It’s always good to remind yourself of your league’s scoring system before you start a re-draft for the season. If you’re like me and you play in multiple fantasy baseball leagues with multiple scoring systems, things can get a little blended together. Here are some really important points to remember when comparing Ottoneu points and standard roto Read the rest of this entry »

The Starting Pitcher episode (Part 2) of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Eno Sarris

Pitching+, Stuff+, Command+

Strategy Section

• Effects of new MLB rule changes on pitchers
• Injury Guru’s Trivia of the Week
• Risk
  • Valuing pitchers returning from injury
    • Chris Sale
    • Jacob deGrom
    • Tyler Glasnow
  • Valuing older pitchers with lots of mileage on their arms
• Shohei Othani
  • Is there extra risk asscociated with rostering the two-way player?
• Starting pitcher strategy
  • General landscape
  • Do you need to draft an ace pitcher in fantasy?
  • Should we avoid the waiver wire for starting pitchers?
    • Should we avoid streaming SPs?
  • Should we tilt the Hitter/Pitcher % split more towards pitching?
  • Should we use more bench slots for starting pitchers this year?
  • Should we be chasing any of the following?
    • Wins
    • Innings
    • High IP / GS
    • Pitchers on good teams

ATC Undervalued Players

• Starting Pitchers
  • Aaron Nola
  • Shane Bieber
  • Kevin Gausman

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A few years ago, a guy named Jabari Blash streaked across the Fantasy Baseball firmament like a doomed comet. He had tremendous raw power, but was a three-true-outcomes guy with a vengeance, and most of those outcomes were strikeouts. His plate discipline, his glove, and his baserunning skills were such that he had to hit a lot of home runs to keep a major league job, and when he didn’t, first the Padres and then the Angels kicked him to the curb. We ourselves didn’t expect Blash to succeed, but we nonetheless took him in various deep drafts out of our sentimental recollection of a story we heard in our youths.

The tale goes like this: A young man’s fantastically wealthy grandfather dies. He leaves his entire estate to charity. To the young man, he leaves only some words of wisdom and advice. The key to success and happiness, says Grandpa, can be stated in a single word: BLASH. But to find out what the word means, the young man must do as the grandfather did in his own youth and seek out a certain guru who lives as a hermit at the top of a remote Tibetan mountain.  After much travail, distress, danger, and expense, the young man scales the mountain and finds the guru. “Guru,” he says. “I have come from far across the sea to acquire the wisdom that you alone possess. What is the meaning of BLASH?” And the guru says, “Buy Low And Sell High.” Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s get right back to our odyssey around MLB in search of the underestimated and the overlooked. This week, the final  installment, covering the NL Central and the NL West. Numbers in parentheses are the Average Draft Positions of the players in question, derived from draft results in National Fantasy Baseball Championship Draft Champions leagues since the start of the year. Read the rest of this entry »

Watch me live as I draft my team in the NFBC Online Championship! This is a 12-team 5×5 Roto draft with an overall component.

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Last week I detailed how I am preparing for an upcoming Ottoneu re-draft and how I set my hitter targets. In this post, I finish the job and detail my approach to targeting pitchers. I should note that this is an iterative process. It is necessary to go back and forth to figure out a good balance between hitting and pitching and so much of that is dictated by who you have on the free-agent list. Regardless, I’m a planner and need to set my targets ahead of time. I need to see what happens if Plan A fails and what Plan B really looks like. Sadly, I was never the kid in school who could just roll out of bed, head to the exam in their pajamas, and get an A without studying.

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Let’s continue our reconnaissance through MLB in search of reserve-round picks—the more camouflaged the better–whom we expect to outperform the market’s expectations. This week: AL West and NL East. The numbers in parentheses are the average draft positions in the 68 National Fantasy Baseball Champions Draft Champions (15 teams, 50 players a team, no FAABs) completed since the start of the year.

Angels: Jared Walsh (350) is to 2023 as Christian Walker was to 2022: a power hitter with a doctor’s note. Through June 21^st last season, Walsh hit .265 with 13 home runs in 266 plate appearances. Thereafter: 188 PAs, 2 home runs, .144, until he packed it in for the season in late August. He then had surgery for thoracic outlet syndrome, and while he’s still a bit under the weather, he says he’ll be fine by opening day. We envision a Walkeresque season of 30 or so home runs and a .260 BA.
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Time to begin our sweep through the major leagues, looking for reserve-round players who might be good enough to grab in a deep draft like NFBC’s Draft Champions (50 rounds, no FAABs). Some of these guys probably won’t play unless someone gets injured, but someone always does. Some of them are next in line behind shaky frontliners. Some of them had apparently-bad records last season that we think mask actually-good records. And some of them are starters whom, we think, the market just disrespects. So let’s have a look. This week, it’s the AL East and the AL Central on which we lavish our attention. The numbers in parentheses are the Average Draft Positions in the 53 completed Draft Champions drafts since the start of the year:

Toronto: We don’t see how a genuine contending team can keep Yusei Kikuchi in its rotation for a whole season. People seem to think that his replacement will be Nate Pearson, who is indeed a promising pitcher, but very delicate. His arm probably can’t take a lot of five-inning outings before it falls off. So our candidate is Yosver Zulueta (748). His control deserted him in the minors last season, but he was coming off a three-year hiatus (TJ/pandemic/knee surgery) and still did pretty well.

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….[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.

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So, you’ve made the difficult decision to start rebuilding in your dynasty fantasy baseball league. Maybe you’re coming off a competitive window but salary inflation and arbitration have conspired to prevent you from running the same roster back again this year or you had a really unlucky season and need to tear everything down. Whatever the case may be, you’re here now and need to start somewhere. Last week, I walked through that decision-making process and how to start evaluating your roster, now you need to start making things happen.

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