Introduction: Assault on the Pinochle

Welcome. We are two brothers, aggregate age 122 years, of which roughly 106 have been spent as stat geeks and baseball fans, probably in descending order of intensity. One of us, Michael, resides in Manhattan and is a former academic economist, self-described as an idiot savant in econometrics. He’s why you’ll keep reading, if you do. The other, Dan, resides in Albany, New York, the hub of civic virtue, and knows how to type. He also knows just enough about economics and statistics to translate for the multitudes when his brother is speaking in tongues.

Astonishingly, Michael was a Fantasy Baseball virgin until last year, when his brother tarnished his theretofore-unsullied innocence by recruiting him to replace an owner who went AWOL at the last moment in a $50 buy-in league. It might as well have been an introduction to freebase, and overnight, homemade multiple regression analyses started popping up like toadstools. We’ll share the results of one recent study with you next time: an attempt to identify hitters who were pitched to differently, and reacted to the pitches they saw differently, in the second half of the 2014 season, betokening (we surmise) a newfound respect among their opponents. You don’t need our help to figure out that you might want to draft Nolan Arenado or perhaps Jedd Gyorko. But how about Ender Inciarte, Ike Davis, and Delmon Young, all of whom we recommend?

Anyway: having finished third and fourth, in an order we won’t disclose, in last year’s $50 league, we took the obvious next step. We are officially registered for the NFBC Main Event, live in New York City on Thursday, April 2nd, $1600 buy-in, $100,000 grand prize, and note this, James McManus and Colson Whitehead: we’re using our own money. We’d like you, FanGraphs readers, to join us in our assault on what Norm Crosby would have called the pinochle of success in Fantasy Baseball. (Yes, we know that the buy-in for the World Series of Poker Main Event is 10k, and yes, we know that there are NFBC events with buy-ins of 10k and more, and yes, we could no doubt find evefn pricier leagues if we knew where to look. Maybe next year.)

Step 1 in our quest for immortality: Prepare for, and then engage in, an NFBC “slow draft,” in which 15 (or 16, assuming none of the other teams involves a folie a deux) lunatics have nothing better to do in January than draft—hell, know the names of—50 players apiece, with whom they will be stuck for the entire season. This of course requires exhaustive research and meticulous strategizing. Our draft position: 8th in the first round, and every round thereafter. Our preparation: encyclopedic. Our draft strategy: impeccable. First violation of our draft strategy: 8th position in the first round. Outcome of draft: troublesome. Details coming in our next post or two.