Let’s return without delay to the second half of our exploration of the Quadrinity: players who satisfy certain statistical criteria and, we have found, do better in the aggregate than the market thinks they will. Last week, we looked at pitchers, who were the species on which this experiment was first conducted. But we have found over the years that it works well with hitters, too. We are, as you might imagine, looking for hitters whose achievement is the opposite of that of the qualifying pitchers: guys whose walk percentage and hard-hit percentage are above-average, while their strikeout percentage and soft-hit percentage are below-average.

There are usually about twenty such guys. This year, there’s a bumper crop of 26, although one of them, Brendan Rodgers, blew out his shoulder earlier this month and is likely out for the season. So let’s wish Rodgers a speedy recovery and name the other twenty-five, divided according to position, along with their average auction prices in auctions conducted under the auspices of the National Fantasy Baseball Championship. One of the oddities of the Hitter Quadrinity is that we’re usually able to construct a full 14-man Roto roster from among them—as we would have been this year as well, but for Rodgers’s misfortune : Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, just hours before I dove into the auction for league 1199, I laid out the challenge I faced for the brilliant minds that read this site, and promised to return with news of how things played out. This is my foretold return.

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This post won’t be long. And it has more questions than answers. But it’s the most immediately relevant thing I have ever written (at least to me). What do you do in auction where you have a choice between getting a star or building a balanced team and you can’t realistically do both?

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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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