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A disclaimer I must add is that this is possibly the worst time to create holds tiers that I could ever imagine. The injuries to closers such as Joakim Soria and Ryan Madson and attempting to judge who will be their replacements make these rankings difficult. The Royals are supposedly leaning towards Jonathan Broxton, but how long will that last for? The Reds are considering going with a closer by committee, but if Sean Marshall starts locking down saves, will they be willing to move pitchers around late in games?

I did not want to get into a big guessing game in that regard. For sake of these rankings, I assumed Marshall and Broxton would close. Below my personal, not RotoGraphs’, holds tiers for the upcoming season.
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Last season, I was a part of the FanGraphs Experts Ottoneu League. As there wasn’t a prize and I was in three other leagues, my team fell into disarray pretty quickly and I missed a bunch of opportunities to add good players in the midseason. I finished in 10th place with a team largely deserving of said finish. Therefore, when I heard there would be payouts of $600/$300/$100 for the top three places this year, I had mixed emotions. Payouts for a league I don’t have to pay into? Awesome. But my team sucked, meaning I had a lot of work to do in the auction.

The reason my team didn’t do well is, naturally, because I drafted a lot of bad players. Ottoneu gives players ample chances to make sweeping changes midseason — trading or picking up prospects, acquiring chips to trade in the offseason. But instead I just let it sit, and as such I only had 14 players worth keeping, one of whom was a $63 Albert Pujols. I threw him back knowing I needed a big budget to work with in the auction. As such, I kept the following list:

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Thursdays in this time slot, we’ll have some of FanGraphs’ finest talk about ScoreSheet baseball, which some consider the “realest” fantasy baseball out there. There’s defense, lineups, simulations… it’s complicated like real baseball.

This faithful correspondent is a rookie at the format. So I may be asking you, from time to time, what y’all think about this or that. This week, I’m setting my first lineups. And I’m looking at this hook thing.

First, the results of my draft, in AL-Skeeter, the 12-team AL-only keeper led by the ineffable King Kaufman. Let’s represent them in the general lineup order, without going through and breaking them out by handedness like you do in the real game. Lefties have the asterisk.

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FanGraphs vs. The Hardball Times. And you can take part.

The RotoGraphs squad is taking on a group from The Hardball Times in a fantasy showdown. Our own Howard Bender, Chris Benson, Mike Podhorzer, Dan Wade, Brandon Warne, and David Wiers took part in an auction last night and they’ll be battling six foes from The Hardball Times for fantasy glory… and a $600 prize that will go to the charity of the winner’s choice. Most likely, the cash will end up going to the Leukemia Society, because, most likely, we’re going to win.

We’ll be writing about this from time to time to keep you up to date and discuss issues that come up, but there’s a twist — you can get involved if you like.

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After a particularly boring stretch, we actually have some shortstop news to report. Let’s start with what’s happening out in Arizona.

After coming off a very good 2010 season which saw him hit 15 home runs and steal 10 bases, Stephen Drew suffered a broken ankle in July, ending his 2011 campaign early. The 29-year-old had been hopeful for opening day but it’s now being reported that he’ll miss that target date, and no timetable has been set on his return. That leaves Willie Bloomquist and John McDonald in the backup roles.

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For the greater good, I try not to recap every fantasy trade I make. First of all, most of you probably don’t care about every trade I make. Second, I really like making trades (seriously, tweet @ottoneu and ask about Chad’s trades, Niv will tell you all about it), and so I would end up writing nothing but trade recap posts.

But once in a while, a trade happens that I think is worthy of a recap. And in my first trade in the new ottoneu FanGraphs Staff League, I believe I have made one of those recap-worthy trades: Pablo Sandoval and Hong-Chih Kuo for Matt Thornton and Paul Goldschmidt.

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Regular RotoGraphs readers may recall a couple weeks ago when I posted my then-in-progress Scoresheet team for all to belittle and besmirch.

Well, my roster has since filled out, and I’m now ready for further humiliation and shame. Let’s take a peek, with breakdowns where I feel are pertinent: Read the rest of this entry »

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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When, in the course of formulating the starting pitcher consensus ranks for the 2012 fantasy baseball season, it becomes necessary to rank a relief pitcher as as starting pitcher before he makes start number one in the new season, a decent respect to the opinions of RotoGraphs readership requires that a little more attention be paid to the causes that led to the exclusion of said starter-slash-relief pitchers from the rankings — and how they’d be ranked otherwise.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all pitchers are mostly divided into two groups; that they are thus endowed by the game with different kinds of value and to be judged separately; that inherent to each value is the pursuit of saves or wins but not usually both; that it is much more difficult to gain starting pitcher eligibility and actually start than it is to be a starter-eligible reliever; that the penalties associated from moving from the bullpen to the rotation (17% degradation in strikeout walk and home run rate, as well as a .7-2 mph drop in fastball velocity, on average) often make newly-minted relievers-turned-starters a shaky proposition; that therefore most years it makes most sense to rank reliever-eligible pitchers with the relievers.

But whenever any form or ranking encounters a destructive force — as it has this year in the form of Men like Daniel Bard, Neftali Feliz, and Chris Sale — it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish the old ways and to institute a new form of rankings.

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Our contribution to FantasyPros’ consensus rankings was filed today, and while my own tiers are still forthcoming, now is as good a time as any to take a look at my colleagues’ rankings. Having pitching as deep as it is this year is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it affords players the luxury of waiting until the middle or late rounds to build their staffs and means that an error in the first couple rounds — losing someone like Clayton Kershaw to injury for example, not that I think Kershaw is terribly risky — isn’t likely to be a fatal blow.

On the other hand, it makes doing these rankings virtually impossible. Who is the fifth best pitcher in the NL? Matt Cain? Zack Greinke? Cole Hamels? Solid candidates all, but picking The One is a tough ask. Generally speaking, I’m in line right with Eno, Jeff, Mike, and Zach, but here are a few things I wanted to highlight ahead of my own contribution. Read the rest of this entry »