I enjoy participating in some early season draft-and-holds because they allow me to dive deep into the player pool before FAAB drafts start. Also, the extra time between picks allows my partners and me to work out our differences before any timed drafts. This past season, my results varied from winning the league to not even being competitive. I’m going to go through my process for dissecting leagues to find any possible future improvements (full drafts at end of the article).

I’m going to focus on the procedure of breaking down a league after the carnage. I know people don’t want to read about my leagues, hell I don’t even care about them as I get ready for 2021 but I need to stop making the same mistakes. Here are the four steps I use to investigate and improve my leagues.
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Introduction

The key to succeeding in fantasy baseball:

Maximize the value of your accumulated roster.

At the start of a draft, each fantasy owner is handed a set of draft picks. Each owner receives a 1^st round selection, a 2^nd round selection, a 3^rd round selection, and so on. If your league chooses to hold an auction rather than a more traditional serpentine draft – each team is handed $260 at the auction start. Players are then purchased throughout the auction with the use of these finite funds.

The key to gainfully drafting is not to draft a 3^rd round player in the 3^rd round, or a 9^th round player in the 9^th round, etc. The key is to draft a 3^rd round player in the 10^th round, and a 9^th round player in the 20^th round.

In an auction, if you purchase every player at his projected value, you will have paid $260 of auction dollars for $260 of value. What you will have is an average team. You won’t finish last, but you won’t finish first. Instead, with your $260 – you need to buy some $290 or $300 or $310+ of total value.

The key is to make a “profit” on as many roster spots as you can. The goal is to purchase players at bargain prices.

I have asked this question before – but it is worth asking every now and again. Suppose that you competed in an NFBC fantasy baseball auction back in July this season.

Which player was the better purchase?

Bryce Harper (OF, PHI)

OR

Andrew McCutchen (OF, PHI)

Before opining on the better Philly outfield purchase of 2020, let’s take a look at their final 2020 stat lines:

On the surface, it seems like a pretty obvious answer. Harper had more HR, SB, R and a better batting average than McCutchen. He had just one fewer RBI.

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The 2021 draft season may be the most unpredictable one … ever. While several rule changes (e.g. NL DH) can cause some evaluation inconsistencies, the biggest monkey wrench to deal with will be the lack of previous season stats. Projection systems will weight the 60-game 2020 season (37% of a normal season) to historical averages but what are those who don’t use traditional projections systems? Or read or listen to people who don’t care for them in order to create a compelling narrative? It’s time to anchor some historical context around those narratives.

All analyses “should” start with at least some set of weights. For those who start with one, they’ll have an advantage. For those who guess the correct one, they’ll have a huge edge. The issue with setting weights is how to create a short season one that fills all the narratives.

First, most of the players were rushed to get game-ready and were not 100% ready when the season started. So the beginning of the season stats could be used to replicate this ramping up period, but the weather was still warm at the season’s end increasing offensive output. Maybe the entire first month should be ignored with everything in flux. Possibly the last two because that were the 2020 regular season months. played. So, I decided to look into all the possible options including a horrible first attempt.
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To say the least, the 2020 fantasy baseball season will go down as a one-of-kind. A late start led to a 60 game sprint. Seven-inning double-headers. Weeks of rescheduled games because of COVID-19 positive tests. The National League DH. Twenty-eight-man rosters in September. Each of these on its own would fill the headlines. With the changes coming all at once, they felt overwhelming. I’m hoping to calm everyone if any and hopefully not all of the changes happen again. Here is some advice on how to handle the changes.

The help divided up into league setting and individual manager focus. While I inserted plenty of my own advice, I wanted to make sure as many people as possible contributed so Tweeted out and asked during my chat for input.
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One issue I’ve had with pick up articles in the past is that so few ever recommend anyone to cut so which is arguably tougher than recommending who to pick. Sure, a player in question should probably be on a roster, but should it be your roster? I have a group of interesting free agents but also a player at each of those positions who you can consider cutting as well.

This article is designed mostly for 10- and 12-team leagues as a lot of these guys aren’t available in 15+ teamers and the recommended cuts are likely worth giving a bit more time to in deeper formats as well. I’m using ESPN’s roster rate for guidance.

