Archive for Strategy

Earlier this season, in the midst of Davis Martin’s ascent, Fernando Tatis Jr.’s slump, and after more than two months of Cal Raleigh’s big dumper of a follow up season, I wrote an article pointing to an interesting trend. 

Through May this season, hitters were busting more frequently than pitchers relative to their draft cost. More specifically, ADP was less predictive of hitter performance than it was starting pitcher performance. This goes against a premise analysts and casuals alike repeat throughout draft season, that “pitchers are riskier than hitters.” 

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In an attempt to improve what I find most challenging when constructing my fantasy roster, I found a league this season that could help me address those shortcomings, with the hope that it would also inform my approach in future seasons across all formats. This was joining a league with scoring that heavily favored relievers, with increased points for saves and holds, and minus points for blown saves.

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Over a fantasy season, it’s hard to trace results back to the decisions or actions you took that led to that result. We take so many actions from keepers (if your league has them), to the draft, to trades, to FAAB or waiver moves, to lineup decisions, that parsing what mattered and what didn’t can be impossible.

Instead, I find it is more productive to evaluate things the other direction – look at decisions you made or actions you took, determine how they impacted your final results, and then decide if you did something right and repeatable or wrong and avoidable. That is how I started the analysis of my trade for Tarik Skubal. And that’s why I am diving into my bullpen in Ottoneu League 1.

I felt I had a strong team, with a good lineup and a top-tier rotation. I finished 4th. That’s not terrible – we pay out the top four spots and I still get bragging rights over eight managers, many of whom I have competed with for nearly two decades. But it isn’t what I hoped. And the bullpen might be why.

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In my first article for Rotographs, I dug into a premise that always puzzles me at the beginning of the season. What do you do with the seemingly low end starting pitchers who are off to hot starts? 

I noted how sometimes, they can stay hot for the full season, citing Rick Porcello’s Cy Young season in 2016 and more recently, 2025 standouts like Kris Bubic, Shane Smith, and Tyler Mahle. 

I set the parameters for this type of pitcher around a variety of the statistics that fantasy managers look to when determining the staying power of a starting pitcher. 

“We want to find pitchers who are suppressing runs and locating, but who may be considered unsustainable due to underlying metrics, specifically around the GIF making Stuff+ and K-BB%. To capture this, we’ll focus on pitchers with Stuff+ below 100, a Location+ above 100, a K-BB% of 17% or less, and an ERA below 3.00.”

Here was that list as of May 1 this season. 

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The so-called “back of the baseball card” numbers still matter to us. No matter how many new-fangled metrics are concocted, we can’t keep our eye from straying towards the .300 AVG/30 HR/100 RBI hitter. That’s the ideal. It’s how we were trained to think about players.

In this article series, I’ll point out two two starting pitchers and two hitters who I think could fall victim to a bias away from low volume players, depressing their draft day costs for 2027. 

While it’s still too early to tell what their cost will be, I’d argue that given their numbers, paced out to 162 games, make them some of the best players in fantasy, and they’re unlikely to cost what they’re worth. 

Last week, I covered Logan Henderson, who was the second-ranked pitcher on a per-162 basis via the Fangraphs Player Rater this season, slotting in right behind Jacob Misiorowski.

This week, I’ll cover Jeremy Peña. The franchise shortstop for the Houston Astros is still just 28 years old and I think he’s quietly been starting to make good on the first impression he made during the 2022 playoffs.

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Whether you think first of Lenny Kravitz or Yogi Berra, the simple truism used to title this article is a more than just a pithy saying. Sometimes we think a game is out of reach – and it turns out it isn’t. Sometimes we think a series is won – and it’s not. And sometimes you think it’s late September and my fantasy standings are locked in. But are they really?

There is still a lot that can happen even in the last four days of the season.

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For many of us, our fantasy baseball seasons are effectively over. It wasn’t our year. But instead of sulking, something many of us do so well is to immediately turn to draft prep and the next season.

In doing that, part of the process is looking back at the season to see some of the emerging young players and ascertain whether or not their emergence was real and repeatable. One of the classic ways to do this is by looking for comparisons of these young players to established major leaguers to serve as proof of concepts. 

Scouts have done this forever and it has worked in the recent past. Hunter Brown’s association to Justin Verlander foreshadowed the former’s rise to ace status. Many in the industry connected Parker Messick’s arsenal and style of pitching with Hyun Jin Ryu, and Messick has had similar results so far. Chase Burns’ reliance on the fastball and slider was compared to a young Spencer Strider’s prior to the former’s debut, and Burns has been just as good as the vintage version of Strider. 

Over the course of the next few months, I’ll provide a handful of starting potentially instructive comps we can make to help illuminate this growing crop of young starting pitchers.

Part 1: Max Fried & Kade Anderson

Part 2: Sandy Alcantara & Walbert Ureña

Today, I’ll compare Garrett Crochet and Payton Tolle, a comparison I think captures the ceiling case for Tolle to be drafted as a top-15 starting pitcher in drafts in 2027. 

I believe that Tolle in 2026 is having a more polished version of Crochet’s 2024 season with the White Sox, reaching a similar innings level, experimenting with new pitches, and finding lots of success against major league hitters. Read the rest of this entry »

Using Statcast data, we can track which of the four aspects of a hitter’s batting stance moved and by how much across each month of the season. In this piece, I wanted to go a step further with some of the names from part one and layer in bat tracking data and batted ball tendencies to see whether the stance changes translated into a measurable swing change.

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“Billy, we’ve got 38 home runs, 120 RBIs to make up for…”

“Guys, you’re still trying to replace Giambi. I told you we can’t do it. What we might be able to do is recreate him. Recreate him in the aggregate.”

It’s so tempting to head into draft prep season thinking like this. We all have our GM hats on, though we may not all pull it off quite so well. 

We scour over projections, building out potential lineups based on how many of each Roto categories we need to fill to finish near the top of the table. Or we look at certain hitters with disdain when they fall underneath our perceived thresholds when it comes to counting stats.

There’s, of course, a lot more that goes into it. Otherwise, what would we be doing here?

But the so-called “back of the baseball card” numbers still matter to us, it’s how we were trained to think about players.

In this series, I’ll point out two starting pitchers and two hitters who I think could fall victim to a bias away from low volume players, depressing their draft day costs for 2027. 

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Over the course of a 162-game season, many casual fans may be surprised by how much a hitter might adjust their stance and setup. Often, the assumption is that once any athlete reaches the pinnacle of their sport, there is resistance to change, particularly mid-season, and any major mechanical changes are reserved for the off-season. But it turns out hitters are constantly tinkering with parts of their stance, particularly when looking to find some form.

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