In the first month of the season, fantasy sites and blogs will be littered with your standard buy low and sell high columns. The authors will highlight hitters suffering/benefiting from a low/high BABIP or pitchers whose xFIP (or other expected ERA metric of choice) is dramatically different from their ERAs. I won’t get into why I think these articles are rather useless, but I do want to discuss how to go about evaluating early season pitcher performances. There is a two-step process I use and since I am feeling generous, I would like to share it with you.

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Maximizing pitchers that make 2 starts in a week is a strategy used by some fantasy owners, especially in H2H leagues. The owners cycle through less desirable starters each week and get a new set the next week in order to win the counting stats. The first week of the season offers a unique situation because most of the 2-start pitchers are #1 and #2 starters for a team. Most of these pitchers are already owned. Today I am going to look at some of the few 2-start “aces” that may be available in a league

(Owned % are ESPN and Yahoo)

Erik Bedard (7%, 39%) – Erik is by far the best option among the pitchers I will look at today. His main issue in the past has been staying healthy. While he has a lower chance of getting a Win than a starter on a better team, he will supply a decent number of strikeouts (ZiPS projection is 8.15 K/9). Since an owner is looking to have him around a only a week, they might as well take the chance on him stating healthy that long. In a deep league, owners should actually look to keep him until he eventually goes on the DL.

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This will be a real quick hitter here, thinking about periphery stuff in terms of roster strategy…

There are no doubt going to be a goodly number of you drafting fantasy baseball teams this weekend (so many in fact that we’re trying to throw together a weekend-long marathon chat for you should you want to check in with crisis situations!). After looking at the many squads I’ve already procured through sometimes deft and sometimes drunken decisions, I’m starting to prepare for my roster spots yet to become available via the disabled list. So while this is a waiver wire piece, it’s rather a bizarro-waiver-wire piece because I’m asking you to think about it in advance. Yes, it’s a strange time of year.

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Short but simple piece right here. I just finished drafting my 12th league, so with an “n” of 12, let’s see who I like. The simplest way to do this is to list the players I own most. So, here we go.

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As Eno pointed out the other day, six of us from FanGraphs/RotoGraphs joined up with six writers from The Hardball Times to do battle in a 12-team rotisserie league for both bragging rights and charity.  The winner gets to donate the prize to the charity of his choice while the site for which he writes gets to reign supreme in the fantasy universe.  Sounds like fun?  Well, you weren’t there for the four-plus hour auction.

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So a buddy of mine calls me the other day in need of a 10th team for his home league.  Apparently someone dropped out at the last minute due to work obligations and he needed to find someone competitive to fill the slot.  Shallow league, very basic.  10 teams, mixed, 5×5 roto, standard snake draft.  Happily, I obliged and decided that this would be a great opportunity to see just how long I could wait on drafting a starting pitcher while still maintaining a competitive staff in the league.

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Jason Heyward – RF/CF

Heyward has been seen in center field on a few occasions this year, and it is clear that the Braves would rather have Heyward as the backup centerfielder than carry a weak hitting bench bat. He plays top notch defense in right field, so he can likely handle the position in a pinch without any issues. In a league that accounts for outfield positions rather than outfield in general, Heyward could be very beneficial if he eventually does earn enough games to qualify in center. This is not a given, but it something to keep an eye on as the season progresses.

Eric Hosmer – 1B/OF

Ned Yost put Hosmer in right field for a game just a few days ago, in what could be Yost’s game plan when the Royals play in National League parks. One of the team’s best hitters, Billy Butler, will be forced to sit on the bench in NL parks otherwise, so Hosmer getting some work in the outfield makes a decent amount of sense as he is certainly athletic enough to handle a corner outfield spot. It will depend on the eligibility roles in your league, but Hosmer could end up with cheap OF eligibility which could really be beneficial as first base is consistently extremely deep. This, like Heyward’s situation, is not a given but is worth following to see if he does end up getting OF eligibility.

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I made a mistake in my latest auction draft. A rookie mistake. I left money on the table. You know what, though — I’m not too worried about it. It was a natural risk that was bred from a few of my main tenets. Here are some of those personal rules — which I may have to alter now that I’m going public — and then I’ll discuss how implementing the rules went in yesterday’s particular draft.

1) Throw guys you don’t want. Bid on them a little bit so people don’t know that you’re throwing guys you don’t want. Watch them spend money on players you don’t want.

2) Budget two dollars for every bench spot. This creates end-game flexibility. You’ll be able to steal everyone’s one-dollar picks.

3) Compare early results for stars to your auction value spreadsheet. Adjust your plan accordingly.

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If your memory works anything like mine, you have a small pocket of your brain specifically used for random, useless baseball trivia. For instance, I remember that Willie Bloomquist started the 2011 season with a 10 game hitting streak. I forgot my daughter’s date of birth yesterday, but I apparently made room in my skull for this.

Indeed – looking at his stats, Willie Boom-Boom was hitting .340/.360/.468 with seven RBI and he even hit a home run. It turns out, that was 33% of his home run total and 37% of his total RBI for the season. He finished at .254/.310/.320.

When the season starts, we try hard to not read much into small sample sizes – and if you’re a longtime reader, you know that the sample size is constantly referred to for the first couple months of the season, and for good reason. But in contrast to Spring training, these statistics actually matter to our fantasy baseball teams, so it’s hard to ignore when one guy is hitting out of his mind and another is barely doing anything. As logical as I try to be, I guarantee you that I’m disappointed when half my team doesn’t hit a home run on opening day.

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It takes a special kind of overly-obsessed fantasy player to worry deeply about what to do with marginal players over two games in late March before 28 teams have even played a real game. I mean, there are 2,430 games in a season. Two early season games account for a solid 0.08% of the MLB season.

So it should come as no surprise to anyone that this morning I found myself wondering, “What do I do with Mike Carp in Japan?!” And I figured if this is keeping me awake at night, I can’t be the only one.

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