When I hear or read about a hitter playing through an injury my interest perks up and he becomes an immediate draft target. Standard projections have no idea these players played hurt and the lower production keeps down future estimations. Savvy owners can give these players a small talent bump and reap some nice rewards. My current request to create a detailed list of hitters playing through injuries for 2019 preseason research and to test after next season.

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Royals phenom Adalberto Mondesi is going to be a hot topic this winter. By ripping off 32 steals in 291 plate appearances while also popping 14 home runs, Mondesi won quite a few fantasy championships. The hype may have crested yesterday when he was selected 28th overall in the very first NFBC draft of the 2019 season.

I’m going to do something novel (lazy) and just kind of assume we’re all on the same page about who Mondesi is as a player. This isn’t an analysis of his skills. I’ve done been there, done that elsewhere. As a hitter, he compares to one of the top fantasy assets in the league. This same comparable player was a massive resource suck for many years before finally breaking out.

Could Mondesi skip the painful growth seasons?

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In the #2earlymock drafts run by our own Justin Mason, Javier Baez is going 17th and Trevor Story is going 20th among all hitters. The picks are quite high considering Baez was the 58th hitter taken, and Story was 65th in NFBC drafts last year. The pair didn’t have must-draft preseason hype and their suspect plate discipline limited their perceived value. Both exceeded all expectations as they came in at 6th and 7th overall this year. This was a huge miss by the industry and I’m going to see if some traits point to why some low plate discipline players break out and others don’t.

For every Baez and Story, other bad plate discipline hitters failed like Byron Buxton (.383 OPS), Chris Davis (.539 OPS), Miguel Sano (.679 OPS) and Jonathan Schoop (.682 OPS). No obvious difference stood out. While Chris Davis is old, Buxton, Sano, and Schoop should be in their primes. To find out who may break out, I decided to start with the 2018 Bad Plate Discipline Class.

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Today, I start the process examining who the industry, owners, and myself missed on with their preseason evaluations. Did a smoking gun exist and everyone missed it or was there no way to guess the outcome?  I’m going to start with two pitchers who had smoking guns, I wrote about the smoking guns, and then I totally ignored them.

The two starters are Gerrit Cole and Anibal Sanchez. Back in February, I highlighted both in a pitch mix change article. Looking back, I made a convincing case for taking a chance on either one. I spent a few hours doing the research and when it came to draft day, I never picked up a share. I failed as both overperformed.

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Every fantasy owner should sit down in the next week or so and reflect on what went right and wrong in their leagues. More than reflecting, they need to take a few notes on the journey to help themselves improve next season.

The process doesn’t need to take a while but an owner should at least get a couple points, good and bad, on each league. It’s time for a little humility because some owners need to continue to take positive small steps forward. The rest of us need to start catching up. Hopefully, the following will nudge a few owners to take some notes before going into offseason mode.

Reviewing My Leagues

Overall, my season was a huge disappoint and I knew it was going to be a rough finish a couple months into the season. I made so many preseason and early season mistakes, I could never recover. Here are my leagues in order of finish.

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As your fantasy team marches into the playoffs, weekly matchups and playing time considerations become more important. Players fighting for playing time or battling nagging injuries can hurt you chances of taking home a title if they are giving you nothing or only playing three times per week. Especially leagues with weekly lineup locks.

While some players are easy to let go, the pedigree and past performance of others can make fantasy owners hesitant to cut or bench players of a certain caliber, but given the time of year, here are some top-150 players that you might consider cutting or benching to give you the best shot at winning in 2018.

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Last September, Jeff and I spent last September highlighting daily starters you could consider picking up for your playoffs and roto stretch run. We’ll be doing the same again this year starting with tomorrow’s super-lite 4-game slate.

(I’ll be citing the FantasyPros roster rates)

Luis Castillo – CIN v. SD (49%)

Castillo entered July with a 5.85 ERA, but has since put together a 10-start run of 3.23 ERA and 1.06 WHIP in 55.7 IP with a 26% K rate and 4% BB rate. Two 5 ER duds during the run push the ERA a bit, but he bounced back strong from each one. The Arizona one was kinda weird, too, because he bookended four perfect innings with the five runs in an inning and two-thirds.

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In my last article, I contemplated if fantasy owners care too much about who to add and not enough on who to drop. I’m going run an experiment over last few weeks of this season to see what can be extracted from league drop trends.

For reference, I’m going to analyze the 34 leagues in the NFBC Main Event. These are 15-team mixed leagues using batting average and no trading. With each team putting $3K on the line, more of these owners haven’t thrown in the towel than in most leagues.

This first week, I went through the 30 most dropped players. The reasons behind the most dropped players were obvious, mainly they were hurt, lost a role, or demoted. Next week, I may concentrate on the players dropped between 5 and ten leagues. These players aren’t the most obvious drops and analyzing them may be the most helpful.

Name: Number of teams who dropped him (of 31)

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Since I’ve started this tracking the NFBC Main Event FAAB bids, I’ve gained some insight on how the owners spend their money. A few nuggets I’ve found is the high prices paid by owners chasing Saves and the money hoarding that happens right before the trade deadline. This week, it’s time to see the money spent on impact rookies with the promotion of Michael Kopech.

I expected a fairly bland week with prospect call-ups starting next week. After September 1st, any player on the 40-man roster can be called up and the time in the majors doesn’t count for their service clock. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Eloy Jimenez are the two big names who owners have been waiting on.

Without getting too far ahead, here is a look at how last week’s newly adjusted projections performed.

The results from my FAAB estimates this week.

I was way off on Taylor Ward but his value heavily depends on him being catcher eligible.

Owners stepped up to pay for closers this week. https://t.co/kimu1c0IiY pic.twitter.com/OI8DFDffut

— Jeff Zimmerman (@jeffwzimmerman) August 21, 2018

While the results (and spelling) were not perfect, they were better than the previous few weeks. Owners do continue to spend their limited resources on potential closers (Hildenberger and Glover).
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It’s crunch time, folks! After the remainder of this week, we have just five left so I put together a quick chart of how many games each team has left. There aren’t massive edges to be gained in the aggregate as it’s just a four game split between the most (Cubs) and fewest (Padres) left, not to mention that the team with the fewest isn’t even that fantasy relevant, but whether H2H or Roto, every little advantage can be useful at this point in the season.

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