This past weekend I was again honored to be asked to participate in the 15-team Tout Wars auction held bright and early on Saturday morning at Staten Island’s Richmond County Ballpark. After a short ferry ride, I caught up with old friends and then auction began. Like last year, it rolled at a fast pace and ended in about four hours later. While my final team’s roster doesn’t resemble any team I’ve previously rostered, it has a nice chance to compete.

Prep

The biggest decision I made when constructing this team happened months ago when I looked back at my 2017 fantasy teams and found my pitching way outperforming my hitting.

To help offset this final imbalance, I decided to go with a 70%/30% hitter/pitcher split. Over the past few seasons, this league’s split has been 67.8%/32.2%. The difference works out to a $6 difference. I am not married to reaching this exact mix at the auction but it gives me a general guideline to follow. It had a side effect I didn’t fully understand but the anomaly ended up driving my auction.

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This means we’re actually getting close to official baseball, right? It’s bold prediction season and you know the drill (with an Ottoneu context), so let’s get started.

1. Freddie Freeman achieves 8.0 WAR

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The death of the incomparable Stephen Hawking inspires us to reach for analogies from physics, even though we know even less about the subject than we do about, say, restoring antiques or Masters curling. Bear with us for another two paragraphs and we’ll get to the stuff you’re here for.

Thus: It seems to us that baseball stats can be divided and subdivided into particles. Blender stats like WAR, Win Shares, and our new Fangraphs colleague Jay Jaffe’s JAWS can be seen as molecules. In the right hands, these numbers are interesting and illuminating. But they are useless for our present purpose, which is to identify players who might do better than the Fantasy market expects them to.

These molecules are made up of atoms: the often-Fantasy-relevant outcome stats (ERA, Batting Average, and so on) that comprise the statistical lingua franca of baseball, known and (usually) acknowledged as meaningful by both stat geeks and non-geek fans. Hadrons, in this scheme, are the kinds of stats that reflect the things that most immediately produce the on-field events on which the outcome stats depend: hard-hit balls, “zone swings,” fly-ball distance, and so on. And at the quark level you find the stats that make up the hadrons, and that nobody could even measure until recently: barrels, tunnels, spin rate, things that we’ve probably never heard of.

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With ottoneu auctions in full swing, and just over two weeks before the season begins, I wanted to take a look at how I plan out my rosters both before/during an auction and heading into the season. I use a mix of the typical ottoneu auction results and the number of players I feel put me in the best position to meet games and innings caps in my “rubric”. Without further ado, here’s my breakdown:

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Luis Castillo is one of the most exciting pitchers in this year’s pool. His 89-inning debut has vaulted him firmly into the top 100 picks and top 30 starters. Our good friends over at PitcherList.com have him slotted 20th on their board. I love Castillo, but are we being a little overzealous with the 25-year old righty?

There haven’t been a lot of guys putting up a 3.12 ERA/1.07 WHIP combo with an 18% K-BB rate in 90ish innings during their rookie season so finding comps wasn’t easy, but I came up with some thresholds and we’re going to look at what they did in their second season. It doesn’t necessarily mean we will figure out what Castillo is going to do by looking at these guys, but we will have some reference points and we’ll highlight one of most commonly used comps to zero on some potential results.

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The LABR only league auctions are a fantastic way to start off the fantasy season (AL and NL results). I’m co-captaining one of the AL-only teams with Eno Sarris who is making one last attempt for a championship. Here are some takeaways from the weekend.

For a quick rundown of the rules.

• 12 teams
• 23 players, 9 pitchers, 14 hitters (two catchers)
• 5×5 roto with AVG
• $260 budget

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3/1/18

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!

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

Follow The Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational info here!

Logo designed discussed in the show can be found here: 78_AllStar

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Yesterday, I put together my All Sleeper Team, identifying a group of players being drafted outside the Top 200 who could greatly exceed that draft day cost. While those guys are outright recommendations by me, today’s group is a bit different. We’re looking at the All Bum Team, a group of players with quality track records and high draft status in 2017 who ended up being terrible.

The idea is that these guys could reasonably bounce back, especially with health as most were injury flameouts, and the price to see if they will is worth taking a shot. This is more of a cost v. upside situation as opposed to me standing firmly behind them as investments. I’m not trying to hedge or anything, just stating the difference between yesterday’s and this piece. If you believed in these guys last year, then you should probably double down in ’18 because the price has tanked. I will be clear about the ones I’m most interested in buying with the write-up.

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In a few days, the Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational will begin drafting. The invitational is the combination of 13 different 15-team leagues full of the industry’s best and brightest (and Howard Bender). We’ve been given our draft positions and I got the third pick. After Arizona installed the humidor and dinged Goldschmidt’s value, the pick has no easy options. Instead of focusing on the first-round pick, I’m going to dive into my second and third round options to hopefully make a better choice with the first one.

With any draft or auction in which my draft pick is known, I plan my first two to three picks. Beyond that point, the variables increase, plan is out the window, and owners need to target values and needs.

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Jason mentioned this idea on Sunday’s pod so I went ahead and put it together. It’s a list of all the players on 40-man rosters who are out of options and thus could have the inside track on roster spots if they’re directly competing with someone who does have an option left. He mentioned that he uses this info to identify some options for AL/NL Only leagues where playing time is king. Hat tip to Justin for the title of this piece!

I didn’t pick and choose who to mention so you’ll see some guys who are obviously not in grave danger of even being sent down at any point. Instead, I’m just listing all the 40-man players with a “0” in the options column on Roster Resource. These guys could be dealt to or picked up by teams where their playing time gets a boost.

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