I’m going to focus on position battles until the season starts and possibly into the season. Most of the early season breakouts happen because of additional playing time.

Pirates Third Base

Jung Ho Kang vs Colin Moran

Other analysts and I probably didn’t give Kang enough love but he’s coming out firing with an OPS twice that of Moran. The 31-year-old Kang had a couple of acceptable seasons with double-digit home runs and an OBP near .350. He didn’t play any last season because of a DUI in South Korea and wasn’t able to obtain a visa. He seems to have not missed a beat.

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A few years ago I posted an article about designing fantasy league incentives.  While the popularity of customized, add-on incentives is hard to measure across the fantasy community, it’s clear that leagues conceptually understand the potential value of features and rewards that attempt to keep owners engaged over the course of a long baseball season.  In the standard winner-takes-all format of many points leagues, commissioners are often left to mitigate the wreckage of AWOL owners that sell off and check out early, so carrots, even small ones, can help in cross-checking drastic, standings-shaking transactions if designed thoughtfully. But designing the right league incentives is easier said than done because owners are motivated by different values.

The purpose of this article is for you, the reader, to help me design the right incentive structure for the very first 20 team Ottoneu league (more on this soon), an exciting experiment that will dramatically alter the traditional economic model that serves as the foundation of standard 12 team Ottoneu leagues. Your feedback will be critical to building a league that lasts, but the discussion will hopefully be a helpful reference for others attempting to structure leagues that are as engaging as possible.

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If two outfielders are projected for identical stats but one is also qualified at first base, the one with multi-positional eligibility will have additional value. The player gives an owner more flexibility during the draft or auction, allows the owner to maximize at-bats or games played during the season, increasing roster flexibility by having more bench spots to use for pitching, and owners can focus on talent versus position with waiver wire acquisitions. The question being posed today, how much is this extra flexibility worth?

It’s not a simple answer. Over the next few days, various RotoGraph authors, including myself, will provide our takes. Will we come to a solid answer? Probably not or an analyst would have figured it out and the adjustment would already be universally incorporated. We just want to put our best foot forward.

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3/6/19

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is brought to you by Out of the Park Baseball 20, the best baseball strategy game ever made – PRE-ORDERS AVAILABLE NOW on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms for the March 22nd release! Go to ootpdevelopments.com to order now and save 10% with the code SLEEPER20!

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• @sporer – Host
• @pitcherlist – Co-Host

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Strategy: Nick discusses how he builds and manages a pitching staff in shallow and deep roto leagues as well as H2H leagues.

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Allow me to break the fourth wall (more than I normally break the fourth well) and say I’m glad a few of you have enjoyed my recent (mock) draft recaps, especially the format of them. It can be tough to make that kind of content both interesting and informative, so I’m glad it has achieved at least the minimum thresholds in both regards.

(Mock Draft Review: RotoBaller Friends and Family Draft)
(Draft Review: The Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational)

I was fortunate enough for the National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC) to sponsor a “Beat Alex Chamberlain” high-stakes league. It was my first time competing in this specific contest: the $350 Rotowire Online Championship. With that kind of buy-in, I knew I would likely face some sharp competition despite having no prior exposure to any of the other owners.

The league specifications are as follows:

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The Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational (TGFBI) is a league of leagues in which hundreds of fantasy baseball analysts square off against one another in 15-team leagues and overall. Three hundred and fifteen competitors will face off in 21 separate leagues to test their wits and all that jazz.

I wrote about my performance last year here. After bottoming out in April, finishing the month 12th of 15 with only 63.5 points, I had the 3rd-best team from May onward, finishing the season 4th in my league and 51st overall out of 195 analysts. Of the $900 or so I spent on free agent auction budget (FAAB), roughly half was spent on chasing saves — of which I accrued only 22. It was a preposterously bad performance in that regard. Only one other team above me in the overall standings collected fewer saves, and maybe three others had fewer than 40. Otherwise, everyone had 60 or more. It stands to reason a sharper FAAB performance could have vaulted me up the standings.

This year, I’m running down my picks as they happen, almost like a diary, although I won’t publish this until the draft is complete. Still, you can track my train of thought as if it were real time.

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A few days back, I determined the replacement levels for hitters who will miss some time this upcoming season. Today, the pitchers take center stage.

It’s tough to give any pitcher a full season of innings with almost half of them heading to the IL. Today’s focus is to find those pitchers who won’t see a full workload for one reason or another. Workload limits. Injuries. Time in minors. Since the missed time is known, an owner can the fill in the rest of the season with a replacement pitcher. It’s time to dive in.

Injured or coming off Tommy Surgery

Note: The standard minimum return time from Tommy John surgery is now 14 months. No one in years has come back in 12. I’m skipping any pitcher who had a mid-season or later surgery since they may just be back for a few September starts. I’m not going to worry about September starts in Spring Training.

Brandon Morrow
Out until: ~May 1st

While it may be a mistake, I’m fading Morrow hard. He’s an injury-prone pitcher who is starting the season hurt. And for a closer, he’s good (~2.00 ERA the past three seasons) but not great (9.1 K/9 in 2018). I could see Pedro Stroop take the job and run with it over the first month. When Morrow returns, he may never get another Save. He’s a late round DL stash for now.

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For the fourth consecutive year, my friends at RotoBaller invited me to participate in the RotoBaller Friends and Family mock draft. The draft room was, in a word, terrifying:

1. Vlad Sedler, Guru Elite
2. Nick Mariano, RotoBaller
3. Pierre Camus, RotoBaller
4. Todd Zola, Mastersball
5. Tim Heaney, RotoWire
6. Heath Cummings, CBS Sports
7. Howard Bender, Fantasy Alarm
8. Nando Di Fino, The Athletic
9. Scott Engel, RotoExperts
10. Alex Chamberlain, RotoGraphs
11. Ray Flowers, Guru Elite
12. Real Talk Raph, RotoBaller

I drew the #10 pick (as shown in the draft order above), immediately understanding I might have a difficult decision to make very early in the draft.

This doesn’t need much preamble, but I do want to say one thing: I maintain that a good way to improve as a drafter (for lack of a better word) is to try something you might not ordinarily try or force yourself into an uncomfortable position you might not normally get into. I embraced this discomfort with my first two picks, assembling a base from building blocks I might not normally use given the options available to me. As you’ll see in my concluding remarks, I think I did pretty well.

Also: we were all on a 30-second clock. I don’t know about everyone else, but I was stressed. My internal monologue was utter chaos.

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2/13/19

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is brought to you by Out of the Park Baseball 19, the best baseball strategy game ever made – available NOW on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms! Go to ootpdevelopments.com to order now and save 10% with the code SLEEPER19!

Follow us on Twitter

• @sporer – Host/Producer
• @jasoncollette – Co-Host

GET THE GLOB T-SHIRT FROM ROTOWEAR!

GET THE SLEEPER & THE BUST T-SHIRT FROM ROTOWEAR!

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You should buy an ace.

The fantasy landscape has changed dramatically over the past few years. Just a half decade ago, a mid-$20s bid at a mixed league auction would buy you a top pitcher. $30 was unheard of … for any pitcher. A non-hitter in the first round was blasphemous. Pitching was thought of to be too volatile, and far too risky to roster at such a considerable cost.

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