It’s almost impossible to prove empirically, but the anecdotal evidence is fairly strong: teams put bad lineups on the field the day after they clinch the postseason. Especially if they’ve clinched the division. Look at this stinker the Dodgers sent out on Friday, the day after they jumped in Arizona’s pool:
In the post-roster expansion period, it is easy to lose track of who the heck is playing these days, especially for non-contending teams. If you’re an NFL fan and fantasy football player, it makes it even more difficult to monitor playing time situations. With less than two weeks to go, deeper leaguers who are scrambling for bats should consider the following hitters who have enjoyed significant playing time over the past couple of weeks, perhaps to the surprise of some.
Two weeks left in the season. At least a few of you are staring at the batting average category and wondering if you can do anything about it at all. You have 11/12ths of the season in the rear view weighing you down, it’s not likely. But I thought it might be fun to do a thought/math exercise.
If you could get lucky, and get the league-leader in batting average at every position over the last two weeks of the season, how far north could you push your team’s overall batting average?
We all want home runs. And so it’s tough to stream for power — if they coulda hit homers, they woulda hit them allready. But we can look for the best situations for power, and look for borderline power guys for people of differently-sized leagues, and maybe we’ll help you ‘luck’ into some extra dingers for your playoff fantasy squad.
The basic philosophy is simple. Power is well-correlated with hot weather, and certain parks are more conducive to home runs. You can add in a fly-ball pitcher if you want to really want to set the scene for Elvis Andrus‘ one home run of the year.
We stream all the time for pitching stats, but now it’s getting into crunch time for every stat on the board, especially in head-to-head leagues. Let’s look at the schedule this week and try to identify some key players in each category. Oh, and if this isn’t enough, check out the Daily Fantasy Strategy column on the site. If you squint right, you can find what you’re looking for in the Daily Five, even if you’re using it for a different reason.
We’ll start with steals because steals might be the best offensive stat to stream for.
A year or two before ottoneu was founded (so about a decade ago) I swore off head-to-head baseball leagues. The beauty of baseball, I think, is in the daily grind – six months of daily grind, with no one day being more important than any other. Besides, if you are going to make one day count more than another, choosing September, when the rules of the game change and when different teams have such wildly different incentives and goals just does not make sense to me.
But I am now in my second year playing in a matchup league again. I took over a last place team in this dynasty league, barely missed the post-season a year ago, and now I am just a few hours away from my first playoff matchup in years. And the strategy for the post-season is taking some getting used to.
I’m not intending to hurt the feelings of three quarters of you all, but this post is mainly for those of you fortunate to be in serious contention for money and/or bragging rights and/or special unnamed prize. Or whatever else you might be playing for that I probably don’t want to hear about. Chances are, if you’re still coming to Rotographs in late August, you’re at least sniffing the top third of your league or perhaps your day job lacks any level of mental stimulation.
I tend to use innings pitched as a gauge as to whether a team has an inflated win or strikeout total (ahead of pace) or if there’s a team lurking, behind pace in innings. It can put standings into context. This applies in leagues with an innings limit, of course. The rest of you can just move on. But if you’re up there still shaking a menacing fist at the leader of your league, or if perhaps you are the leader, I encourage you to just blow up your innings now.
As we head into the last month of the season, many fantasy owners are clamoring for more strikeouts and wins. Obviously, chasing wins is a fool’s errand (see: the Cardinals boxscore last night as Michael Wacha blew Shelby Miller’s win, allowing 3 runs in an inning of work, yet recorded the almighty win). But obviously, the more starts you accumulate, the greater the opportunity for the holy win, and of course, strikeouts.
With a large base of innings already in the books, that means that a pitcher’s implosion won’t hurt nearly as much at this point, so a streaming strategy isn’t ill-advised. So with that in mind, here is one recommended streaming play a day for games from Wednesday through Sunday. Pitchers should all be available in the majority of 12-team mixed leagues and shallower. Of course, since I don’t know who is in your free agent pool, there could be some better options, in which case I fully expect you to ask me about them in the comments.
As we get closer to our league trade deadlines, I wanted to follow up with more thoughts on trading after my piece a couple of weeks ago. Then, I talked about throwing player values out the window and trading for needs based on your position in the various statistical categories. Don’t worry about overpaying if you still expect the trade to net you positive points. That concept still applies, probably even more so now, but I also wanted to share some other random thoughts and go more in-depth on that idea.
We’re about 60% of the way through the regular season, the Major League trading deadline is coming in a week and a half and if your league has its own deadline, it’s also likely coming at some point over the next month. For me personally, trading is one of the most frustrating activities in fantasy baseball. Whether your potential trading partner’s player valuations are idiotic or his response for declining your offer that you genuinely believe helps both teams is illogical, I don’t really enjoy the whole process. It feels more like work to me than something fun. But, sometimes we simply need to make a trade, whether to fill a hole using our depth or to plug a categorical weakness by utilizing a strength.
