If You Must Punt, Punt It Right

For all the years that I’ve been playing fantasy baseball, I’ve never really understood the idea of punting saves. Not that I don’t understand the concept, but that I don’t understand the rationale behind thinking that it’s a good strategy. You load up on starters with the hope of locking up wins and strikeouts while doing your best to stay competitive in WHIP and ERA. Perfectly viable strategy, right? But what about the fact that Wins is, more or less, an arbitrary category and while your guy goes seven strong and exits with the lead, some clown of a set-up man comes in, walks the leadoff guy and then serves up a two-run shot to tie the game. A great game for your starter, for sure, but you make no advancement in a category you’ve supposedly built your team to excel in.

And what about the fact that punting saves completely dismisses the benefits a solid closer gives you in stabilizing your ratios? Logging 65 innings of a 2.00 ERA does a helluva lot more to help you than 150 innings of a 4.50 mark. Obviously you’re shooting for starters with better numbers than that but really, how many of them are out there that you’re realistically going to be able to lock up onto your team? So not only are you shorting yourself completely in the saves category, but now you’re also leaving yourself vulnerable with respect to your ratios. Unless you build a rotation filled with aces, you’ve given yourself nothing more than an advantage in just one category while completely losing another and leaving your nose open on three more. An over-simplification? Maybe. But not really.

No, if you’re going to punt a category, then do it with one that isn’t going to help you cut your throat in the others. Punt batting average. Punt the sh*t out of it. I mean, really. How important is it? The category has become so obsolete that most competitive leagues don’t even use it anymore, replacing it with OBP or OPS or some other metric that’s more indicative of a player’s skill. If you’re playing in a league, whether it’s standard roto or head to head, that uses batting average as one of its categories, ignore it. You can easily build a team that excels in each of the other four standard categories regardless of what it does for you in batting average.

I mean, look at this team:

Pos	Player	R	HR	RBI	SB	AVG
C	Matt Wieters	67	23	83	3	0.246
1B	Ike Davis	66	32	90	0	0.227
2B	Rickie Weeks	85	21	63	16	0.230
SS	Everth Cabrera	49	2	24	44	0.246
3B	Pedro Alvarez	64	30	85	1	0.244
MI	Danny Espinosa	82	17	56	20	0.248
CI	Adam Dunn	87	41	96	2	0.204
OF	Curtis Granderson	102	43	106	10	0.232
OF	Jay Bruce	89	34	99	9	0.252
OF	Josh Reddick	85	32	85	11	0.242
OF	B.J. Upton	79	28	78	31	0.246
OF	Cameron Maybin	67	8	45	26	0.243
UT	Michael Saunders	71	19	57	21	0.247
	Total	993	330	967	194

Are you telling me that you couldn’t walk away from your draft with this team? I matched it up with the team I just picked in the RotoGraphs Ridiculously Early Mock Draft and this team beats the snot out of that team. This team is even competitive in stolen bases, a category I focused on in that other draft. True, a guy like Reddick needs to have the career year he just had to get the final tally, but since there’s no first rounder on this roster, let’s sub in that guy for him then. What If I took Giancarlo Stanton and his, more than likely, .260 average? I’m actually coming out even better. There are tons of guys out there that fit the bill here, so if you’re thinking that two or three on this team have too similar ADPs to be able to get them all, then mix and match other players that have lousy averages and quality stats elsewhere. There are plenty.

So when you’re coming up with your game plan for this year and the thought pops into your head about punting a category, do it the right way. Be smart. Punt the category that truly means the least and where taking a zero in it won’t hurt you everywhere else. Yes, the closers can be tough to take with so much volatility at the position, but I’d rather fight for a decent reliever on the waiver wire than have to sweat something as pointless as batting average.