In fantasy baseball, there are a couple of loopholes owners can abuse and one of my favorites is SP/RP qualified pitchers. These pitchers can be used in either the starting or relief spot and, depending on your league structure, they can be quite valuable. Today, I will be looking at how to use SP/RP qualified pitchers that are going to be used as relief pitchers to start the season.

Basically, they are useful in leagues that have each of the following:

1. Allow daily transactions.
2. Have both SP and RP slots

Here is how to use them.
Read the rest of this entry »

So you’re just about set for your draft. You’ve ranked players. You’ve jotted down some sleepers. You’ve even oh-so-carefully suggested to your significant other that, hey, it might be a good idea to get out of the house for a while this weekend, say, around the hours that just so happen to coincide with the time you’ll be selecting various real players to populate your fake team with the most clever nickname in all the land.

But before you make any final decisions about outfielders, here are a few strategies to consider. Keep in mind that this applies primarily to very deep mixed leagues, or better yet, AL- and NL-only versions with a minimum of five starting outfielders. In other words, when you’re not going to be able to fill out your roster with Ryan Braun, Carlos Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, Josh Hamilton and Matt Holliday, one or two of these ideas may help you do more with less. After all, unlike most other offensive positions where you only start one player (or occasionally two), there’s a little more room to play with when it comes to mapping out your outfield.

Read the rest of this entry »

Directly related to this comment from Mike Podhorzer and his piece on the Cheapest Pitching Staff Possible, I often use a term to describe the process by which a manager reacts, in my estimation, incorrectly to the developments of his or her respective snake draft.  As Mike pointed out, “zigging” when your fellow managers are “zagging” may allow you a degree of competitive advantage, and failure to do so is what I call ‘chasing the draft’, and while it’s hard to avoid sometimes, it frequently requires that you wad up your draft strategy and toss it in the rubbish bin.

Read the rest of this entry »

The FanGraphs in-house league drafted last week, and 60 cans of PBR and Tecate into the Arizona dawn, we were mostly finished. My domination – though assured – will be even sweeter against competition like the FanGraphs staff. Despite the danger of putting the cart before the horse, I’ll call PBR the champagne of beers and crack one open for myself.

Well, maybe. I tend to be a little bipolar with my fantasy teams. It’s either all good or all terrible. Tell me what you think.

12-Team Ottoneu LWTS Points
It’s A Perm
C Geovany Soto $26
C Ryan Doumit $1
Read the rest of this entry »

I have always been tempted to draft as cheap a pitching staff as possible, though I have never used this strategy before in a mock draft or a real one. In an auction, this strategy is simply called the $9 pitching staff. In a snake draft, you would draft all your hitters in rounds 1-14 and then fill out your pitching staff over the remaining 9 rounds. Unfortunately, the $9 pitching staff auction strategy will put you at a severe disadvantage versus your competitors who are all likely spending at least $55 more than you on pitching. However, a straight draft puts teams on a much more even playing field, so although your rotation would likely be worse than the rest of your leaguemates’, the difference would not be as large as it would be in an auction league. So let us use actual average draft position data from CBS Sports leagues to construct a cheap pitching staff.

Read the rest of this entry »

OK, RotoGraphers.  Your Monday morning cup of coffee from this week forward will be accompanied by some sort of discussion revolving around catchers and all the fantasy deliciousness they provide.  Since the season has yet to begin and several of you are still waiting to draft, let’s talk about when is the best time to grab your help behind the dish.  Is it wise to invest a late 2nd/early 3rd round pick on Joe Mauer or is the position deep enough to wait until later?  Fresh cup of java in hand….let’s get to it… Read the rest of this entry »

Commenters in my last post asked how to determine position scarcity in FanGraphs Points leagues, and another reader, Kris, suggested using box plots.  I figured “hey, that’s a good idea for a post.”  So, here is a box plot based on Marcel projected 2011 performances for starters at each hitting position (using the numbers of players per position that Zach used here).

