The best of, worst of awards continue this week along with a spotlight on fantasy baseball’s catcher landscape in 2015. Last week, I awarded the 2015 Sigh Young — fantasy baseball’s biggest pitching bust — to Jeff Samardzija, who miserably underperformed expectations en route to a pretty awful season.

The 2015 Roto Overhyped Pitcher award is a bit different and probably more subjective. Rather than simply be bad, a pitcher must have also been over-hyped. Too much hype typically occurs for two reasons, neither of which are mutually exclusive:

1. The pitcher was once a top prospect
2. The pitcher broke out, or turned the corner, the previous season

Read the rest of this entry »

This is one of those fun awards where there is debate about what the award means. Roto and Hitter are clear, but what constitutes a comeback? Does the winner have to come back from injury or ineffectiveness or both? How good does he have to be to have “comeback?”

Well, since I get the only vote, I also define the parameters. I prefer unexpected comebacks, so I give more credit to coming back from ineffectiveness than injury. I think you need to make a BIG return to win this award – going from top 20 bat, to borderline useful player, to top 20 bat is more impressive than going from top 75 bat, to top 200 bat, to top 75 bat. With that in mind, my pick: Chris Davis.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re passing out awards this week at RG (we’re also delivering demerits, but not in this piece) and I’m looking at the Deep League MVP today. I share Eno’s position of what this award should be as he discussed in the Deep League Cy Young. What that means in a nutshell is that A.J. Pollock isn’t winning this one.

He had an undeniably fantastic season, rising up from a 104 hitter ADP to end up as the fourth-best hitter in baseball, but even factoring in pitchers only jumps his ADP 54 spots meaning he wasn’t exactly cheap despite being a tremendous return on the investment. Kendrys Morales was less expensive as the 226th hitter off the board, but he was drafted enough to log a real ADP on four of the six sites FantasyPros uses so he’s out, too, despite the incredible season.

I was a little lighter on my playing time requirements for consideration as we saw some guys do amazing things in fewer than 100 games this year, so I was looking for at least 400 PA. You can probably think of some of the top candidates immediately, especially if you won a league as the beneficiary of these free agent finds. The booming rookie class paid major dividends via the wire in large part because the arrival of several was well ahead of schedule, let alone the fact that they performed immediately.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s best of and worst of week at RotoGraphs. I’m here with 2015’s worst starting pitchers.

There’s a lot of ways to approach this. A lot of pitchers’ values are conditional upon their circumstances, so I’ve tried to keep this in mind when creating this list. When it comes down to it, though, this is all just one man’s opinion.

Fantasy Pros calculated the aggregate average draft position (ADP) using several premier fantasy baseball websites, so that’s the value upon which I’ve based my decisions.

But first, let us acknowledge 2015’s All-Injury Sigh Young Squad:

Read the rest of this entry »

To separate the deep league fantasy Cy Young from the regular fantasy one, and also from the real-life Cy Young, we’ll need to define the award. Fantasy Baseball is maybe all about value, and value is at least 50/50 cost, so we have to factor in cost to hand out this hardware.

And, in fact, for the deep league version, cost is even more important. Because the cost for a deep league draftee vs a mixed league draftee has to be much lower. Even if the output is lower, the Deep League Cy Young should not have been drafted in mixed leagues, optimally.

So even if Dallas Keuchel was ranked 257th overall going into the season and ended up ninth overall, making him a great contender if not the lock for the overall Roto Cy Young, Dallas Keuchel was a decently expensive deep league starter. We’re looking for that $1 wonder that led your AL-only staff to victory. We’re looking for 2014 Dallas Keuchel, not 2015’s version.

Read the rest of this entry »