I commonly hear people praising active managers in fantasy leagues, and there is good reason for this. Active managers make for a fun league. My favorite leagues are the ones with regular transactions, trades, etc., where every manager is engaged. While activity makes for a fun league, the praise for active managers often assumes active managers are “good” or “winning” managers. Fun is hard to measure, but good we can try to validate.

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

Guest: Chris Welsh

Strategy Section

• General snake draft strategy
• Early round pitcher strategy
• Differences between various formats & depths
• Tackling closers
• Tackling catchers
• KDS preferences
• What is the most important statistic to focus on?
• What is a category that you could get on the waiver wire?

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

Guest: Paul Sporer

Strategy Section

• Relievers moving to the rotation
  • Good source to find fantasy players?
  • Candidates for 2024
• San Francisco Giants plan for 2024
• Total Solar Eclipse
• Spring Training
  • Red Flags
  • Green Flags
  • Injuries in Spring Training
  • Spring training stats on FanGraphs !!!
• How to value older / aging pitchers
  • Survivor Bias
  • How cost plays in to the risk
• Supermodels
• How to value pitchers coming over from a foreign league
  • Foreign pitchers vs hitters
• 9 Pitcher roto roster – how to split SP/MR/CL?

Starting Pitchers

• General player pool observations
• Lower tiered pitchers
  • What to look for?

ATC Undervalued Players

• Starting Pitchers
  • Jordan Montgomery
  • Nestor Cortes
  • Eduardo Rodriguez
  • Ryan Pepiot
  • Aaron Civale
  • Griffin Canning
  • John Means

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Introduction

In 2018, I introduced a game theory approach for comparing baseball projection systems. Proudly, the original article was nominated for Baseball Article of the Year by the Fantasy Sports Writers Association (FSWA). Today, I am proud to release the same in-depth research for the sixth consecutive year!

This is not a typical statistical analysis. There won’t be any Chi-squared tests, nor will I calculate Type I or Type II errors. Forget about mean squared errors or any hypothesis testing.

My methodology does not incorporate a statistical model. Instead, it looks to determine the profitability potential of each projection system by simulating what would have happened in a fantasy auction draft. It games the projections.

What do I mean by this?

Let’s think about what happens in a real fantasy [pun intended] baseball draft auction.

Suppose that Jared Cross himself (or anyone exclusively using the Steamer projections) walks into a rotisserie auction prior to the 2023 baseball season. Let’s say that Jared decides to participate in an NFBC auction league. Mr. Cross would take his projections and run a valuation method through them to obtain auction prices. He would generate a list that looked something like this …

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

Guest: Jeff Erickson

Strategy Section – Auction Strategy

• General Auction Strategy
  • Rules to live by
  • Differences to snake drafts
  • Online vs. in-person auctions
  • Time of day
  • Other players’ tendancies
  • Looking around at the auction table
  • Most important items to keep track of during an auction
• Nomination Strategy
  • Have a purpose
  • Reasons for nominating who you are most interested in buying
  • Plan A / Plan B nomination
• Market Values
  • Assessing the market
  • AAVs / ADP$
  • Hotspots
• What to pay for players
  • Strike Prices
  • Paying more for players who fit your team’s build
• Money plan
  • Hitter / Pitcher % Split
  • Stars & Scrubs vs. Spread the Risk
  • Unorthodox strategies
• Money management
  • Pacing yourself in the auction
  • Buying out of “the break”
• In-draft adjustments
  • Tracking scarcities
  • Tracking inflation
• Bidding
  • General procedure
  • Starting bid
  • +2 bids
  • Bidding often
  • Timing of bids
  • Price enforcing
• Other tidbits
  • Pay attention to the other bids
  • Clogging the DH spot
  • Shohei Ohtani is still pitcher eligible
  • Need to get bargains

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

Guest: Nick Pollack

What’s new at PitcherList?

