the fantasy draft season where I’ll be tracking differences in the NFBC average draft that is referenced regularly throughout the community and can be found here. Each Sunday I’ll pull the data, compare it to the previous week, and then deliver my key findings. You will still need to synthesize the data into something applicable for your leagues, especially if you don’t play in the NFBC, but this is the game’s sharpest market so I think it’s worth following.

(This will usually drop on Monday or Tuesday, but with the rankings roll out, it was delayed a day.)

BIGGEST RISER: Neftali Feliz – up 48 spots to pick 327

He signed in Milwaukee over a month ago, but the market is working down an ADP that was essentially non-existent so I wouldn’t even get comfortable with the 327 average. With a Max Pick of 713, his only value was as a late-round draft pick for the Draft Champions leagues (50-round, draft and hold) before joining the Brewers where he is likely to close. His Min Pick of 167 is only down two spots, so I’m sure it’s a lot of slotting in the 167-200 range that is steadily moving his ADP. That range slots him in the early-20s among relievers, which feels right given the resurgent velocity and strikeout rate plus an opportunity.

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This is not a “sleeper” list. Read the rest of this entry »

Our report on the first half of our NFBC Slow Draft received reviews that were decidedly, um, mixed. But mixed reviews didn’t deter the producers of Batman vs. Superman from offering a sequel, and they’re not deterring us. We won’t revisit the background information about the draft or the strategy with which we approached it; it’s there at the start of the first installment. We’ll just report our selections, and comment when comment seems called for. And remember, folks, this is the second half of a 50-player draft. If everything goes perfectly, which of course it won’t, almost none of these guys will crack our starting lineup. Many of them are strictly spare parts. So “Ewww! Eduardo Escobar” is uncalled for.

Draft Position 374. Scott Schebler and 377. Francisco Liriano. Liriano, at least in 2017, is the kind of pitcher you take when you have a deep bench. We suspect that his career as a starting pitcher is over. He was very bad with Pittsburgh in the first four months of last season—his ERA third time through the order was 10.04–and while he helped Toronto a lot in the August and September, he still had trouble getting past the fourth inning in his 8 starts: ERA, innings 1 through 4, 1.97; ERA thereafter, 5.28. We’re not counting on him. But we got him cheap (his NFBC Average Draft Position is 324), he can still get strikeouts, he’s already penciled in to the Blue Jays’ rotation, and maybe we’re wrong about him. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re preempting the promised report on the first half of our NFBC slow draft to offer some information that, for a change, you might find useful. Stats, Inc. keeps track of Average Draft Position in NFBC drafts, starting with the earliest drafts in late 2016 and updating as the preseason heats up. We’ve been tracking the tracker—following the movement in ADPs– and have seen some interesting things.

When we studied this recently, there had been 46 NFBC drafts (there have now been 57; the trends we report below have mostly continued, and none of them, with one exception noted below, has reversed itself). The NFBC ADP at that time of course reflected the average of all those drafts. We knew what the ADP after 34 drafts had been, and we calculated the separate ADP of the next 12. We figured—accurately, it appears—that the all-drafts ADP would mask some interesting developments. Read the rest of this entry »

Projection Analysis: Yoan Moncada

Many prospect experts project Yoan Moncada to be one of the game’s few top prospects. Some have him as the top guy but his MLB playing time and production varied substantially. I found I needed a projection I felt comfortable using.  I’ll start with his playing time.

I believe he’ll be promoted between the Super Two deadline (so the White Sox can save money) and early September (rosters expand). I thought about using July 15th (All-Star Game) as my cut off.

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I know that clown PUNKxsutawney Phil – that’s right, I’m swinging on a groundhog – saw his shadow which allegedly yields six more weeks of winter (the dumbest season), but we shan’t be deterred by that as baseball season is here. Well, fantasy baseball prep season is here which is just as good. We are less than a week away from pitchers and catchers reporting around the league which officially kicks things off in earnest and before you know it, you’ll be in your draft room making the big decisions that will shape your season.

Here are a few tips to remember as you prepare and then enter your draft:

YOU CAN’T WIN OR LOSE YOUR DRAFT IN THE FIRST ROUND

I fully understand the excitement of the draft order reveal and subsequent first round. I’m not here to say that the first round flat out doesn’t matter, but it doesn’t matter as much as we like to think. The top 15 players at the end of the season are never the top 15 drafted that March, not even close.

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My fellow RotoGraph writers and I have started compiling our preseason position rankings. My initial rankings are projection based and then I adjust them as I see fit. I found several rankings/projections where the industry and I disagree. I am going to dig into three of those players today with more to come.

Freddie Freeman: Disputed Projection

Tenth? Really? I didn’t expect Freeman that low. Depth Chart based SGP values place him out as the tenth first baseman. At NFBC, he is the 6th first baseman which is near my gut based ranking. Additionally, he just went 24th overall in MLB.com’s Fantasy411 slow industry draft.

I am fine with the six players ahead of him (Goldy, Rizzo, Cabrera, Votto, E5, and Bryant). Then my gut disagrees and I am pretty sure some of our readers will also.

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This is not a “sleeper” list. Read the rest of this entry »