I’m always torn when setting a draft date for a fantasy league, particularly a redraft one. Most people I play with generally want the draft to be as close to the start of the regular season as possible, which makes sense – the longer you wait, the more information becomes available, and the more certainty players have, especially when it comes to playing-time estimates.

Depending on your level of risk-seeking, the depth of the league, and your confidence in finding early-season waiver-wire sleepers, an earlier draft might be your preference. It’s certainly mine. In those cases, I’m comfortable using picks in the later rounds on sleepers who may or may not make a team, trusting that if they wind up optioned to the minor leagues (or designated for assignment, as it were), I’ll be able to plug someone in out of the free-agent bin comparable to a “floor” pick I could have otherwise used that selection on.

The longer you wait to do your draft, the less opportunity there is to take those playing-time-uncertain fliers. Either those players will be deemed to be without a job, or others will have grown wise to their hold on a job, bidding the price up.

My favorite example to illustrate the impact of draft timing this year is Trea Turner, the No. 2 prospect of the potential NL East-champion Washington Nationals.
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Everyone loves value, and paying down at pitcher is quite popular — even in writer/expert leagues. Waiting on pitchers puts some extra pressure on hitting on value plays to offset the lack of a “true” ace. That’s not to say the following pitchers will perform like fantasy aces, but they do appear poised to outperform their draft positions — some by a significant amount, in my opinion. Each of the five pitchers highlighted below is being selected outside of the top-50 starting pitchers in NFBC drafts, just one is being selected inside the top-200 picks on average, and three of the five are being selected, on average, outside of the top-250 players.

*NFBC ADP data current as of March 10th. Read the rest of this entry »

So here you are, a month from Opening Day, reading a Deep League Waiver Wire column. If you’re actually perusing the wire, it’s either because you’re one of the few fantasy owners who’s already drafted or, like me, you’re frantically patching holes in a sinking fantasy Spring Training team that’s been decimated by injuries.

I’m writing this weekly column to help those of you looking at rather threadbare free agent pools find suitable replacements, Plan Bs, and maybe if we strike gold together, some…gold. This week, we focus on a couple overlooked catchers who are either going late in drafts or not at all. So, let’s go digging.

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Perhaps our very worst prediction of 2015—there’s intense competition for the honor– was that Jordan Schafer would lead the American League in stolen bases. As it developed, he tied for last in the AL, with zero. You can grasp our reasoning, though. Schafer, a year ago, was 28, was among the all-time top 100 in stolen base percentage, had stolen more than 100 bases over the previous four seasons of decidedly part-time play, and was the Twins’ center fielder of choice. He somehow contrived, over the course of April and May, to play himself not only out of the Twins’ starting lineup but out of professional baseball entirely. A .217/.250/.261 slash line, plus three caught-stealings and no stolen bases when your principal asset is speed, will do that to you.

So of course we’re eager to tell you who the 2016 version of Jordan Schafer is. By this, we mean the player most likely either to steal far more bases than anyone envisions or to put the quietus on his career. As we wrote last year, our mistake with Schafer was not taking seriously his spring training record, which was short on speed and long on slow. Thus, our recommendation this year comes with a sub-recommendation: Watch this guy during spring training (or let us watch for you; we promise to report back). If there’s evidence that he can’t run, and you haven’t already got him, don’t take him; if you’ve got him, jettison him, as his team will presumably get around to doing. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t even know what “special cloth alert” means, but I do follow DJ Khaled on Snapchat so I say it a lot to Charlotte. And she’s just all like, wtf are you talking about now? OK then, jeez. Anyway, I’ve interpreted it as a positive based on the many special cloth alerts that Khaled has issued in 10-second bits of majesty. So now I’m offering up a special cloth alert on two power-speed hitters who have a real shot at improving upon their 2015 seasons and exploding into early-round assets.

Odubel Herrera | PHI | OF

Did you catch Herrera’s 2015? It’s easy to miss good-not-great seasons on terrible teams. Plus, he was a Rule 5 pick so he wasn’t super well-known coming into the season. He came up through the Texas org. as a light-hitting speedster with a .294/.354/.377 line, 3 HR, and 30 SB per 600 PA. He was given grades of 40 hit, 50+ speed, 50+ defense, and 20 power (35 raw). So how did he pop 8 HR – 60% more than his previous career high? Must’ve been a bunch wall-scrapers.

Orrrrr… he was a monster?

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I have spent the last few weeks rewatching Breaking Bad. For those who have never watched it, it is arguably the greatest show of all time. It is the classic story of a high school chemistry teacher that gets terminal cancer and becomes a drug kingpin to make sure he leaves something behind for his family. Let’s be honest, the story of Walter White could be any of us, minus the drugs, Mexican cartels, violence, terminal cancer, money, and ability to make thermite in our kitchen. Read the rest of this entry »

“The romance of New York [City] during that era is contagious.” So comments a reviewer of a recent book of photographs from said era. And what era might that be? The melting-pot 1920s? The beatnik 1950s? The pot-and-protests 60s? The dot-com 90s? Nope; the 70s. The pink mist of nostalgia that now envelops 1970s New York City puzzles us a bit. In memoir after memoir—most of them quite good, by the way—1970s NYC is portrayed as culturally and intellectually heady beyond the imaginings of those then unborn or unfledged. But at the same time, it’s depicted as dirty, dangerous, and broke, and the memoirists describe it as if they’d survived the trenches at Guadalcanal.

