Jeff Zimmerman’s End-Of-Season League Reviews

Every fantasy owner should sit down in the next week or so and reflect on what went right and wrong in their leagues. More than reflecting, they need to take a few notes on the journey to help themselves improve next season.

The process doesn’t need to take a while but an owner should at least get a couple points, good and bad, on each league. It’s time for a little humility because some owners need to continue to take positive small steps forward. The rest of us need to start catching up. Hopefully, the following will nudge a few owners to take some notes before going into offseason mode.

Reviewing My Leagues

Overall, my season was a huge disappoint and I knew it was going to be a rough finish a couple months into the season. I made so many preseason and early season mistakes, I could never recover. Here are my leagues in order of finish.

TDGX (20-team, 40-man roster dynasty league)

Standings: 15 of 20
Hitting: 29.5
Pitching: 42.0

  • I’m still a couple seasons off from contending. I just need to keep grinding and don’t give up.
  • I need to find more power bats after coming in 18th in HR.
  • I’ll continue to churn pitchers for hitters. I gutted my entire pitching staff last season and it still outperformed my hitters. I’m always able to find pitching. I need better bats.

15-team Draft and Hold

Standings: 7 of 15
Hitting: 39.5
Pitching: 46

  • It was my first time doing a no waiver wire league. I’m not sure I like it at all. I may do one again just to see if I can improve but I don’t like the format.
  • Make sure 3+ players are qualified at a position. The Josh Donaldson injury forced me to get some 0’s at 3rd base. I need to really pay up for multi-position players.
  • Either get know closers or setup men. Don’t gamble on good closers. I wasted too many picks on potential closers. If I do one of these leagues again, I may completely punt Saves.

The Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational (15-team draft)

Standings: 7 of 15
Hitting: 26.5
Pitching: 59

  • I’m just staying away from single category contributors like Dee Gordon unless he’s at a huge discount. I hoped to get a decent lead in steals and trade him. Didn’t happen
  • Damn, I do fine in pitching. I’m considering going with a 70%/30% split next year forcing myself to just load up on bats
  • I wasn’t grinding as much as I could have been with this league and got lazy with it.

Tout Wars (15-team auction)

Standings: 4 of 15
Hitting: 48
Pitching: 43.5

  • I tried to compensate for usually getting too much pitching and adjusted my split in Tout Wars. The problems was that I adjusted the values twice giving almost no money to pitching. I was forced to trade off too many bats to get some pitching.
  • Additionally, I made a math error when evaluating steals and they were effectively zero in my evaluations. They were a mess all season. I need to second check the values.
  • Follow my advice. Many times I did some preseason work where I disagree with projections or player has some possible. Many times I didn’t add in the factor. One such instance was getting too many Jon Gray shares. I knew of the Colorado factors but he’s effectively been a two-pitch (fastball/slider) pitcher. He just gets struggles the third time through the lineup with his career FIP going from 3.44 to 3.67 to 4.19 each time through the order. I need to track these projection changing factors better and find a simple way to incorporate them.

AL-only Home Keeper League (9-team, 4×4)

Standings: 1 of 9
Hitting: 41
Pitching: 39





Jeff, one of the authors of the fantasy baseball guide,The Process, writes for RotoGraphs, The Hardball Times, Rotowire, Baseball America, and BaseballHQ. He has been nominated for two SABR Analytics Research Award for Contemporary Analysis and won it in 2013 in tandem with Bill Petti. He has won four FSWA Awards including on for his Mining the News series. He's won Tout Wars three times, LABR twice, and got his first NFBC Main Event win in 2021. Follow him on Twitter @jeffwzimmerman.

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Mario MendozaMember since 2017
6 years ago

What system do you use to play the AL Home Keeper league, where you have long term commitments to players and you just lose all those pitchers?