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

Guest: Nick Pollack

ATC Undervalued Players

• Starting Pitchers
  • Framber Valdez
    • Board bet !
  • Tyler Glasnow
  • Logan Webb
  • Zach Eflin
  • Tanner Bibee
  • Justin Steele
  • Bryan Woo
  • Drew Rasmussen
  • Reynaldo López
  • Nestor Cortes
  • Ranger Suárez
  • Max Scherzer

Injury Guru’s Trivia of the Week

ATC Overvalued Pitchers

• Jacob deGrom
• Corbin Burnes

Injury Update

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

Guest: Nick Pollack

FSWA Nomination

Strategy Section

• Valuing Pitcher Changes
  • Working on a new pitch
  • Pitch mix
  • Arm angle
  • Relief pitcher turned starter
• Spring training
  • What to look for?
  • Who to look for?
• Starting pitcher strategy
  • Do you emphaisze drafting pitchers with high innings pitched per start?
  • What to do with the Los Angeles Dodgers?
  • Which should you emphasize earlier on in drafts – strikeouts or ratios?

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The Outfield & THE BAT episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Derek Carty

THE BAT Projections

• Projections accuracy contest on FantasyPros
  • What is the best way to test projections accuracy?
• What are the key components of a projection system?
• What is the difference between THE BAT & THE BAT X?
• THE BAT methodolgy
  • Details on weighting of years
  • Runs & RBI
  • Stolen bases
  • Accounting for park factors for new stadium dimensions

Strategy Section

• Positional Eligibilty
  • Which is more valuable for 2025 – 2B, 3B or OF?
  • The value of multi-position eligible players
• Outfield strategy
  • Player pool
  • Should you draft an elite outfielder?
  • Are there certain statistics that you should acquire from your outfielders?

ATC Undervalued Players

• Outfielders
  • Anthony Santander
  • Taylor Ward
  • Nick Castellanos
  • Lourdes Gurriel Jr.
  • Lane Thomas
  • George Springer
  • Cedric Mullins
  • Matt Wallner
    • Board bet !

Injury Update

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

Guest: Mike Gianella

Strategy Section

• 3rd & 4th Rounds
  • Should you continue to avoid [downside] risk in the 3rd and 4th rounds?
  • Is it too early to take a closer in rounds 3 & 4?
•  When should you shift your emphasis from being risk averse to risk indifferent to risk seeking?
  • Health Risk vs. Performance Risk vs. Playing Time Risk
• How to handle position runs mid-draft?
  • Are position runs a factor in pre-draft KDS selections?
• Middle Infield strategy
  • Player pool
  • Which position gets a bigger replacement level / positional scarcity bump – 2B, SS or 3B?

ATC Undervalued Players

• Middle Infielders
  • Luis Arraez 1B/2B
  • Luis Garcia 2B
  • Xavier Edwards SS
  • Jeremy Pena SS
  • Zach Neto SS
  • Bryson Stott 2B
  • Gleyber Torres 2B
  • Tyler Fitzgerald 2B*/SS
  • Brendan Donovan 2B/OF

Injury Update

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

Guest: Frank Stampfl

Strategy Section

• 1st & 2nd Rounds
  • What should you accomplish in the 1st two rounds?
  • Do you need to draft a starting pitcher in the first few rounds of drafts?
  • Overvalued players
    • Should you draft catchers in the first two rounds?
    • Ohtani at 1.1 ?
  • Undervalued players
    • Freddie Freeman’s consistency
  • Players drafted outside the first two rounds, but should be drafted earlier.
  • The Top 3
    • Why Elly De La Cruz should and shouldn’t be considered to be drafted just outside the top 3.
• The ATC Volatility Metrics
• Corner Infield strategy
  • Player pool

ATC Undervalued Players

• Corner Infielders
  • • Vinnie Pasquantino 1B
    • Alec Bohm 3B
    • Yandy Díaz 1B
    • Luis Rengifo 2B/3B
    • Nolan Arenado 3B
    • Andrew Vaughn 1B
    • Michael Busch 1B
    • Ryan McMahon 3B

Injury Update

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

Guest: Erik Halterman

Strategy Section

• Snake Drafts
  • How to generally prepare
  • How has preparation changed over the past five years?
  • Drafting “naked”
  • Drafting early in the season (January) vs. drafting late in the season (March)
  • Create a do not draft list?
  • Draft risky pitchers?
  • Proactive vs. Relative approach
    • ADP Chicken
  • How to use ADP
  • How to handle risk?
    • In the aggregate
    • Per player
      • Risk-adjusted pricing
    • Power drafters (playing in multiple leagues)
    • Binary risks
      • Free agents in mono leagues
• Catcher strategy
  • Player pool
  • The value of catchers
    • Catcher bump

ATC Undervalued Players

• Catchers
  • • Salvador Perez
      • Is Perez worthy of the Hall of Fame?
    • Logan O’Hoppe
    • Gabriel Moreno
    • Austin Wells
    • Luis Campusano

Mailbag

Injury Update

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The Auction Strategy (Part 2) episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Marc Winokur

Auction Strategy Section

• Hitter vs. Pitcher split
  • For valuations
  • For allocations
• Money management in an auction
• In-draft inflation
  • Calculate or feel it?
  • Keeper league inflation
• Endgame
  • How many $1 players should you look to acquire?
  • Is it good to have the hammer?
• Nominations
  • Multi-round plan
  • Nominations are very important
  • Tips
• Bidding
  • Timing, frequency & speed
  • NFBC’s Max Bid button
• Scouting players

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The Auction Strategy (Part 1) episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Marc Winokur

Auction Strategy Section

• Differences between auctions and snake drafts
  • Benefits of auctions
  • Difference in preparation
• Advice for new auction players
• The most important items to keep track of during an auction
• Working with a partner
• How online auctions differ from in-person auctions
• How to construct market values
  • What to do for non-standard formats
• How to construct player values
• How to construct strike prices for buying players

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Reader beware:

A human wrote this article. Some humans’ caffeine levels can fluctuate in predictable patterns and correlate strongly with “time of day” data points. Yet, there’s no telling how many milligrams were present in the author’s typing fingers at the various stages of writing this article. It was an iterative process that took the author much longer than he had originally expected. While a human wrote this article, a machine wrote and generated many sections, namely ChatGPT’s “gpt-4o” model. From here on out, anything written or output by the very friendly and human-helping artificial intelligence (be careful…they’re listening…) will be italicized.

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Arbitrary (ar·bi·trar·y)

1. based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system.

My Ottoneu arbitration strategies have varied over the past few years. I’ve been overly analytical, downloading .csv after .csv, splicing and merging and concatenating until there was more data than I cared to actually do anything with. I wrote last year about measuring salaries against the average and tipping the scales on already overpriced players. Sometimes it can be more fun to simply add a few dollars where it feels right. That’s what I did this year. Here are a few notes and thoughts I recorded as I dished out my dollars Read the rest of this entry »