We ourselves aren’t nostalgic about 1970s New York, or 1970s anywhere else, for that matter. In one respect, though, we kind of miss the decade, because (awkward segue coming) it saw the rise of the lively-ball-era stolen base. Even in the 60s, of course, there were stolen-base avatars like Maury Wills and Luis Aparicio. They’d steal fifty or more bases and lead the league every year. Otherwise, though, nothing: on average, a 60s team would attempt a stolen base about every other game. Read the rest of this entry »

The Giants’ biennial odd-year failures are well documented. By now, Giants fans know that if it’s an odd-year, they can safely leave town on Columbus Day weekend, volunteer at their NPR affiliate’s fall pledge drive, or spend a weekend up in Santa Rosa picking delightfully fragrant organic Braeburn apples in-season. But odd-year apple seasons bring Brian Sabean neither respite nor rich phytonutrients. For it’s a time when baseball’s longest-tenured GM must roll up his sleeves and construct yet another World Series winner.

This past October, Sabean set his sights on filling a gaping hole in center field and rebuilding a rotation that ranked 25th in WAR. So he signed Denard Span, Johnny Cueto, and Jeff Samardzija to multi-year contracts, undoubtedly improving the team in 2016. And that’s more or less it. Needs addressed.

From a fantasy perspective, there isn’t so much a battle for the final rotation spot as the inevitability that injuries to Matt Cain or others will open the door for Chris Heston and conceivably a few promising young pitchers. With that in mind, we take a look at those pitchers vying for the final spot in the Giants’ rebuilt rotation.

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The woods decay and fall. Man comes and tills the fields and lies beneath, and after many a summer dies Abe Vigoda. But…we’re still around! We’ve worked hard this winter, pumping irony. We’ve added five pounds of muscle—well, one of us has; the other has added ten pounds of fat—so we’re in the best shape of our lives. This season, we’re going to run more. We’re also going to walk more. Especially, though, we’re going to sit semicomatose in front of our computer screens more, burning up even more irreplaceable hours than we did last year. Yes, once again, we’re taking our two-man submersible deep into the sunless sea of fantasy-relevant stats, and, as before, when we resurface, we’ll show you our specimens.

We’re the Birchwood Brothers, honest-to-God siblings, aggregate age 124 years, lifelong stat geeks and baseball fans, unregenerate fantasy baseball addicts, and spare-time would-be craftspersons of lapidary prose. Like you, in all probability, we’ve got better things to do than this, but that doesn’t mean we do them. Having attained mediocrity in last year’s National Fantasy Baseball Championship Main Event, we’ve decided to seek new challenges. The Main Event uses a snake draft; this year, we’ll be joining the NFBC Mixed-League auction, where we figure to be even more overmatched. As an aperitif, yesterday we started an NFBC slow-draft league—15 teams, no in-season transactions, as much as 8 hours to make each pick, 50 rounds or Ragnarok, whichever comes first. We’ll also be playing in the Bluefish Blitz league, whose rules have so little in common with anyone else’s that we’ll have to prepare for it all over again. And somewhere, we’re going to find a fourth league that suits us, and if we can’t find one we like, we’ll start our own. Read the rest of this entry »

Through the first half of last season, the A’s ranked 2nd in baseball in starting pitcher’s ERA. They were also tied for 1st in HR allowed per 9 and second in the AL in GB%. Offensively, the A’s were 5th in the AL in runs scored, entering the All-Star break with a +44 run differential. And a -9 win differential. So what happened?

Well, they were terrible defensively. They ranked 29th in Defensive Runs Above Average and UZR and led the AL in unearned runs. With catcher Stephen Vogt rating as 2015’s 8th worst pitch framer, it’s a wonder the rotation fared as well as it did. And the bullpen? Is a -0.1 WAR something you might be interested in? Me neither.  

Out of contention by the trade deadline, Billy Beane traded Scott Kazmir, Ryan Cook, Tyler Clippard, and Eric O’Flaherty. Then in the offseason, he exiled Jesse Chavez to Canada, Evan Scribner to the Mariners, Drew Pomeranz to the Padres, and lost Dan Otero on waivers and Edward Mujica to free agency. Caught all that? 9 pitchers, most of whom started 2015 in the East Bay, gone.

But you know the good news? The A’s never tear it down completely. In rebuilding his pitching staff, Beane assembled an intriguing posse of youngsters and Methuselastic veterans you might not recognize if you were sitting next to one on BART. Your league mates definitely won’t either.

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