We’ve got lots of guys to talk about, so let’s get right to it. Check out the start of last week’s article for an explanation of what we’re doing and how we do it. The pitchers are listed in descending order of likelihood that they’ll do what the stats we’re looking at suggest they’ll do. In other words, we list unlucky guys in ascending order of our pessimism about our optimism, and lucky guys in ascending order of our pessimism about our pessimism.

UNLUCKY STARTING PITCHERS

Kyle Freeland: Hesitant as we are to recommend, and for that matter to draft, Colorado pitchers, we are making an exception for Freeland, whose 2018 was unquestionably the best single season ever by a Rockies pitcher. The only thing that went wrong for him last year was that he was suddenly unable to get left-handed hitters out. Since he’s never had that problem before, we envision that he won’t have it again, at least not this season.

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The Pre-Season Injury Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Injury Update – Reuven gives us the injury updates.

Hitters

• Ronald Acuna Jr.
• Fernando Tatis Jr.
• Evan White
• Julio Rodriguez
• Brandon Belt
• Adley Rutschman
• Odubel Herrera
• Andrew Vaughn
• Luis Urias
• Chris Taylor
• Cavan Biggio
• Greg Bird
• Carter Kieboom
  • Maikel Franco
• Evan Longoria
  • Wilmer Flores
• Nick Ahmed
  • Josh Rojas
• Yermin Mercedes
• Dominic Smith
  • Mets lineup & defensive allignment

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For the first time in my fantasy baseball career, I think I’m going to employ the pocket aces strategy. You can learn more about the strategy by reading Mike Carter’s synopsis on SP Streamer. The idea, however, is simple; take two starting pitchers with your first two picks. In my home league (10-team, 5×5, ESPN, Roto) I’ve been given the 10 spot to draft in a snake draft format. I’ve never employed this strategy because, like many others, the volatility of pitching scares me. The injury risk scares me. I usually want good hitters who steal bases early. But this year I’m going to try something new. Plus, I’m fairly certain I’ll be able to get Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom. Remember what I said about injury risk? I’m throwing caution to the wind. If something changes and my league drafts differently than I expect, my strategy may change. But, one look at the visual below makes me want to get two pitchers with my first two picks.

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The Mock Draft Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Chris Welsh

Tout Wars Head to Head Recap

Strategy Section

• General Draft Strategy
  • Push up saves/steals/starters? What is the right time to roster them?
• KDS Selection for 2022
• What is the best time to reach for your “favorites,” “targets” or “upside players?
• Should you draft prospects in redraft leagues?

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The last two weeks, I had two auctions with the same problem – a player (or players) I wanted going for way more than I anticipated – but ended with very different results. In both cases, how I prepped for the auction played a big role in how I reacted to the market, adjusted, and eventually built teams I think are ready for the season.

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Now it’s time for a Birchwood Brothers tradition: identifying players who, their stats suggest, have either been lucky, and thus ought to be eschewed, or unlucky, and thus ought to be swallowed. We are no-trade-league guys. Some years ago, though, we were sucked into the black hole of a league that not only permitted but virtually demanded trading, and were fortunate to survive our resulting passage through the fabric of space-time. In that league, we were offered a mid-season trade for a pitcher that looked pretty good on its surface. But we wondered whether this guy’s success was significantly a function of his good fortune, and came up with a down-and-dirty way of finding out. It worked in that particular case—the guy had been lucky, but not long after we turned the trade down, both his luck and his pitching went bad. And the following preseason, we tried the same thing with the previous year’s full-season stats, and in the fullness of time found that it worked pretty well there too.

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The Ottoneu Prestige League is back and whether you participated last year or not, I highly recommend you play this year if your team is eligible. For those of you who have joined, or intend to join, it is time to start thinking about who you are going to target for your OPL team.

Last year, I dug into roster construction for OPL, and I am using that same analysis as my guide for OPL this year, but what about specific types of players and names?

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The Spring Training Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Matt Williams

Injury Guru’s Trivia of the Week

Strategy Section

• What can we learn from this year’s Spring training?
  • How will 2022 be different?
• How will the start of the 2022 season differ from a typical season?
• Using middle relievers in fantasy baseball early on in the 2022 season.
• The return of 9-inning doubleheaders.
• Fantasy leagues – Drafting in 2022
  • Should we push off drafting our 2022 fantasy teams until after the season starts?
  • Drafting early in the morning.

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The Expert League Recap Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Matt Williams

LABR Reacap

• Overall thoughts
• Closer strategy
• When to drop out of bidding wars
  • How much is too much to pay?
  • The economincs of waiting to nominate desired players in the auction
• Nomination strategy
  • Nominate players that you want to buy or players that you don’t?
• Franmil Reyes
• Catcher strategy
• Draft regrets

TGFBI Recap

• Noticeable trends
• Grabbing players earlier than ADP
  • Akil Baddoo
• Big decisions

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Quick: Has Abraham Almonte caught on with a Major League team, and if so which one? No peeking. (If your counter-question is “who’s Abraham Almonte?”, then you have our permission to peek, but we like to think we know our readers, and we like to think that, for our readers, “Abraham Almonte” is as familiar a name as Mike Trout or Volodymyr Zelenskyy.)

The answer to our question, happily for all of us Abraham Almonte fans (which we actually are, for an assortment of reasons), is that he’s a non-roster invitee of the Milwaukee Brewers. This is, frankly, not a comfortable spot for him to have landed in, since the Brewers are so deep in organizational-depth outfielders that he may have trouble making even the AAA roster. But if the Brewers jettison him, we figure another team will pick him up, and that—just as the Braves did last season—New Team X will find a way to use him in the majors.

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