Can you believe it’s already November? I always lament the end of the season, but the gold lining is my annual trip to the Arizona Fall League for BaseballHQ’s First Pitch Forum event. This was my 10th year attending, and I absolutely love it.

Not only do we get to watch live baseball from some of the best prospects in baseball, but there’s also nonstop fantasy baseball talk as well as the beginning of a 50-round draft and hold NFBC league. We run the first 23 rounds live in Arizona and then pick it up in January online for the final 27. Let’s take a closer look at the team I put together on Friday night.

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Royals phenom Adalberto Mondesi is going to be a hot topic this winter. By ripping off 32 steals in 291 plate appearances while also popping 14 home runs, Mondesi won quite a few fantasy championships. The hype may have crested yesterday when he was selected 28th overall in the very first NFBC draft of the 2019 season.

I’m going to do something novel (lazy) and just kind of assume we’re all on the same page about who Mondesi is as a player. This isn’t an analysis of his skills. I’ve done been there, done that elsewhere. As a hitter, he compares to one of the top fantasy assets in the league. This same comparable player was a massive resource suck for many years before finally breaking out.

Could Mondesi skip the painful growth seasons?

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Every fantasy owner should sit down in the next week or so and reflect on what went right and wrong in their leagues. More than reflecting, they need to take a few notes on the journey to help themselves improve next season.

The process doesn’t need to take a while but an owner should at least get a couple points, good and bad, on each league. It’s time for a little humility because some owners need to continue to take positive small steps forward. The rest of us need to start catching up. Hopefully, the following will nudge a few owners to take some notes before going into offseason mode.

Reviewing My Leagues

Overall, my season was a huge disappoint and I knew it was going to be a rough finish a couple months into the season. I made so many preseason and early season mistakes, I could never recover. Here are my leagues in order of finish.

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I posted my first five rounds yesterday and you can check those out here. I was going to post my first nine rounds, but I was minutes away from my 10th pick so I decided to break it up into two 5s.

Round 6, Pick 62: Marcell Ozuna | OF, STL (ADP: 69… nice)

While I was ahead of the ADP on Ozuna, this still felt like a bargain to me. He labored through much of the first half as his shoulder was clearly bothering him, but he’s looked like his 2017 self in the second half with a .303/.353/.527 line and 12 homers in 218 PA. He hit just 10 HR in 377 first half PA and had just a .645 OPS through May. A healthy Ozuna is a top 50 pick.

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Yesterday I posted my first run of a Top 30 for 2019. The comments have been lively discussing players y’all would’ve included or asking about certain players so I figured I’d show you the rest of the pool I was choosing. I had a list of about 70 guys that I whittled down to 30 and there were some tough cuts.

My toughest was Carlos Correa and I think that push-come-to-shove, I’d take him over at least Corey Kluber and Clayton Kershaw and maybe even Gerrit Cole and Aaron Nola, too. Those four made up the final four of my Top 30. Here are my next 10 in order and then a positional look at the others who were considered:

31. Carlos Correa, SS, HOU: He’s never been bad (lowest wRC+ was 123 in 2016), but he’s also topped 109 games just once (153 in that same 2016 season). He’s already missed a month with his current injury (back stiffness) and isn’t due back for another couple of weeks.

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Every year around this time, I like to look at how the top of the draft is shaping up for the following season and today is that day! Today I also guested with Van Lee and our own Jeff Zimmerman on their podcast, Launch Angle, so give that a listen! I’m not exactly trying to predict the Top 30 in the exact order they will go, but rather giving an early look at how my board is shaping up right now.

1. Mike Trout, OF, LAA

Let’s all point and laugh at those who tried to get cute and take someone else #1 this year. I can give a slight pass to those who took an ace first because of how impactful elite starters are, but the hitters taken over Trout at 1 didn’t make sense then and look especially misguided now

2. Mookie Betts, OF, BOS

Betts wasn’t his best self last year thanks in large part to a .264 AVG, but he also hit 24 HR… the same total he has right now in 70 fewer games! If you’ve listened to the podcast or read my work regularly, you know I push back on using BABIP as a luck-o-meter as if the player has zero control over it, but Betts’ 2017 was a case of BABIP bad luck that showed no signs of sticking around. Not only has he reversed course on the .264 AVG from last year, but he’s now leading baseball at .351!

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Yesterday, I examined hitters who owners missed on preseason and what could be done to prevent such mistakes in the future. Today, the underachievers go under the microscope. In my previous article, I used Paul Sporer’s “All First Half” articles for reference. With no underachieving articles out yet, I will look for players with differences in ADP and current rank using our auction calculator.

Extended Injury Stays

Daniel Murphy

I lamented last offseason about missing out on J.D. Martinez’s great 2017 season. I didn’t want to miss out again and was willing to take a chance on Daniel Murphy’s discount.

When I created his projection, I account for six weeks off but it was on the short side. Additionally, once he returned, he wasn’t productive for a few weeks but has a .859 OPS in July.

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We are all learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. -Charlie Munger

It’s time to see if I need to adjust my fantasy baseball beliefs by analyzing the first half busts and breakout lists. While it’s great to acknowledge these players, owners need to sit down and figure out why everyone missed on them. By hitting on one or two of these breakouts, a team could be competing for the top spot. Here are the groups and how to identify the breakout next preseason.

For the player situations I analyzed, I’m used Paul Sporer’s First Half All Value Stars and Fantasy Team for inspiration. I looked for actionable traits or tells which can be used next season.

Unknown Playing Time

Jesus Aguilar

Everyone understood coming into this season that the Brewers playing time situation was going to be a mess, so not owning Aguilar is understandable. He was to be in a platoon with Domingo Santana with middling projections. The deal with Aguilar, he really didn’t have a horrible platton split. It was .372 wOBA vs .338 wOBA in 2017. It’s .444 vs .405 this season.

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One of the great things about Ottoneu is the high level of engagement by the growing community of owners.  Few topics get the masses talking more than crowd-sourcing feedback on recent league trades, so today I want to highlight a few of the more interesting trades I’ve seen recently to get a pulse on how some player values are already shifting early this season.

As a quick reminder, Ottoneu is a keeper system by design that shifts the balance just short of traditional dynasty leagues, and offers a variety of scoring systems (including H2H this year).

Few players have seen their value shift as wildly as Shohei Ohtani over the past few weeks.  What he’s managed to do to start the season with both the bat (1.286 OPS) and off the mound (97.8 mph fastball) has at least verified that he’s as talented as the world thought he was, but the fact that he now looks less raw than he did just a few weeks ago in spring training tells you everything you need to know about the upward trajectory of his value in fantasy baseball leagues.  If you don’t happen to own Ohtani already, he’s going to be one of the hardest players in the game to acquire over the next 30 days.  He’s young, exciting, and just for the cool factor of clicking between batting and pitching stats on his FanGraphs page makes him the hottest commodity in the game right now, especially if you have the flexibility of slotting him into your daily lineup or your rotation like Ottoneu provides.

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The major league season is starting in just a few days. Fantasy owners are making the adjustment from pre-season to in-season mode. Before owners concentrate 100% on in-season topics, they should take a step back for a few minutes and reflect on their final rosters and the process they used to acquire them concentrating on what worked and what didn’t. Here are some areas to consider and how I struggle with them.

Player Valuation Process

This area is probably the one area I struggle with balancing the most. Do I over think the player values and more importantly do I make actual decisions based on these valuations? I start all my valuations by creating a composite projection system from several websites and generally probably lock myself into these projections to create player values depending on the league’s format. Usually, I just check each value and adjust them as I see fit.

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