Read the rest of this entry »

Every year, a number of starting pitchers get drafted higher than they should because of their successful performances the year prior. Call me crazy, but I tend to avoid these pitchers. Why? Because the expected cost outweighs the projected output. Instead, I set my sights on pitchers still on the upswing, and even a few coming off disappointing seasons who are likely to bounce back.

Not every pitcher can be Roy Halladay or CC Sabathia, guys who can actually sustain their peaks across multiple years. But that doesn’t stop owners from latching onto a pitcher following a big season, or even an outlier season, hoping that said pitcher has established a new talent level. In most cases, though, the wave has already crested.

This strategy gets tricky because it requires: 1) distinguishing between pitchers still capable of better and those about to take a step back; and 2) accepting that there are simply some pitchers you won’t own come draft day. The five below fall into that category for me this year.

Read the rest of this entry »

While most fantasy owners fall in love with players who broke into the elite a year ago (like Carlos Gonzalez and Andrew McCutchen) or get carried away with unearthing the next didn’t-see-that-coming talent, the best way to find cheap value on draft day is to keep tabs on vets whose fantasy reps took a hit following a down year. Like these three NL leftfielders with power-hitting track records.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is the third part in a published four part series. If you’re interested in reading the Update, click through!

If you haven’t done so, please make sure to read the first two pieces on Fantasy Value Above Replacement from earlier today.

Before we get into the auction conversion, there are a couple notes that need to be addressed.

Weighing Rate Stats – We can all agree that a batter that hits .300 in 600 at-bats is more valuable than one who does it in 400 at-bats, right? We have to take this into account and adjust for AB’s and IP in rate stats. Simply multiple a players normal z-score in the batting average category by their AB total. We’ll call this wBA. Once that is done for every player at that position, you take the z-score of those wBA numbers and you have your final batting average value. You do the same with ERA and WHIP as well, using IP instead of AB. It can actually end up helping some players with poor ERA numbers, because having a 5.00 ERA isn’t as bad if it’s only 150 innings. On the flip side, power hitters who play everyday and have a bad batting average will be penalized even more for it.

Pitcher Adjustment – Because pitchers can only contribute to four stat categories (SP don’t get saves, and it’s always best to disregard RP wins), we need to curb their value. I do this simply by multiplying their FVAAz number by 0.8 to reflect the ⅘ ratio.

Inputs – Please note, and this is a biggie, that this system is only as good as its inputs. If your projections are way off, the rankings might be, too.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, we can take a look at how to convert FVARz into auction values.

Auction Conversion
The auction conversion formula takes into account the number of players on each team, as well as the simple idea that every player taken in an auction has to cost at least a dollar. The conversion formula is below.

[(Team Budget – (1*no. of players per team)) / number of players per team] * (z-score above replacement / average z-score for above-replacement players) +1 = Dollar Value

Note: “Draftable” player are considered to be players who are projected to produce at a level above replacement level.

In our case, a 12-team standard league, it would look something like this:

[(260-(1*23))/23]*(FVARz / average FVARz for above-replacement players) + 1

If you want to make things easier, you can substitute 3.0 for “average FVARz for above-replacement players.” The number varies a bit year-to-year, but it is usually around 3.0. So our final formula is

10.3*(FVARz/3)+1

This formula works because it makes two things clear: The average player should be payed the average amount of money a team can spend on a player, and a replacement level player is worth $1.

A Small Sample Using Marcel
In case you’re having a hard time visualizing this whole process, I have done a small sample of FVARz using the Marcel projections found right here on FanGraphs. The sample is done using a 400 AB minimum, and the positions are done simply based on what Marcel says.

If you want to view the sample, click here and your wish will be granted.

Thanks
While I was the only one doing any direct work on this project, many others helped me out by letting me bounce ideas off them, and other such things. So, let me thank Michael Jong and Joel Goodbody, as well as FanGraphs’ own David Appelman and Eno Sarris.