I participated in two drafts this past weekend. Both were 10-team auctions, one a season-long rotisserie keeper league (“LOWV,” henceforth), the other a head-to-head points redraft league (“Sandlot”). They are just home leagues, not renowned leagues such as Tout Wars or LABR or anything like that, but hey! Breaking down any draft can make for good insight, and if it helps just one person clarify his or her strategy, perhaps it did some good.

“So, Alex, how did you in your drafts?” Great, thanks for asking! I love both my teams. Love them. Except I made the same mistake in each draft: I left some money on the table. Like, $20 in one instance. It became a running gag: “Don’t question Alex — it’s all part of his master plan!” But here’s the catch: I arguably have the best team, per the projections, even after managing my budget so poorly.

So where did my strategy go wrong? Honestly, I’m not sure it did. (Or maybe I’m just trying to make myself feel better.)
Read the rest of this entry »

For many reasons, the majority of fantasy leagues in aggregate spend between 65% and 70% of their total auction budget on hitting. Though I haven’t kept all of my auction results since I founded my home league back in 2003, I’m fairly confident that I have exceeded that typical hitting budget nearly every year, if not in all of them. But I don’t believe I have ever spent as much as I did during my auction on Sunday. For some context, my local league is a shallow 12-team 5×5 (we switched to W+QS instead of Wins last year and it was fantastic, though it devalues closers a bit) mixer, with standard 23-man rosters and a six player bench acquired via snake draft after the auction.

Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 209

The latest episode of “The Sleeper and the Bust” is live!

In this episode, Paul Sporer and Eno Sarris dive deep into the mid and late tier of starting pitching in this two-hour extravaganza!!!

I broke the guys up into a series of four- and five-pitcher groupings and then we talked about a couple or all in each group. These are the tiers from which a lot of breakouts and surprises will emerge.

Read the rest of this entry »

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Every year, we here at RotoGraphs publish tiered rankings for every position and update them throughout the year. What you will read below are, more or less, my end-of-season projections for National League outfielders, since the season hasn’t started yet. However, these rankings will change as the year progresses, and I would be a fool to tell you the tiers below will look the same in September.

No doubt, this is a contentious matter, and you can tell me how much of a moron I am in the comments.

Without further ado, here is the 2015 season’s first installment of tiered rankings for NL outfielders.

Read the rest of this entry »

My piece yesterday got me thinking a bit. Seeing the high-impact finishes of Jake Arrieta and Jacob deGrom of 16th and 37th among starters despite not even qualifying for the ERA title (162+ IP) had me marinating on Masahiro Tanaka. Are we being too cautious with him because of the partially torn UCL? On Tuesday’s episode of The Sleeper & The Bust, Eno mentioned hearing “a talent evaluator” (which is the latest version of “they say” or “sources say”) suggest that upwards of 40 percent of pitchers are working with a partially torn UCL.

Read the rest of this entry »

I think something the fantasy universe forgets too often at this time of the season is the sheer length of the season. Six months. Twenty-six weeks. And of course, 162 games. In today’s game, very few players are able to play ‘em all. Just four players were able to do so in 2014. The pitching equivalent is 34 starts and just 10 pitchers managed to reach that height last year. So there are countless guys populating the top 50 or 100 who didn’t play anywhere near the full season.

Trust me I understand why we as a fantasy community have such a sharp focus on the here and now, prioritizing players who have roles secured at this moment. After all, you absolutely can’t play 162 games or log 34 starts if you aren’t even slated to start the season with the major league club. We know many starting roles will turnover as the season goes on and we will churn our fantasy rosters week-in and week-out. With that in mind, you need to make sure you aren’t being too dogmatic about avoiding injured guys or those on the outside looking in of a starting role.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been playing in auction leagues since about 2001 and believe it to be far superior to snake drafts. Why choose a draft format that immediately prevents you from acquiring players as soon as you know your draft slot isn’t number one? I want the opportunity to buy Mike Trout for $48 damn it! Okay, enough standing on my pedestal and rehashing why I think auctions are best. Let’s just talk about some random things that have popped into my head since my Tout Wars auction on Saturday.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks back, I dropped some ice-cold water on some of the spring’s favorites just to give us a reality check about their downside. Interestingly enough, the guy I was struggling most to wet blanket is the one who is now dealing with an ailment: Anthony Rendon with his MCL. For me, his checkered health record was the only thing really holding him back as it could cut into his base-stealing production if it was something nagging and obviously something more severe could really take a chunk out of his numbers. Today, I’ll do the same from fast-rising pitchers and ideally, I’ll go beyond health concerns for all three picks as those loom overhead for every single pitcher every single time they throw the ball.

Read the rest of this entry »

Weekly update:

• Add a bunch of times to first.
• On batted ball, I am trying to correctly combine categories batted ball categories. With categories combined, it will take less time for a hitter’s batted ball profile to stabilize. I hope to have a major update on this area in the next week or two. After that, I can start getting some real values for the stats begin to stabilize.
• Here is a link to the data in an Excel format. For some reason I can only embed OpenOffice files.

Pitchers’ Approach Attacking Hitters

Robert Arthur at Baseball Prospectus has shown pitchers will change their approach depending on the hitter’s talent level. Here is a complete list of the number of fastballs (including sinkers) thrown to each hitter of the past two years divided into half seasons. Also the number of pitches in the strike by half season is included along with the fastball percentage in the strike zone. I will begin adding 2015 information as it becomes available.

Read the rest of this entry »

My Tout Wars evening almost went a very different way on Tuesday night. We had 15 of us gathered for the Tout Wars Mixed Draft and I had the 11^th overall pick. This is an OBP league which severely changes the value of some players, so keep that in mind when you’re looking at the draft board. We had to run the draft on RTSports through one of their mock drafts even though the league will be hosted on OnRoto in-season. This caused some issues right out of the gate and nearly set my night down a vastly different path.

On my end, the draft didn’t start at 7:00 PM central as scheduled. There were no sounders and nothing was moving. At about 7:04, it jumped live to the 14^th pick and I had been auto’d with Adam Jones. He is an unquestionably great player, but I wouldn’t necessarily take him there in a standard league with AVG and I certainly wouldn’t take him there in an OBP league. He experiences one of the biggest value shifts going from AVG to OBP. He has hit a composite .284 over the last five seasons, ranging from .280 to .287, but an unspectacular 3.9% walk rate leaves him with just a .321 OBP in that same span (.334 high, .311 low). I was pretty livid.

Read the rest of this entry »