Eddie: Do you smell that?

Vincent: What? Smoke?

Carmen: No, money…

Ok, well maybe not money for everyone, but for those who play fantasy baseball for free, a championship is the equivalent to cash and as our hero aptly points out soon after — money won is twice as sweet as money earned.

It’s time, baby! A new season is upon us. Though many of you throughout the country have a hard time believing it, winter is thawing and the deliciousness of spring is in the air. The boys of summer are making the magic happen down in Florida and Arizona and we’re less than three weeks away from the first official game of the 2014 season. While some of you have actually drafted your fantasy teams, many of you have not and are looking for that edge come draft day. Read the rest of this entry »

Many moons ago (actually six years to be exact), I began my fantasy baseball writing career with the Fantasy Baseball Generals. The site is long gone, but all the writers have gone on to greener pastures, including my friend Patrick DiCaprio who I broadcast the Fantasy Baseball Roundtable show with every Wednesday night. We had a loyal, albeit tiny, following and needless to say, my posts weren’t read by nearly as many people as they are here. So inspired by a reader comment, I decided to dig up a snake draft strategy primer I remembered having written, at which point I then learned that it was actually published at FBG. So this is an updated version of the step-by-step tutorial to winning your snake draft.

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I had my first Yahoo draft of the season last Saturday and it turned out quite badly. Just about every player went for $10 above my projections. Thankfully, my keeper roster was unfair, so I didn’t need to accomplish much in the draft. My plan was to win Miguel Cabrera, a couple elite closers, and sit on my heels. But I missed Cabrera and then I missed plans B, C, and D. I even missed Jose Abreu, who I thought I could nab for under $20 (wrong). In the end, my “big ticket” expenditures were Craig Kimbrel (25), Kyle Seager (18), Brian McCann (17), and Elvis Andrus (16). I’m not pleased with any of those prices, but I had to spend the money on somebody.

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I stunk up the joint last year in AL LABR, one of the longest-going super leagues in the business. I combined terrible draft choices with terrible free agent auction decisions and even a bad trade in order to end up tenth of twelve. I showed poor restraint and discipline at the draft, I lacked the context necessary for making good decisions, and I panicked a bit late in the season. I’m not so proud of that season.

At least this year I feel a lot better about the draft. As Razzball’s Grey Albright said at the after-party, there’s a long way from feeling good to doing good in the final tally. Admitted. But since I actually didn’t even feel great about my draft results last year, I’ll take this as a positive sign.

Let’s take a look at the team and the better decision-making process that went into it.

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I’m always talking about how good a pitch’s peripherals are, on our podcast, or on the radio, or on twitter, so I thought I’d help you get a sense of makes a good off-speed pitch, when it comes to whiff percentages. Since some of the listings in different places are whiff per swing (more here), and yet our site uses swinging strike rate (swSTR%), I thought I’d make the benchmarks in swinging strikes. You can see the whiff benchmarks in this oft-linked post here. You’ll also get ground-ball rates there, which is an important pitch peripheral that I won’t talk about much today.

So what makes a good pitch, swinging strike wise?
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Sleepers are the holy grail of fantasy analysis. Everybody has players they like more than others and sleepers are those special someones who offer tantalizing upside at a piddling price. Sometimes, they’re just overlooked, small market players who have been good all along while other times they are players predicted to have a break out season.

It’s good to have sleepers. It’s good to acquire them on draft day, assuming you have some skill at parsing the mountains of data available on the internet. It can even be good to throw an extra dollar at your favorite targets in the auction. Where owners run into trouble is when they convince themselves that they must acquire their sleepers.

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When drafting hitters for a traditional five category league, my standard strategy is to target players who contribute in many categories – preferably all five. Today, in deference to my jet lag, we’re mostly going to dispense with analysis and break out some lists of players who fall into different buckets of production. All of the values below come from Steamer’s 2014 projections. Steamer and projection systems in general aren’t the best at predicting runs and RBI, so keep that in mind.

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I read two articles the other day that helped clarify my thinking. For at least a year, I’ve been bothered by fantasy baseball’s obsession with rankings – especially preseason rankings. Imagine: here’s a list of the top 25 first baseman ranked in order of value. Except there isn’t much difference between the fourth best and the eighth best. After the 11th best it gets really ugly. Perhaps we should introduce some tiers, we’ll call them Great, Good, Average, Bad. But now there are tiers within my tiers and hidden tiers than span between my arbitrary tiers, etc. etc.

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From time to time, I’ll hear reference to BeerGraphs as if we’re trying to legislate which beers are actually the best with our numbers. I don’t really think that’s the aim — we research beer trends and report what the numbers say, and we try to offer different ways to slice available numbers so that you can make more informed decisions. There’s no way to analytically prove which beer is the best.

There’s no way to analytically prove which settings are the best for your fantasy league. It’s fantasy, it’s not real, and so whatever settings you decide are just the rules for the game you are about to play. Different settings do beget different styles of analysis, though, so it’s worth a little thinking to get it right, especially if you are about to start a league that you hope will be around a while.

I’ve got 15 leagues. I’ll just write about the pros and cons of each. Maybe that’ll help.

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UPDATE: You can view complete rosters here and Steamer projections for all teams here. I’m ranked 10th currently, but saves aren’t included yet (12 points projected). 

On Tuesday, Howard Bender organized the first draft of the 2014 season for his Mock Draft Army. You can learn more about the army here.

We kept things short and simple; a 23 round snake draft with standard deep league positions, no bench, and 5×5 scoring. The picks ranged from Mike Trout at pick 1-1 to Fernando Rodney at pick 23-12.

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