If you have read my work or listened to the podcast, you know I’m obsessed with my Arizona Fall League trip every year. It’s just the best. One of my favorite things about that trip is the NFBC Draft & Hold league we start there. We do the first 23 rounds live and then the other 27 online starting in January. It’s a little bit of a reach-fest. I think part of it is the draft and hold aspect, part of it is recency bias of the season just ending, and part of it is just getting the oohs & ahhs (or playful curse outs) from another participant.

I’ve been doing this draft since 2012 and I think I’ve had an early pick just one. I regularly draft from one of the last three spots in the 15-team league and this year was no different as I nabbed spot 15. For those unaware, it’s a Kentucky Derby Style draft slotting process where they draw the names out of the hat and then you can pick your spot among those available. I can’t recall exactly when my name was pulled, but 15 was available and that was exactly what I wanted. I had done a mock in mid-October and was struck by how deep the first round was so I felt more than comfortable getting the wheel.

Another reason I love pick 15 is because I get the first pick in the January restart. After a few months of Hot Stove activity, there are usually a handful of players who have improved their status beyond a round 24 pick, making them great values at this slot. Of course, this year they cancelled the Hot Stove so there might not be any of those gem picks available to me.

Let’s take a look at my first 23.

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I had participated in a too-early industry mock draft that ended a couple of weeks ago. Then I attended First Pitch Arizona (FPAZ), which I reviewed and at which I participated in another arguably too-early draft. This post is about that latter draft. Sorry for all the reviews lately.

The draft, which took place live at FPAZ, is hosted by the National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC). It’s a 15-team league, but instead of being a standard 30-round draft (seven bench players) with in-season transactions, it’s a 50-round draft-and-hold with no transactions (don’t worry, this only covers the first 23 rounds). I won’t say it completely changes the dynamic, but it does, or at least should, dramatically alter the plans of owners who take a lot of risks and plan to hedge them using their free agent acquisition budgets (FAABs).

What’s worse is I had, and still have, done virtually zero planning for the 2018 season. Accordingly, I relied on a strategy I outlined in the previously hyperlinked too-early mock draft review. I’m a risk-averse guy, so I typically draft player who are boring — boring because they’re old and/or you know what you’re getting. Low variance, things of that nature. This strategy inadvertently exacerbated this tendency of mine in these drafts, and the draft-and-hold nature of this league further compounded it. Without looking, the average age of my team must be, like, 33 years old.

But I like it. It’s so unsexy, so unapologetically (actually, very apologetically) boring that it’s almost not worth review. Except when I talk about boring, unsexy teams, I hear from guys like Jeff Zimmerman, Mike Gianella and so on — guys in the industry expert leagues such as Tout Wars and LABR — who say this is their jam, and that’s reassuring.

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Yesterday, the Justin Mason posted the ADP from four of the slowest drafts containing industry experts and myself. One thought I had after a handful of rounds was the lack pitching available and how the good were the available hitters. I decided to go back and examine draft results from last year and these draft to see if pitching was being taken early. While it wasn’t, some other information could be extracted.

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Continuing our weekly series, I’ll be tracking differences in the NFBC average draft that is referenced regularly throughout the community and can be found here. Each Sunday I’ll pull the data, compare it to the previous week, and then deliver my key findings. You will still need to synthesize the data into something applicable for your leagues, especially if you don’t play in the NFBC, but this is the game’s sharpest market so I think it’s worth following. Last week I tried the positional thing, but there isn’t always something to discuss at every position so I’m going back to free form.

PREVIOUS EDITIONS:

• February 22nd
• February 28th
• March 7th

BIGGEST RISER: Jeanmar Gomez | +17 spots to pick 361

Oh look at you, Jeanmar! Back-to-back weeks as the biggest riser as the market adjusts to him at least starting the season in the closer’s role. Despite his two big jumps, he’s still 120 picks behind Hector Neris, though that’s built on early drafts when most assumed Neris would get the role because he’s actually good at pitching.

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I’ll be tracking differences in the NFBC average draft that is referenced regularly throughout the community and can be found here. Each Sunday I’ll pull the data, compare it to the previous week, and then deliver my key findings. You will still need to synthesize the data into something applicable for your leagues, especially if you don’t play in the NFBC, but this is the game’s sharpest market so I think it’s worth following. Last week I tried the positional thing, but there isn’t always something to discuss at every position so I’m going back to free form.

PREVIOUS EDITIONS:

• February 22nd
• February 28th

BIGGEST RISER: Jeanmar Gomez | +27 spots to pick 378

Gomez dethroned Neftali Feliz (+23), who was going for a three-peat as the biggest riser. Gomez was named the closer by manager Pete Mackanin instead of an open competition with Gomez, Joaquin Benoit, and Hector Neris. However, despite the jump, Gomez sits only 10 spots ahead of Benoit and is actually 140 spots behind Neris. The Phillies might be showing some confidence in Gomez, but the market isn’t following suit.

