Even though I personally find two-catcher leagues torture, I did have to pony up and get two guys in AL-LABR this weekend, so we thought we’d go pretty deep to help you out.

If you’re in a mixed league, with one catcher, it looks like you might as well wait until the end of your draft and spend less than your competitors. There’s a decent group at the top. A Mike Napoli / Brian McCann pairing would have plenty of upside and cost a lot less than Buster Posey.

But get down into the dregs of this position, and we know how bad it can get.

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Thing might look a little different this year. We’ve got tools upon tools for your drafts this year, and they should be easier to get to now. But we will still do consensus rankings, and we’ll still do tiered rankings. Because it’s all helpful in different ways.

But it’s time for the consensus ranks first.

It’s also worth putting down on ‘paper’ why we do the consensus ranks the way we do them. We have Jeff Zimmerman, Mike Podhorzer and Zach Sanders submitting their individual ranks alongside mine for a couple of reasons. The first is that four is the minimum ‘n’ we can give you: more of a sample should give you a better ranking. It’s like a mini crowd-source. And the second reason is really the same, in an alternate package: each of us uses projections to a different extent, and each of us uses intuition and research to a different extent. And yes, we have the Steamer projection numbers listed here, but no, none of the rankings is solely based on those projections. In any case, you’ll get five numbers to look at, and you can choose which one you like.

To the first basemen!

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Phew. After a nearly four and a half hour snake draft online, I have officially completed the earliest draft in my fantasy baseball career. LABR stands for League of Alternative Baseball Reality, and along with Tout Wars, is one of the two most publicized “expert” leagues. In the past, LABR has had only two leagues, an AL-Only and NL-Only, with both formats using a live auction in Arizona to select players. Last year, a mixed league with an online draft was formed and I participated in the inaugural season as well. With that background out of the way, let’s get into more league specifics.

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I’m happy to announce the fantasy values have come to FanGraphs+! Based on Steamer projections, these values are for standard, OBP, and “only” leagues based on the following descriptors: 12 teams, 23 starting lineup slots, $260 budget. They will appear on the projections’ leaderboard for FanGraphs+ subscribers ($4.99/yr).

The methodology for these values has long floated around the site, but there are a few minor changes that have been made to better the accuracy and efficacy of these values.

The replacement levels have been altered to cover a full league’s worth of players. In the past, we had assumed that the last round of two contained replacement players, but discarding this assumption leads to fuller, more accurate auction values. Now, the top 276 players are worth a combined $3120, which is the full budgeted amount for a 12-team auction draft.

In the past, we’d limited results to players that met a certain at-bat or innings threshold. This is no longer the case. However, there is still need for a baseline uninfluenced by low counting stats, the league averages and standard deviations were calculated using the players with at least 350 ABs or 40 IP.

FanGraphs+ Giveaway!

Name the player the following player capsule describes in the comments and win free access to FanGraphs+!

The 33-year-old [Player] is past his “prime.” While he used to provide some power ([number less than ten] homers in 2010), he looks to be done. He never hit for average (.232 career), but it dropped to [number less than .232] this last year. Two pitchers, Hamels (.217) and Kershaw (.207), had better averages in 2012 (70 minimum plate appearances). Also, the power disappeared, as he ended the season with only one home run. Finally, he stole two bases which was only one off of his career high. Basically he is not good enough to play and when he does, he produces no value. (Jeff Zimmerman)

The last two weeks we had good discussions about prospects best suited to help you in batting average and stolen bases. This week, we’ll be discussing HOME RUNS. As a reminder, I won’t be talking about draft position, ottoneu, or auction prices and because these discussions are more complex than I initially though, I’m abandoning the rigid No Doubt, Overrated, and Sleeper categories and going with a typical straight ranking from now on. Read the rest of this entry »

After 15 rounds in Rotographs’s 12-team ridiculously early draft, 13 second basemen have been drafted. A few surprises have popped up, but again in 2013, the 2B position has it talent spread out pretty evenly.

Note: Aaron Hill was not included when the article first ran. He has been now included.

To begin with, here are the Oliver Projections for the 2B qualified players who have been drafted from rounds 1 to 15:

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Our astute reader Jonathan noted the following about our recent mock draft at Rotographs:

Zim bought in quite a bit on down seasons 2-5

Yes, Jonathan, you are right. After gladly grabbing Cano with the 7th over all pick, I took the following down picks:

2nd Round: Hanley Ramirez
3rd Round: Justin Upton
4th Round: Adrian Gonzalez
5th Round: Jacoby Ellsbury

I decided to party like it was 2012 all over again by trying to balance down side with the hopes of huge gains.

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After weeks of reviewing hitters, position by position by position, it is time for me to offer up my response to Zach Sanders’s rankings of starting pitchers.

As with Zach’s rankings, we are limiting ourselves to pitchers with more than 140 IP this year, giving us a list of 101 starting pitchers, including a few whose values varied greatly between 5×5 and linear weights points leagues. One slight change from hitters to pitchers – because an IP is so valuable in linear weights (almost every team should be using up all 1500 IP over the season in an ottoneu league), we are going to rank pitchers based on Points/IP, not based on total points.

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The 2012 fantasy baseball season has come to a close, so it is time to look back at the season past and determine which players were the most valuable at each position. This week focuses on starting pitchers.

The players were ranked based on their 2012 production, using the evaluation system explained and updated on this site some time ago. To keep things manageable and avoid skewing the numbers, players were only considered if they amassed 140 innings pitched over the course of the year. The replacement level was also adjusted to account for players eligible at multiple positions. The valuations are built for $260 budgets and traditional 5×5 roto fantasy leagues.

These rankings are meant to reflect a player’s value should he have occupied this spot in your lineup for the entire year. So, a player who missed time due to injury but put up great numbers during his time on the field would be worth less.

With all this in mind, here are your rankings. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve already seen the new Bill James projections for 2013 used to rank hitters for 5×5 and linear weights, and to rank pitchers for 5×5 – time to look at how ottoneu players should be thinking about pitchers for 2013.

As with hitters, we are going to look at three sets of data, but unlike hitters, I am going to add a bonus set at the end (isn’t that nice of me).

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