Here are the picks for volume 3:

Available Under 40% | Cuttable at 60%+

• C Pedro Severino – 30% | Mitch Garver – 77% (the cut recommendations at this position are for 1-C formats)

I’m still trying to come to terms with the fact that the Orioles offense is 2nd in wRC+, but in the meantime I’m considering Severino a pickup. He had a mini breakthrough last year with 13 HR and 3 SB in 341 PA with his best work coming against lefties (.273 AVG, 8 HR, 109 wRC+) and he’s amped it up a level this year. Strong work against righties is driving his fast start as he’s hitting .350 with 2 of his 4 HR against them in 40 PA.

I bought in on Garver’s 2019 breakout. Obviously, I didn’t think he’d hit 31 HR per 359 PA, but I saw him remaining a stud hitter as part of that excellent lineup. Instead, he’s off to a nightmarish start with a .167/.280/.238 line that includes just 1 HR and 2 RBI. I’m not completely out on him and of course I’d rather not cut him, but it’s hard to hold a dead weight catcher in 1-C leagues when many viable options sit on the wire. Garver is striking out more, but his swinging strike rate isn’t up much (1 pt to 9%) and his chase rate is actually down 7 points to 13%. He’s swinging and missing more in the zone which is fueling his 36% K rate.

Again, these cut candidates aren’t really “must cuts”, but rather guys who could be let go if you’re offense is really struggling, and you need to cut some of the dead weight.

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As I type this, it’s now July 19, and my 2020 fantasy season auctions and drafts have all officially been completed. That is such a strange sentence to type. I am guessing the majority of you are in the same boat, with some of you auctioning/drafting this week as well. Not only is it hard to be excited about the season, but I still feel like it’s going to be a complete crapshoot between small sample performance randomness and COVID-related injuries and issues galore. Given the smaller sample size, I thought the correct pitching strategy was to discount ratios and buy strikeout rates. That strategy gave me five names to target if executing it.

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There is no argument that if two position players would be guaranteed to produce the exact stats, the one with multi-position eligibility should have more value. The added flexibility would be helpful while drafting or setting lineups. The question of how much value does it add remains unanswered? Todd Zola and I have attempted to answer the question with Todd coming to the conclusion of “adding $3 or $4 to each player in mixed formats, and a couple bucks in single-league formats.” That’s fine in theory but I wanted to see how the market values the flexibility in this short season by matching similar players with and without extra positions. In the end, the results matched up with Todd’s findings.
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I think we all know that this is going to be a truly wacky real and fantasy baseball season. New MLB rules and only 60 games instead of 162 means a chance to adjust our strategies to try to gain an edge. Ratio categories are always volatile, even over a 162 game season, so in just 60 games, there gap between the league leaders and laggards is going to be even wider than usual. And the names of those leaders and laggards could be more surprising than ever before just because randomness and pure luck are going to play a larger role.

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If we do in fact get some sort of 50-ish game season, finding any small edge could be the difference between winning and losing your league. One potential edge is platoons. Let’s take a look at the starting pitching handedness breakdown on the assumed rotations for each division. This assumes they stick to this mega-division plan by combining the East, Central, and West division from both leagues.

We’re also going to grade the pitchers using the FIP from their BAT projection. My arbitrary scale is as such: sub-4.00 is good, 4.01-4.70 is solid, and 4.71+ is bad.

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Note: This article was written in two parts, with the first half being before the draft and the second half after completion.

Prep

Tonight, I’m participating in a 1999 retro with several other industry analysts. The premise is simple: the owner drafts a 5×5 roto team based on the 1999 season’s final player stats. That’s where the simplicity ends.

I knew these drafts were going on but as I was busy with other projects, I hadn’t dived into them. Then Fred Zinkie contacted me to do an idiot check on his valuations for the draft that happened last Wednesday. I’m a fan of using SGP (standings gain points) for my normal evaluations, but none were available for 1999. Instead, I had to break out a copy of The Process and create the player valuations based on the Z-score method. (Z-score looks at how much a player’s real or predicted stats are above or below the league average for the draftable player pool. It takes several passes to get the correct valuations since the final player pool is unknown. The z-score method is helpful when no league history exists.)

After I was done, we noticed two differences. Fred used a modified SGP for the season and was valuing stolen bases a little more. We aren’t sure of the cause, but he gave catcher and middle infield a little more of a bump. I think the difference was from the different stolen base values. Read the rest of this entry »