Every year, people around the country decide that the beginning of the year is the time to make resolutions. These New Year’s resolutions are typically ridiculous attempts at self improvement that tend to fade away by Valentine’s Day.
If I sound angry or bitter, I apologize. I just quit smoking and went on a diet. Read the rest of this entry »
There are some guys I know I’m very unlikely to roster in a given season based on their cost. Let me acknowledge the obvious axiom that every player has their price, so if these guys all fell well below their current perceived prices (I did get some ADP data from Fantrax.com and I’ve been in a handful of drafts already because I’m insane), I’d likely pounce, but as it currently stands I just don’t see it. Without further ado, here are 10 guys I probably won’t be rostering in 2017 drafts.
Dozier had a fantastic 2016 with career-highs in HR, RBI, and AVG while approaching previous highs in R and SB. Perhaps the craziest part of it all was that he spotted the league two months (.624 OPS through May), but the surge has pushed him into the 3rd-4th round area. While the cost doesn’t require a full repeat, I just don’t think I want to pay that for what I think will be something like .255-28-15 from a 30-year old at a deep position. Flyball and hard contact jumps support the power boost, but his 18% HR/FB was also a career-high by quite a bit (previous high of 13%).
So Chad Young and I have been trying to sell Gerrit Cole in the dynasty league we co-manage. It’s not that we’re concerned about Cole. The shoulder doesn’t worry us, and we expect him to bounce back from his worst year in the majors. He’s entering his age 26 season. Aside from the injury blip, he has everything we could possibly want from a dynasty pitcher.
Today we have a thought exercise to, uh, think about.
The Setting
Yoan Moncada is the number one prospect in baseball. Manager John Farrell goaded the Boston front office into rushing Moncada to the majors where he promptly flopped in epic fashion. The Red Sox recently traded him to their bleached counterparts in Chicago, a possible sign they’ve cooled on their former top farmer. Or maybe they just liked Sale that much.
It seems plausible Moncada will return to the majors in 2017. The White Sox have Brett Lawrie and Tyler Saladino sharing second base, but neither player can block a prospect of Moncada’s ilk. And with Todd Frazier almost certain to be traded this winter or during the season, Lawrie and Saladino can always slide to the hot corner.
Prospects with Moncada’s talent and proximity to the majors are usually stashed in all but the shallowest (or thin benched) re-draft leagues. He’s already owned in your keeper and dynasty leagues. Read the rest of this entry »
Redraft leagues are the gateway drug of fantasy baseball. Like other gateway drugs, you could totally stop playing at any time. If you wanted to. You don’t, but you could, and that’s an important thing to know. Once you join a competitive keeper or dynasty league, you’re well and truly hooked. Maybe you can go cold turkey. Maybe…but why? Read the rest of this entry »
The growing game of Ottoneu has a ton of great features that set the fantasy platform apart from the masses, but few are more unique than the annual arbitration process. Now concluded across all leagues, arbitration (a 30 day process) unofficially launches what is a very busy off-season for Ottoneu owners.
As a quick reminder, Ottoneu arbitration enables each league owner to “correct” the market value of players whose salaries appear too low. It’s an economic counter-balance to traditional dynasty rules that often let owners dominate a league for years if they amass the right players at the right prices. Here is the actual arbitration rule:
With 2016 leagues in the books, I’d like to present some league-wide season-ending stats to see what kind of conclusions we can draw about success in the very data-driven game of Ottoneu. The focus here is one of the more popular scoring formats, FanGraphs Points (FGPTS), and the numbers you see in each of the first two charts represent the average standings data for all teams/all leagues by final 2016 finish.
Well, it wouldn’t be much fun if the ball just rolled to the wall every time the pitcher threw it, so obviously the game needs a catcher, even if robot umps take over. But my impression of trying to draft stud catchers from year to year is that it’s folly.
Maybe because the position is so demanding defensively, my impression of their ability to hit is somewhere between ‘American League pitcher’ and ‘Defensive Replacement’. The numbers say that catchers debut later, but even that finding is muddied by late-career backup catcher debuts. Aging for catchers seems about the same, and finding value in a catcher is easy even if they hit 13% worse than league average as a group this year, worse than any other position players — you still need to fill the position, so even an okay batter should be valuable.
Still… am I crazy? It seems that catchers are more volatile, year to year, and I just want to shop in the bargain bin for the most part. Let’s jump in and see if I am loony tunes.
The fantasy baseball season has closed, but the game of Ottoneu continues long into the off-season (one of the hallmarks of its year-round appeal). Following Justin’s take on what happened with some of the best teams in Ottoneu this year, I’ll focus today on how one team mastered this game, presenting you with an interview from the of the 2016 Ottoneu Champions League winner, Brent Daily.
We’ve done a good thing for those of you that still care about fantasy baseball right now. The Auction Calculator now has 2016 stats as an option so that you can look backwards at what has just happened. That’s going to be part of our effort, on the way to the end of the year, to look at last year to learn more for next year.
This is an important part of fantasy that usually gets ignored. Not only does the league itself change year to year, so retrospection is important in that way, but we can learn things about fantasy itself that will improve our ability to value players going forward.
The fourth-best player in the game last year, by this list, has already inspired a possible change to the auction calculator going forward. Let’s see what else it jars loose.