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Necessity is the mother of invention. –Plato

I wanted to know how owners were valuing Michael Brantley’s playing time. Currently, at NFBC, he is going 233rd overall in NFBC drafts. Over a full season, he is projected to be more productive than the two outfielders going right before him, Carlos Beltran and Randal Grichuk. Owners, via calculations or their gut, are significantly downgrading a full season Brantley. But by how much? I needed to find the league replacement value.

I could go through all the whole league setting and final the values like I did for my Tout Wars league. While I recommend this detailed procedure for any league an owner takes seriously. I was just looking for a quick answer and stumbled upon one while looking over my Fantrax league.

Our friends at FanTrax.com have their players listed with projected stats and ADP. Having both downloadable made a projection sheet quickly come together.

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Playing time can make or break a baseball player’s fantasy value. An elite player may not finish above replacement level if he suffers an injury and plays only half the season, and a lackluster player could finish above replacement level simply by playing every single day. This is all intuitive, and the fantasy community generally approaches these kinds of things rationally. In other words, most players are appropriately valued, outside of the market inefficiencies that inevitably warp player values.

One-dimensional speedsters — dudes who steal a bunch of bases and do little else — are much harder to peg. Their value is tied up primarily in one category, as stolen bases (SBs) do not directly correlate with other categories the way home runs would with runs and RBI, for example. The issue becomes all the more confounding when one considers the contemporaneous scarcity of SBs relative to home runs. There’s more to value than just SBs and plate appearances (PAs), but the fact of the matter is the two statistics by themselves correlate very strongly with a player’s end-of-season (EOS) value (which, here, are informed by Razzball’s Player Rater).

In the last five years, baseball has seen 75 player-seasons of 30-plus SBs — 15 steals a year on average, a trend that didn’t fundamentally change in 2016 (although that doesn’t mean SBs aren’t scarce). A simple linear regression of SBs and PAs, the latter of which serves as a proxy for other counting stats such as runs and RBI, against EOS value produces a remarkable 0.71 adjusted R²:

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This is not a “sleeper” list. Read the rest of this entry »

Our report on the first half of our NFBC Slow Draft received reviews that were decidedly, um, mixed. But mixed reviews didn’t deter the producers of Batman vs. Superman from offering a sequel, and they’re not deterring us. We won’t revisit the background information about the draft or the strategy with which we approached it; it’s there at the start of the first installment. We’ll just report our selections, and comment when comment seems called for. And remember, folks, this is the second half of a 50-player draft. If everything goes perfectly, which of course it won’t, almost none of these guys will crack our starting lineup. Many of them are strictly spare parts. So “Ewww! Eduardo Escobar” is uncalled for.

Draft Position 374. Scott Schebler and 377. Francisco Liriano. Liriano, at least in 2017, is the kind of pitcher you take when you have a deep bench. We suspect that his career as a starting pitcher is over. He was very bad with Pittsburgh in the first four months of last season—his ERA third time through the order was 10.04–and while he helped Toronto a lot in the August and September, he still had trouble getting past the fourth inning in his 8 starts: ERA, innings 1 through 4, 1.97; ERA thereafter, 5.28. We’re not counting on him. But we got him cheap (his NFBC Average Draft Position is 324), he can still get strikeouts, he’s already penciled in to the Blue Jays’ rotation, and maybe we’re wrong about him. Read the rest of this entry »

The fantasy community is down on Justin Upton. I get it, but it’s a little strange to me given our collective penchant for recency bias. Upton had a monster second half and finished the season an almost-perfect replica of his usual self. (The operative qualifier being “almost.” We’ll get to that in a second.) Sure, it was a rocky year, but hey, Joey Votto had one, too. Dude was batting .213 with a 27 percent strikeout rate (K%) through May…

Right, so Upton was an almost-perfect replica of himself. In a vacuum, his production looks nearly identical to his typical annual accomplishment, down to nearly every statistic except for his batting average on balls in play (BABIP). In my investigation of his woes, I noticed his uncharacteristically low infield hit rate (IFH%). Here’s a list of hitters with higher infield hit rates than Justin Upton in 2016:

• Salvador Perez
• Kendrys Morales
• Albert Pujols
• One hundred and thirty five other players not surnamed Ortiz, Mauer, Seager, Granderson, Cabrera, Votto or Kemp

Yes, Upton ranked among the bottom 6 percent of hitters in terms of infield hits. If there’s a single bone to pick about Upton’s season — well, aside from the insane volatility — it’s that his BABIP failed to get back on track, continuing to linger at a league-average mark. It seems a trend has emerged; accordingly, it’s easy to accept said trend as a new normal, as a resignation of Upton’s fifth tool.

I’m here to make the classic* Infield Hit Rate Defense, or IHRD, as it’s known in the infield hit community.**

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