Draft season has become a year-round endeavor for fantasy baseballers if so inclined. Usually the winter dotted with industry-based mocks that will appear in the magazines set to hit the shelves soon, but nowadays both NFBC and Fantrax get live leagues going so quickly that there’s barely any down time. I’ve done or am in the middle of a couple leagues of my own while also participating in a host of mocks and I’m noticing some early trends.

Trea Turner is a Top Fiver

When Sammy Reid and Doug Thorburn took Turner 4th overall in my AFL draft, I didn’t bat an eye and tipped my hat at their commitment to the 25-year old fantasy beast. I did think it’d be on the higher end of his upper range as I saw him settling in the back half of 15-team first rounders. Alas, they nailed it dead on as his current average draft position (ADP) is 4th overall. He’s even gone as high as 2nd overall, presumably behind Mike Trout.

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1/5/18

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is brought to you by Out of the Park Baseball 18, 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 SLEEPER18!

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Solo episode where I discuss my first 11 picks in the “Beat Paul Sporer” league.

• Draft results

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Gazing right back at you is someone who relentlessly falls prey to the law of small numbers; to hindsight bias; to over-reaction; to narrow framing; to mental accounting; to status-quo bias; to the inability to evaluate your own future regret; and, most of all, to overconfidence. – Jason Zweig

I’ve been digesting all the literature on behavioral economics I can find as I stated in an article earlier this week. This focus area has gotten quite a bit of attention in the past few years with Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman each winning the Nobel Prize in economics for their work in this field. Thaler (Misbehaving) and Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow) have each written must-read books on the subject. I recommend both books, they are loaded with information. To give a brief induction into the various behavioral economic concepts and their application to fantasy baseball, I will utilize a speech given by the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Zweig on the subject.

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Entering the 2017 season, we were talking about two game changing trends – the home run surge and the 10-day disabled list. We’ve talked home runs to death. I think we all get it – players continued hitting record quantities of home runs. The 10-day disabled list also had a big impact on our fantasy games, and no team better exploited it than the Los Angeles Dodgers.

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Fantasy baseball slowly evolves and with the start of 2018, I’m going to focus on some topics in which savvy and unconventional owners could utilize against their competition. Some of these topics I’ve been contemplating and researching for a while, others are still just dust in the air. The following contains some ideas I hope to have a better understanding of by the year’s end and frame it so owners and utilize it. I’m not the only source of ideas. I’m 100% positive I’ve missed some simple useful topics and would love to research those in presented in the comments.

StatCast Batted Ball Data

As a baseball community, we’ve been slow to adapt and utilize StatCast batted ball information. Besides major league baseball employees, no one is leading the change. Part of the problem is having an easy to access database for everyone to use. That barrier is being removed as tools like Bill Petti’s baseball-r package can be used to help scrape the needed information from Baseball Savant.

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2018 is here, and the dawn of a new year is the best time to reevaluate your overall fantasy strategy.  But before digging into the finer points of roster construction, auction value calculations, and post-post-hype sleepers, January is also the perfect time to step back and ask whether it might be time to trade in your entire fantasy experience for one of the more advanced, up-and-coming fantasy platforms around.

This is a shameless plug for Ottoneu, a fantasy sports platform so addicting that it has also launched a community of more than 1,000 hardcore baseball fans that sleep and eat baseball year round.  But don’t take my word for it.  There are many reasons why you should try Ottoneu (including some exciting new features launching in 2018), but today I want you to hear from some of the “rookies” who just finished up their first full year of Ottoneu in 2017. This growing community of raving fans is a big part of the Ottoneu experience, and their Season One feedback may help you make the final decision to drive your own league to Ottoneu in 2018.

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Trades often begin fairly simply. One owner wants to swap his asset for a rival’s better asset. Typically, some version of the following response is sent: “Big Player is available, but I want more than Medium Player. I prefer a 1-for-1 swap involving Needed Position.”

The thing is, everybody wants the best player in the deal – in part because analysts like me frequently tell you to go get the best player in the deal. And so the dance begins with both owners circling the other; almost but not quite touching upon an agreeable trade. It looks something like this…

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There are only two types of trades – those of necessity and arbitrage. Let’s talk about them today.

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In leagues with Runs and RBIs as categories, predicting how a player’s mix will change with a new team can be guessing. Some clown at Fantrax yesterday wrote the following:

“As for Headley, his value drops by going to a worse offensive team in a pitcher-friendly park. Part of the decline could be offset by a move up in the lineup since he mainly batted seventh for the Yankees last season.”

It could go up, it could go down, who really knows? While writing the statement, I needed a better answer so I created a couple quick and simple tool. If an owner can estimate a few stats, they can predict changes in plate appearances, Runs, RBI when a hitter moves from one team to another.

The key was to be simple and quick. For simplicity, only the following stats are needed.

• New likely lineup location
• Estimate of projected home runs
• Estimated games played such 150 out of 162 games as a percentage.
• Estimated Runs scored by a team. Used over on-base percentage because team level runs scored is easier to find and remember.

The estimated runs scored is the toughest value to come up with. I’d just go to FanGraphs team projection page to get a decent idea. Just take that year’s RS/G and multiply it by 162. Another method is to take the previous season value and plug it into the following regression equation:

`RS in Y2` = .575 * `RS in Y1` + 311

The goal is just to get a basic idea of possible changes.

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The Japanese sensation Shohei Ohtani is finally coming to MLB (and more specifically to the Angels), and in doing so will become the trailblazer that sets a new expectation for the future of the (possible) “two-way” player.  Because salaries and injuries continue to escalate in the game, a true double threat major leaguer is still hard to imagine in baseball, but if the 23 year old Ohtani does become the first player since Babe Ruth to make a regular impact on both sides of the ball, he will change the landscape of fantasy baseball, too.

Ohtani 😱 pic.twitter.com/YXJJ8954Hs

— Vladimir Guerrero (@VladGuerrero27) December 8, 2017

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