The Predictions episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Howard Bender

Strategy Section

• Early drafting (January/February) vs. Late drafting (March)
  • Pros & cons, advantages & disadvantages, differences
  • Average draft position (ADP)
• Our player shares in the 2025 draft season
  • Players we drafted early but not late
  • Players we drafted late but not early
  • Our most drafted players
  • Players we didn’t plan to draft, but did
  • Players we planned to draft, but didn’t
• FAAB
  • What are you looking to accomplish in the first FAAB period?
  • How do you evaluate players for the first FAAB period, and early on in the season?
  • How much does a player’s hot performance in the opening week influence your FAAB bidding?

Predictions

• Bold Predictions
  • Player predictions
  • Team predictions
  • Baseball event predictions
• Awards Predictions
  • MVP
  • Cy Young
  • Rookie of the Year
    • Injury Guru’s Trivia of the Week
• Playoff Predictions
  • A team unlikely to make the playoffs that will
  • A team likely to make the playoffs that won’t
  • The worst team in baseball
    • Board bet !!!
  • Pennant winners
  • World series winner

Injury Update

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The Mock Draft episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Joe Pisapia

Strategy Section

• What are you looking to accomplish in drafts?
• KDS Selection
• Lessons learned so far

Mock Draft

• 14 Team – Mixed 5×5 – 2 C, 1B, 2B, SS, 3B, 5 OF, CI, MI, U, 9P

By Round

By Team

• Tanner Scott vs. Kirby Yates
  • Board bet !

Mock Draft Recap

• Favorite & least favorite picks

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The Corner Infield episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Frank Stampfl

Strategy Section

• 1st & 2nd Rounds
  • What should you accomplish in the 1st two rounds?
  • Do you need to draft a starting pitcher in the first few rounds of drafts?
  • Overvalued players
    • Should you draft catchers in the first two rounds?
    • Ohtani at 1.1 ?
  • Undervalued players
    • Freddie Freeman’s consistency
  • Players drafted outside the first two rounds, but should be drafted earlier.
  • The Top 3
    • Why Elly De La Cruz should and shouldn’t be considered to be drafted just outside the top 3.
• The ATC Volatility Metrics
• Corner Infield strategy
  • Player pool

ATC Undervalued Players

• Corner Infielders
  • • Vinnie Pasquantino 1B
    • Alec Bohm 3B
    • Yandy Díaz 1B
    • Luis Rengifo 2B/3B
    • Nolan Arenado 3B
    • Andrew Vaughn 1B
    • Michael Busch 1B
    • Ryan McMahon 3B

Injury Update

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The Catcher episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Erik Halterman

Strategy Section

• Snake Drafts
  • How to generally prepare
  • How has preparation changed over the past five years?
  • Drafting “naked”
  • Drafting early in the season (January) vs. drafting late in the season (March)
  • Create a do not draft list?
  • Draft risky pitchers?
  • Proactive vs. Relative approach
    • ADP Chicken
  • How to use ADP
  • How to handle risk?
    • In the aggregate
    • Per player
      • Risk-adjusted pricing
    • Power drafters (playing in multiple leagues)
    • Binary risks
      • Free agents in mono leagues
• Catcher strategy
  • Player pool
  • The value of catchers
    • Catcher bump

ATC Undervalued Players

• Catchers
  • • Salvador Perez
      • Is Perez worthy of the Hall of Fame?
    • Logan O’Hoppe
    • Gabriel Moreno
    • Austin Wells
    • Luis Campusano

Mailbag

Injury Update

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Reader beware:

A human wrote this article. Some humans’ caffeine levels can fluctuate in predictable patterns and correlate strongly with “time of day” data points. Yet, there’s no telling how many milligrams were present in the author’s typing fingers at the various stages of writing this article. It was an iterative process that took the author much longer than he had originally expected. While a human wrote this article, a machine wrote and generated many sections, namely ChatGPT’s “gpt-4o” model. From here on out, anything written or output by the very friendly and human-helping artificial intelligence (be careful…they’re listening…) will be italicized.

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The Value episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Larry Schechter

Larry’s new book – The History of Fantasy Sports

Strategy Section

• Auction Draft Strategy
  • General Strategy
  • Bargains & Relative Bargains
  • High priced catchers
  • How to bump up catchers for replacement level
  • Valuing closers
  • Preparing with market values
  • How to incorporate risk in your values
    • Baked into player projections via playing time
    • Aggregating risk
  • Using projections
• Mono vs. Mixed leagues
  • Valuing players in a mixed league
  • FAAB
• In-person vs. online auctions

Waiver Wire

Pitcher Preview

Injury Update

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Tonight, I will be drafting my second $1500 NFBC Auction Championship team. This is a 15-team, 5×5 Roto league with an overall prize pool. You can see the live draft board here.  Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight, I will be drafting my $350 NFBC Online Championship team. This is a 12-team, 5×5 Roto league with an overall prize pool. You can see the live draft board here. I am picking from the 11 spot.

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Tonight, I will be drafting my first $1500 NFBC Auction Championship team. This is a 15-team, 5×5 Roto league with an overall prize pool. You can see the live draft board here.  Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight, I will be drafting my $1750 NFBC Main Event team. This is a 15-team, 5×5 Roto league with an overall prize pool. You can see the live draft board here. I am picking from the 8 spot.

You can watch me do the draft live here: