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

Guest: Mike Gianella

Strategy Section

• Kentucky Derby Style (KDS) Draft Order
  • Which draft slot is most similar to an auction?
  • General preferences for slot selection
  • 2023 preferences for slot selection
• Middle Infielders
  • The shortstop and second base player pools
    • SS – Deep
    • 2B – Wide Bottom
  • Do you need to draft stolen bases from the middle infield position?
  • Jon Berti
  • Adalberto Mondesi
  • Bounceback middle infield candidates

Injury Guru’s Trivia of the Week

ATC Undervalued Players

• Middle Infielders
  • Amed Rosario
  • Gleyber Torres
  • Jorge Polanco
  • Vaughn Grissom
  • Ketel Marte
  • Brendan Rodgers
  • Ezequiel Tovar
  • Luis Garcia
  • Nick Gordon

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We don’t need a post telling us that Spencer Strider is a really good pitcher, but there might be a need for one that he’s already one of the greatest in the game. And his strengths play to everything we want in fantasy.

Shohei Ohtani tops the list of pitchers for obvious reasons, but the next nine or so are more jumbled than we might think. Taking a look at where Strider ranks among all pitchers with at least 130 innings pitched tells an important story:

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Now that 2022 is over and we turn the page to 2023. If you are getting ready for the next season, you should be prepared and when I am preparing for something, I like to make myself a checklist to make sure I am not forgetting something. Here is my Offseason Checklist. 

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It is time to put 2022 behind us and begin to look at 2023! Read the rest of this entry »

2022 was the worst year I have ever had as a fantasy player. I played in 16 leagues and did not cash in a single one. The hard part is that I don’t even know what went wrong. I had teams I really liked coming out of the draft and some that were doing very well throughout the season. Over the next few weeks I will deep dive into each team in a series of articles to examine what went wrong and what the common threads were. This is my 2022 Apology Tour.
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