Author Archive: Chad Young

In Part I of this journey (and it is a journey), we discovered that:

• There are very few followers
• There are even fewer predictable followers
• There are even fewer predictable followers who put up numbers obviously good enough to be trusted in fantasy baseball

You could be forgiven for walking away now, muttering under your breath, “Why is he still writing? What more do I need to know?” But we ended with a caveat:

There are some guys worth using when they follow if you happen to roster them, but there aren’t many of them, and even they aren’t really sustainable or predictable enough to roster them specifically as followers, with rare exception.

Those exceptions have less to do with the pitcher’s involved and more to do with your league structure, which is what we’ll cover in part II.

And you can’t end on a cliffhanger like that, right? I introduced eight questions in Part I and answered the first three. Today we are on to the next three.

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As the manager of a fantasy baseball team, I am constantly asking myself what I can do to make my team better. How can I add a few more HR or close that gap in saves? How can I strengthen my middle infield or take advantage of my supremely deep outfield?

I can ask these questions and find potential answers because I know what I am striving for. Stats roll in, standings update, and my team ticks up or down in response to what I did. Or in response to the whims of the baseball gods. Or in response to yet another injury. But regardless of what happens, I know what the target is and I strive to get closer to that target.

At RotoGraphs, we don’t have standings to track, but we do have a target: to effectively serve you, dear reader. To help you in your quest to dominate your fantasy foes, to share information you will find useful, and maybe, just maybe to entertain you a bit along the way. With that in mind, we’d like to get to know more about you and what you think about us.

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I don’t know about you, but as a kid I was inundated with messages about not being a follower. “Don’t be a sheep,” they said. “Be a leader,” they said. “If your friends all came out of the bullpen to throw bulk innings after, would you do that too?” they asked.

And now I want to call all those people and say, “Have you been watching the MLB postseason? Everyone wants to be a follower!”

The opener/follower structure is certainly having it’s moment and it’s easy to understand why this has value to MLB teams. You can split the opening innings between a left-handed and a right-handed arm, making lineup construction a little more difficult. You can let your follower get to a third time through the order without that third time starting with the big bats at the top. And you can guarantee you get one of your pen arms in the game for the first inning, when you can control the matchups.

The value to fantasy teams, however, is less obvious and worth evaluating.

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Back in early March, when we were young and naive, full of hope and optimism, not yet beat down by the Tommy John surgeries and broken hamates of the world, I shared my 10 bold predictions for the 2026 fantasy season.

I sorted those predictions from “coldest to boldest” so I’ll go through them in that order here. I guess that means if I miss on the first couple, things could get really ugly, huh?

My goal in evaluating these will be to ask three questions: 1) was I right? 2) was this prediction helpful for fantasy drafters? and 3) do I expect to double down on this for 2027?

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Over a fantasy season, it’s hard to trace results back to the decisions or actions you took that led to that result. We take so many actions from keepers (if your league has them), to the draft, to trades, to FAAB or waiver moves, to lineup decisions, that parsing what mattered and what didn’t can be impossible.

Instead, I find it is more productive to evaluate things the other direction – look at decisions you made or actions you took, determine how they impacted your final results, and then decide if you did something right and repeatable or wrong and avoidable. That is how I started the analysis of my trade for Tarik Skubal. And that’s why I am diving into my bullpen in Ottoneu League 1.

I felt I had a strong team, with a good lineup and a top-tier rotation. I finished 4th. That’s not terrible – we pay out the top four spots and I still get bragging rights over eight managers, many of whom I have competed with for nearly two decades. But it isn’t what I hoped. And the bullpen might be why.

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On June 27, I had a team sitting in second place in a 4×4 league, 6.5 points out of first. This particular league, an Ottoneu league called the Food and Travel League, pays out prizes in the form of food and/or beverages. It is one of my favorite leagues, both for the prizes and the competition, and finishing top three in that league is a goal every year – it’s much more fun to receive food than to figure out how to ship it.

I had never won this league and while the gap to first made me wonder if this was the right year to push in my chips, I also saw a clear path to finishing second or third (fourth place was 7.5 points behind me). But I was behind the pace on innings pitched and needed arms. I was third in all of the pitching rate stats (HR/9, ERA, WHIP), but was ninth in IP and, as a result, tied for eighth in strikeouts. Gaining points in Ks while maintaining my rates was an obvious path forward.

So I made a trade. I ended up winning the league, but the trade was costly and it is worth wondering if the trade is why I won the league, or if I could have won without the deal.

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Whether you think first of Lenny Kravitz or Yogi Berra, the simple truism used to title this article is a more than just a pithy saying. Sometimes we think a game is out of reach – and it turns out it isn’t. Sometimes we think a series is won – and it’s not. And sometimes you think it’s late September and my fantasy standings are locked in. But are they really?

There is still a lot that can happen even in the last four days of the season.

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Welcome to the final two weeks of the season. Or close to it, anyway. When games wrap up Sunday afternoon and evening, we will officially have 14 days remaining before the regular season wraps up on September 27.

With the end so near, sit/start calls for your rotation have changed. Maybe in your head-to-head league, things are pretty normal – you max out innings and games played; if you have a limit on games started by your pitching staff, you try to identify the best starts that fit under that limit. The stakes are higher, but the process might be the same.

But in season-long leagues, there are some nuances that should change your typical thought process.

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On Saturday, Sal Stewart hit his 30th HR and Sarah Langs pulled yet another fun stat:

Sal Stewart is the 14th rookie in MLB history with 30+ homers and 100+ RBI in a season the 9 previous players to do it since the rookie of the year award began (1947) all won it

— Sarah Langs (@slangsonsports.bsky.social) 2026-08-29T19:07:32.184Z

That sent me scampering to the FanGraphs Rookie Leaderboards where you would see that Stewart, for all the fun counting stats, is the 7th best offensive rookie by fWAR (and is behind some (pitchers, as well), and the 9th best by wRC+.

But this article isn’t about Stewart, it is about the two fine young gentleman who top that wRC+ rookie leaderboard Esmerlyn Valdez and Munetaka Murakami. There are no many debuts more fun that those two. Murakami is going to have 30 HR any day now (I am writing Saturday, so maybe he already does?) and Valdez is on pace for 40, if only it were for those pesky months in Triple-A.

But Murakami and Valdez share something beyond prodigious power: a prodigious inability to make contact.

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Hot Right Now (HRN) is a weekly Ottoneu feature focused on popular players currently being auctioned or players who you should think about auctioning in your Ottoneu leagues. Even if you don’t play Ottoneu, we’ll be highlighting players you should be looking at in deeper and keeper formats. In this feature, we will break down players into two sections:

1. Current Auctions: A closer look at players being auctioned at a high rate.
2. Hot Performers: Players with a high P/G or P/IP over the last 14 days who are also rostered in 80% of leagues or less.

The RotoGraphs Ottoneu team plans to run this feature weekly, updating fantasy managers on the biggest movers in Ottoneu leagues with an analysis of how these players could or could not help your roster.

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