The Starting Pitcher (Part II) Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Nick Pollack

Strategy Section

• Lockout
  • How it affects starting pitcher strategy in 2022 drafts
  • The importance of spring training
• Starting pitcher strategy
  • General – Auction vs. Snake Draft
  • Riskiness in the elite starting pitchers this season
• Sandy Alcantara debate

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The Starting Pitcher (Part I) Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Alex Chamberlain

Alex’s pitch tool

• Comparing players with similar pitches
• Finding undervalued players

Strategy Section

• Pitchers most likely to throw 200 innings in 2022
• Starting pitcher strategy
  • General – Auction vs. Snake Draft
  • Riskiness in the elite starting pitchers this season
  • Two 1As vs. an ace strategy for 2022
• Effect of the Universal DH
  • Pick the AL pitcher over the NL pitcher?
  • Draft a pitcher in a particular division?
• Undervalued prospects & sleeper pitchers
  • Peyton Battenfield
  • Patrick Sandoval

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Let’s return without delay to the task at hand, which we began last week: our attempt to identify at least one lightly-regarded (cheap or reserve-round) player who might do something this season, assuming with unwarranted optimism that there’s a “this season” that isn’t next season. This week, we’ll look at the AL West and the NL East. The numbers in parentheses are NFBC Average Draft Positions for all drafts.

Angels: As we mentioned in our first article of the year, we like Michael Stefanic (not taken), who could be in the lineup if either something ill befalls David Fletcher or the team doesn’t sign a free-agent shortstop. He’ll hit .270, possibly with a bit of power. And we are struggling to overcome our repeated disappointments in Justin Upton (586) over the years. It’s not clear that he’s got a significant role on this team, but we can imagine him getting the same 250 or so PAs he got last year before he got hurt, and hitting about the same (14 HR, .247) minus some age-related decline, which makes him worth getting at ADP 586.

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The latest episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Brian Bannister – Director of Pitching, San Francisco Giants (& former major league player with NYM/KCR)

Interview

• Highlight of career
  • Coaching highlight
  • Major league pitching highlight
  • Mets highlight
• Injury Guru’s Trivia of the Week
• Impact on college team
• Analytics
  • Some of the current analytics being used
  • Having a hunch and then researching it when the analytics tools are available
  • Impact on current team
  • Using all of the tools at your disposal
  • Studying the outliers & great players to find success for current players
  • Organizations differ in analytics use
  • What are some analytics used by teams that aren’t available publically?
  • VAA, Seam Shifted Wake, etc.
  • Learning from the uniqueness of players
  • Using analytics to play to a player’s strengths vs. exploiting an opponent’s weaknesses

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2/20/22

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live. Support the show by subscribing to our Patreon!!

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• @justinmasonfwfb – Host/Producer
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The Outfield Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Jeff Erickson

Strategy Section

• Playing in multiple leagues
  • How does the draft preparation differ between leagues?
  • Knowing the market of each individual league and creating specific game plans.
  • Does strategy alter by playing in multiple leagues?
    • To what extent should you diversify the players taken in each league?
  • Keeping track of multiple leagues in season
  • Waiver wire in season
    • Start with the shallow leagues
    • Using information from leagues with an earlier FAAB time slot for leagues with later ones
  • How to prioritze leagues in late summer
    • Learning from leagues that are lost
• The impact of the current lockout on drafting
  • Closer prices
  • FAAB early season
  • Mono leagues
    • Actuarial goodness for Ariel

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True story, or at least a story that was presented to us as true: A movie is shooting on location near where one of us lives, and a call goes out for extras to be in the crowd scenes. Except they’re not called extras nowadays; they’re “background talent.” And a guy we know, an aspiring actor, signs up. And the time comes to shoot a scene with a crowd in the background and the stars in the foreground, and our guy is there in costume, jostling with the other aspiring actors to be in the front of the crowd. The crew is setting up the cameras and lighting for the scene, using stand-ins to calibrate things, when there’s some sort of contretemps, and one of the stand-ins stops standing and walks away. The director, or whoever’s running the shoot, looks around, sees our guy, and notices he’s of about the same size and shape, and wearing about the same costume, as the stand-in. So he beckons to our guy, who winds up standing in for the stand-in, and whose reward is to be front and center in the crowd scene, in which position the camera dwells on him for, oh, half a second. And now, our guy’s forever enshrined in whatever the digital equivalent of celluloid is.

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The Closer Rebuttal for 2022 Drafts Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Strategy Section

• Closer rebuttal for 2022 drafts
  • Historical earnings for top closers
  • Early closers may bake in a certain value loss
  • Low historical hit rates for closers
  • Drafting top closers means passing up on valuable players
  • Drafting a starting pitcher instead of a top closer – one less starter to find on the waiver wire
  • Too much uncertainty in bullpens
  • Too much draft capital invested in a one-category player
  • Use a combination of absolute value and relative value

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The Auction Strategy Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Glenn Colton

Strategy Section

• Auction Strategy
  • Online auctions vs. live auctions
  • Having a partner in an auction
  • Auction preparation vs. snake draft preparation
  • Scouting prior to an auction
  • Constructing auction values
  • How strict should you be to your values?
    • When should you bid over your values?
  • Hitter vs. Pitcher % split in auctions
  • Closer market premiums in 2022
  • Auction values for unsigned free agents in mono leagues
    • Playing in multiple leagues – hedging bets
  • Constructing market value dollars
    • Converting ADP to dollars
  • Constructing an auction plan
    • Finding the hotspots
• Nomination Strategy
  • Nominating players you want vs. players you don’t want
    • Pacing yourself through the auction
  • Plan A / Plan B nomination
  • Economic Box nomination
  • Blocking a position nomination
• Bidding Tactics
  • Freeze bidding
  • Starting bids for players
  • Incremental bidding vs. jump bidding
  • Bidding on the 9’s, bidding on the 0’s
  • Price enforcing

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We were going to write about how all the various statistical projection systems that people, including us, use (or, in most cases, including ours, borrow) to project statistics produce pretty much the same result, in terms of suggested draft position or dollar value, because by definition all projection systems base their projections on what the player being projected has done in the past, and everyone has access to the same statistics from seasons past. And then we were going to note that the most important thing about any given projection by any given projector is playing time, so that the projections for established players who are likely to keep their jobs throughout the season are pretty similar, whereas the projections for non-established players vary more widely. And then we were going to explain that we don’t have much to say about established players that other fantasy writers don’t say, and in fact we probably have less to say, because by and large they’ve looked at at least as much data as we have, and often more. And we were going to explain further how our thing isn’t to project our own performance stats but rather to project playing time, in the belief that, as Bill James, the Odin of Sabermetrics, and many others have said, if you get the playing time right, most of the time you’ll get the projection right.

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