• PLV 2.0

Strategy Section

• Pitch arsenal
  • Is it better to have one elite pitch, or a few good pitches?
  • Pitch mix changes
    • Blind spot of projections?
    • How to know when a pitcher will be more successful?
    • What to make of a pitcher throwing a new pitch?
• Should we trust certain teams / organizations to improve pitchers?
  • Ryan Pepiot

Starting Pitchers

• General player pool observations
• 12-team vs. 15-team leagues
• Which is more important – securing ratios or strikeouts?
• Should you chase wins?
• How much of a discount do you need for an injury concern pitcher?

ATC Undervalued Players

• Starting Pitchers
  • Framber Valdez
  • Logan Webb
    • How to throw a screwball
  • Max Fried
    • Partial tear vs. full tear
    • Yoshinobu Yamamoto innings
  • Zach Eflin
    • Injury Guru’s Trivia of the Week
  • Tanner Bibee
  • Justin Steele
  • Shane Bieber
  • Chris Bassitt

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

Guest: Sara Sanchez

Strategy Section

• Risk
  • Should you minimize risk early on in drafts?
  • Should you increase risk late?
  • At what point in the draft do you worry less about risk?
  • How does league size / depth affect your risk propensity?
• The value of player consistency
  • Head to Head formats
• Pitchers with injury issues
  • Why do projections seem to overstate innings for risky starters?
  • Should you avoid injury risk pitchers all together?
  • Should you worry about your team’s aggregation of risky pitching?

Middle Infield

• General player pool observations
• Positing scarcity no longer exists
• Which price points to play at in 2024?
• What statistics should you get from the MI?
• Injury Guru’s Trivia of the Week

ATC Undervalued Players

• Middle Infielders
  • Bo Bichette
  • Nico Hoerner
  • Gleyber Torres
  • Xander Bogaerts
  • Willy Adames
  • Nolan Gorman
  • Jeremy Pena
  • Vaughn Grissom
  • Jeff McNeil
  • Jorge Polanco
  • J.P. Crawford

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

Guest: Ray Murphy

First Pitch Florida

Strategy Section

• Projections
  • The basics of what goes into generating player projections
  • How should you use projections?
  • Blind spots of projections
    • What does the human eye do better than the computer?
• Pricing Players
  • SGP vs. Z-Scores vs. PVM
• Outfield Player Pool
  • General observations
  • Are there specific stats that you need to get from the OF position?

ATC Undervalued Players

• Outfielders
  • Masataka Yoshida
  • Brandon Nimmo
  • Cedric Mullins
  • Riley Greene
  • Taylor Ward
  • Bryan De La Cruz
  • Jung Hoo Lee 이정후
    • Injury Guru’s Trivia of the Week
  • Austin Hays
  • Sal Frelick

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

Guest: Mike Gianella

Strategy Section

• What does it mean for a position to be shallow?
• Strategy for shallow positions
• Dual position eligibile players
  • Value and use
• General corner infield player pool observations
• Injury Guru’s Trivia of the Week
• What statistics do you need to accumulate from the corner infield position?
• Get a reliable CI up top, or wait for bargains to unfold later on?

ATC Undervalued Players

• Corner Infielders
  • Paul Goldschmidt
  • Nolan Arenado
  • Alex Bregman
  • Josh Naylor
  • Yandy Diaz
  • Jake Burger
  • Alec Bohm
  • Nathaniel Lowe
  • Ke’Bryan Hayes
  • Andrew Vaughn
  • Ryan Mountcastle
  • Jose Abreu
  • Ty France

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

Guest: Justin Mason

Strategy Section

• Catcher player pool observations
• Are catchers less valuable this year?
• 1-Catcher vs. 2-Catcher leagues
• Injury Guru’s Trivia of the Week
• Can you effectively stream catchers?
• Can you / should you draft a catching pair from a single MLB team?
• Catchers who might recieve extra playing time as the designated hitter

ATC Undervalued Players

• Catchers
  • Salvador Perez
    • Will Sal Perez be a Hall of Fame catcher?
  • Willson Contreras
  • Keibert Ruiz
  • Jonah Heim
  • Logan O’Hoppe
  • Shea Langeliers

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