The Relief Pitcher Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Alex Fast

LABR Recap

• Reactions to the LABR Mixed Auction League Draft

Strategy Section

• Closers
  • How should we draft closers in 2021?
  • What closer tiers are the best return on investments?
  • Is it better to pick a named closer on a bad team or an uncertain closer on a good team?
• Relievers
  • How should we set ourselves up for in-season play with relief pitchers?
  • How much are reliever ratios a consideration while drafting, as opposed to only considering the closers role (saves)?
  • When should you draft a valuable middle reliever over a named closer?

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The Injury Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Stephania Bell of ESPN

Tommy John Surgery

• Timelines
• ** New TJS Procedure: Internal Brace
• Updates on returning TJS pitchers
  • Noah Syndergaard
  • Chris Sale
  • Luis Severino
• Updates on players with prior TJS
  • Jordan Hicks
  • Michael Kopech
• How to manage pitchers with elbow concerns in fantasy.

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3/1/21

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live. Support the show by subscribing to our Patreon!!

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• @sporer – Host

THRIFTING OPTIONS

• CATCHER: Salvador Perez v. Gary Sánchez (3:05)
• FIRST BASE: Matt Olson v. C.J. Cron (7:54)
• SECOND BASE: Cavan Biggio v. Jean Segura (13:11)
• SHORTSTOP: Carlos Correa v. Paul DeJong (21:11)

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The Catcher & Utility-Only Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Ryan Bloomfield

Strategy Section

• Catchers
  • How to account for Positional Scarcity with Catchers
  • Differences between 1-Catcher Leagues and 2-Catcher Leagues
  • Streaming Catchers
  • Is J.T. Realmuto worth his current draft price?
• Utility-Only Players
  • Are Utility-Only players undervalued in drafts?
  • “Clogging the Utility Slot”
  • Utility-Only players to gain positional eligibility
    • Marcell Ozuna
    • Colin Moran

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The NFBC & Outfielder Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Matt Modica

Strategy Section

• NFBC
  • Differences between NFBC (High stakes) vs. Home Leagues
  • Standalone Leagues vs. Leagues with an Overall Prize
  • NFBC Specific Rules
    • Limited Bench
    • No Injured List
    • No Trading
    • Semi-Weekly Lineups for Hitters
  • Are Multi-Position Eligible players more valuable?
  • Pitching is greatly pushed up in NFBC leagues
    • Is it warranted?
    • Should you follow the crowd, or alter your strategy to zag?
    • Should a super elite pitcher (deGrom/Cole) be taken #1 overall?
  • NFBC Draft Planning
  • KDS

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The Auction Strategy Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Derek VanRiper

Strategy Section

• Auction Strategy
  • How Snake Drafts & Auctions differ in preparation.
  • Constructing Auction Values
    • Should you strictly hold to values?
    • What to use as a Hitter/Pitcher % split?
  • Generating Market Values
  • Nomination Strategies
    • General – It has to have a purpose.
    • Should you nominate players you want to buy, or players that you believe are overvalued?
    • The Economic Box
  • Bidding
    • Starting Bids
    • Jump Bids
    • Price Enforcing
    • The ‘9’s
  • Draft Inflation

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The Starting Pitcher Episode (Part II) of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Nick Pollack

Strategy Section

• Simple analytics vs. advanced analytics.
• Offseason information – what is noise, what is real?
• Blind spots of projections for pitchers.
• 2021 Season
  • 6-man roations
  • Starting pitcher inning limits
  • The Tampa Bay Rays
  • What if the season is delayed?
  • Ramp-up from 2020 short season

Starting Pitcher Strategy

• General strategy
• Pitchers that we would more likely roster in auctions vs. snake drafts (& vice versa).

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The 2021 ATC Projections have arrived at FanGraphs!

The Average Total Cost projection system (ATC) gets its name from the fact that it “averages” many other projection systems together. ATC also happens to be my initials.

ATC is a “smart” projection aggregation model. While most other aggregation systems typically apply equal weight to all underlying data sources, ATC assigns weights based on historical performance. The method is similar to what Nate Silver does with his political forecasting at www.fivethirtyeight.com. Read more about how ATC works in last year’s introductory ATC article.

ATC’s advanced methods have paid off. Last year, FantasyPros ranked ATC as the most accurate baseball projections, even more accurate than their own. Annually, I conduct my own projections review using a game theory method, which has consistently shown that ATC has outperformed other projections. You can read the results of last year’s study here.

Starting this year, ATC will include three new volatility metrics to be described later in this article. Aside from introducing the concepts behind these new metrics, we will also discuss how a fantasy manager might use them in practice.

First, let’s quickly remind everyone on where to find the ATC projections at FanGraphs.

Viewing ATC

There are currently three ways to view and utilize the ATC projections on the site.

• Full Projections
• Individual Player Pages
• Auction Calculator

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At last, it’s finally time to unmask xHR/FB v4.0! If you want a refresher on how we got here, review my xHR/FB history and v4.0 research and then check out the correlations of a variety of metrics that may or may not predict HR/FB rate.

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Yesterday, I shared the history of my xHR/FB rate equation and the first pieces of research on my journey toward developing Version 4.0. Today, I’ll discuss a myriad of correlations for a myriad of metrics and how those calculations helped me determine which would win a spot in my final equation. Fun!

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