Archive for Featured

I’ve written a couple of late-season articles on overperformers and underperformers based on projected versus earned value. As someone who spends plenty of time examining pitchers, my fantasy teams admittedly struggled in pitching points. My team’s pitching ratios exploded due to blowup outings from Jack Flaherty, Luis Castillo, Logan Webb, and others.

On the hitter side, I rostered plenty of veteran players that might be seen as boring ones. Common hitters on my roster included Trea Turner, Jose Ramirez, Dansby Swanson, Ian Happ, Bryan Reynolds, and Seiya Suzuki. In one 12-team league, I started with Ronald Acuña Jr., Garrett Crochet, Manny Machado, Bryce Harper, and Geraldo Perdomo.

On another 12-teamer, I went with Shohei Ohtani, Treat Turner, Ketel Marte, William Contreras, Hunter Brown, Suzuki, Carlos Estevez, Corey Seager, Alex Bregman, and Spencer Strider with my first 10 picks. Unsurprisingly, that team struggled across the board.

I’ll walk through a few lessons from my draft and in-season strategy from the 2026 fantasy baseball season.

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“No one cares about your fantasy leagues,” but: I am your 2026 Tout Wars 15-Team Mixed On-Base Percentage (OBP) Auction champion. I’m not sure how helpful draft and/or league recaps are for most people, but I figure debriefing a victory is as good a use of this time as any.

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Midseason, I charted the rookie crop of pitchers using a z-composite score. As the first full season for many of these pitchers wraps up, let’s come back to them to see how they fared and what this means for fantasy value moving into 2027.

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Lon Horwedel-Imagn Images

With the dust finally settling, I ended the 2026 season with $3K in profit over 12 leagues. Here are my league results and some of overarching thoughts on the season and some leagues. Read the rest of this entry »

On June 27, I had a team sitting in second place in a 4×4 league, 6.5 points out of first. This particular league, an Ottoneu league called the Food and Travel League, pays out prizes in the form of food and/or beverages. It is one of my favorite leagues, both for the prizes and the competition, and finishing top three in that league is a goal every year – it’s much more fun to receive food than to figure out how to ship it.

I had never won this league and while the gap to first made me wonder if this was the right year to push in my chips, I also saw a clear path to finishing second or third (fourth place was 7.5 points behind me). But I was behind the pace on innings pitched and needed arms. I was third in all of the pitching rate stats (HR/9, ERA, WHIP), but was ninth in IP and, as a result, tied for eighth in strikeouts. Gaining points in Ks while maintaining my rates was an obvious path forward.

So I made a trade. I ended up winning the league, but the trade was costly and it is worth wondering if the trade is why I won the league, or if I could have won without the deal.

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Like a moth drawn to a flame, I find myself returning to the strange comforts of relief pitcher analysis.

In last week’s article, I looked at whether or not there seems to be big-picture movements in relief pitcher value and found that generally, despite the overall vibe shift and changing usage patterns, the proportion of good reliever seasons and distribution among the players accruing these seasons is not materially changing.

But – as one commenter noted – what about SVHD (saves + holds) leagues? It’s a fair question and one to which I am personally sympathetic. Despite all of my digital hullabaloo about standard 5×5 roto settings, I don’t actually play in a league where holds are not counted. As more and more home leagues shift away from saves dominance it might be worth a closer look.

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• Daily SP Chart archive
• SP Rankings (last update: 7/24)
• No 2-Start podcast episode this wk because there is just SO much uncertainty that I didn’t think there’d be a ton of value to it.  I should be able to run Sat/Sun boards for y’all again this weekend to help w/those last second questions.

Welcome to the Daily SP Chart, click here if you’re new to get an idea of what I’m doing with these rankings.

• With such little time left, everything is heavily based on your particular situation so if you have any specific questions, drop a comment and I’ll help the best I can!

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9/25/26

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live!

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• Paul Sporer | Twitter | Bluesky – Host
• Justin Mason | Twitter | Bluesky – Co-Host/Producer

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2027 DRAFT REVIEW PT. 3

Closer Talk

• SVs leaders
• Riley O’Brien
• Justin Martinez
• Félix Bautista
• Daniel Palencia
• Grant Taylor
• Hagen Smith
• Jacob Latz
• Ben Joyce

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Geoff Burke-Imagn Images

American League

Royals

• Lucas Erceg’s fastball velocity is up since returning from the minors.

But by far the biggest development was Erceg’s scoreless eighth inning. It was the first high-leverage spot for the former Royals closer since his demotion to Triple-A Omaha earlier this season for performance issues. After working on his mentality, mechanics and plan on the mound, Erceg needed just nine pitches to keep Kansas City’s one-run lead. He also hit triple digits for the first time since the 2024 ALDS.

Before the demotion to AAA, his fastball averaged 97.1 mph. Since returning, it’s averaging 99.2 mph with a 1.87 botERA (2.77 xFIP). It was a 4.38 botERA (5.41 xFIP) before that. Read the rest of this entry »

The so-called “back of the baseball card” numbers still matter to us. No matter how many new-fangled metrics are concocted, we can’t keep our eye from straying towards the .300 AVG/30 HR/100 RBI hitter. That’s the ideal. It’s how we were trained to think about players.

In this article series, I’ll point out two two starting pitchers and two hitters who I think could fall victim to a bias away from low volume players, depressing their draft day costs for 2027. 

While it’s still too early to tell what their cost will be, I’d argue that given their numbers, paced out to 162 games, make them some of the best players in fantasy, and they’re unlikely to cost what they’re worth. 

Last week, I covered Logan Henderson, who was the second-ranked pitcher on a per-162 basis via the Fangraphs Player Rater this season, slotting in right behind Jacob Misiorowski.

This week, I’ll cover Jeremy Peña. The franchise shortstop for the Houston Astros is still just 28 years old and I think he’s quietly been starting to make good on the first impression he made during the 2022 playoffs.

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