On Tuesday, I built a $14 offense using only $1 players from the NFBC average auction values in March. My player pool to choose from for that exercise was 78 players. But what about those that weren’t purchased at all? Surely they could have been had for a buck, too! That group is now my pool to choose from for this thrilling offense. There were a total of 110 players that I have a Pod Projection that weren’t rostered in a single NFBC auction in March. As a reminder, there were 25 auctions run since Mar 1, so this 14-player offense will be solely composed of hitters who failed to be bought in any of them.

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You know what’s fun? Drafting a fake team, selected using values from completed drafts. Several years ago, I debuted a series of posts using NFBC average auction values (AAV). Let’s start that up again as we’re just over a week away from opening day. I’ll start by building a $14 offense. That’s right, 14 hitters, all just a buck each. Isn’t that exciting?! I can only imagine the thrills that will be had choosing between players most fantasy owners have no desire to roster. But think of how amazing your $246 pitching staff would be!

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Yesterday, I discussed six 2021 fantasy breakouts and concluded with a verdict as to whether I believed each was for real or would be a 2022 bust. Today, let’s discuss the 2021 busts. Will they rebound or continue down the path of bustiness?

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It has seemingly been a couple of years since I have published this post, so let’s get back to analyzing some of last season’s biggest breakouts. Four years ago during Fantasy Baseball Week at The Hardball Times, I researched whether last season’s breakouts were solid investments the following year. Spoiler alert: they are actually terrible investments. Of course, that’s as a group. So while in aggregate last season’s breakouts are a bad investment the following year, not every breakout from the previous season is going to fall flat the next season. So let’s discuss some of the big breakouts from 2021 and decide which turn out to be poor investment busts and which end up holding onto their gains.

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Now it’s time for a Birchwood Brothers tradition: identifying players who, their stats suggest, have either been lucky, and thus ought to be eschewed, or unlucky, and thus ought to be swallowed. We are no-trade-league guys. Some years ago, though, we were sucked into the black hole of a league that not only permitted but virtually demanded trading, and were fortunate to survive our resulting passage through the fabric of space-time. In that league, we were offered a mid-season trade for a pitcher that looked pretty good on its surface. But we wondered whether this guy’s success was significantly a function of his good fortune, and came up with a down-and-dirty way of finding out. It worked in that particular case—the guy had been lucky, but not long after we turned the trade down, both his luck and his pitching went bad. And the following preseason, we tried the same thing with the previous year’s full-season stats, and in the fullness of time found that it worked pretty well there too.

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The 2022 Pod Projections are now available and include over 550 player forecasts! As usual in my Pod Projection posts, I’ll dive into my projection methodology (detailed in Projecting X 2.0) by sharing my process on several hitters and pitchers.

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Quick: Has Abraham Almonte caught on with a Major League team, and if so which one? No peeking. (If your counter-question is “who’s Abraham Almonte?”, then you have our permission to peek, but we like to think we know our readers, and we like to think that, for our readers, “Abraham Almonte” is as familiar a name as Mike Trout or Volodymyr Zelenskyy.)

The answer to our question, happily for all of us Abraham Almonte fans (which we actually are, for an assortment of reasons), is that he’s a non-roster invitee of the Milwaukee Brewers. This is, frankly, not a comfortable spot for him to have landed in, since the Brewers are so deep in organizational-depth outfielders that he may have trouble making even the AAA roster. But if the Brewers jettison him, we figure another team will pick him up, and that—just as the Braves did last season—New Team X will find a way to use him in the majors.

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Yesterday, I continued my Pod Projections vs Steamer battle by pitting our stolen base projections against each other, and identifying those I forecasted for a higher total. Let’s now review the players I am projecting for fewer steals per 650 PA than Steamer.

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Today, I continue my Pod Projections vs Steamer battle, this time moving along to stolen bases. Similarly to the way I compared our home run forecasts, I’m going to calculate a PA/SB rate first and then extrapolate that projection over 650 plate appearances so we’re only comparing stolen base projections and playing time forecasts don’t factor in. I’ll begin with the players I’m projecting for more stolen bases, or the upside guys.

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While many expert fantasy players have been drafting and posting their rosters and drafting and posting their rosters and… you get the point…, you may be waiting out the lockout before you schedule your draft. If that’s the case, you’re probably exhausted from all the fantasy content that has been pumped out into the meta-verse and at this point, probably have your mind made up on a few players. Let’s put that theory to the test and let’s see if you can guess who’s who based on only their counting stat projections. This is my second installment of the choose your player game and here are the rules:

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