Justin Mason’s 2022 Apology Tour: FPAZ

2022 was the worst year I have ever had as a fantasy player. I played in 16 leagues and did not cash in a single one. The hard part is that I don’t even know what went wrong. I had teams I really liked coming out of the draft and some that were doing very well throughout the season. Over the next few weeks I will deep dive into each team in a series of articles to examine what went wrong and what the common threads were. This is my 2022 Apology Tour.

The third team I am covering in my apology tour is my first draft of the year. The first 23 rounds of the draft happened on November 11, 2021 at the First Pitch Arizona Forum at Arizona Fall League, which I highly recommend people go to if you have never been, and the rest of the draft is a slow draft resuming in January. This is a 50 round draft and hold league. It is 5×5 roto with 15 teams. The league had a number of great industry players in it and I finished 14th.

The Draft
With the league being a draft and hold, the draft is clearly the most important part of the league. I got my first choice of draft pick in KDS and chose the last spot because I wanted the first pick once the draft resumed in January to the player whose value might have raised a ton with news over the month and a half in between the beginning and the resumption of the draft.

My first real mistake actually happened before the draft. No one other than me was prepared. I have ranks done much earlier than most and instead of just taking the advantage that I had over the field, I shared my ranks with anyone who needed it, which was about half of the draft. It was a free league and I had a lot of friends in the room. This clearly took away a big advantage I had coming into the draft, but I was ok with it.

Here is my team:

My second mistake was taking Cedric Mullins in the first. Mullins was great again, but he was not a first round pick. Part of the reason for the pick was the meme of it. I was the Mullins guy in 2021 and with a group of friends in a free draft, it was fun to be able to say he was a first rounder, but I left a lot of value on the table by taking him over other players.

My third mistake was investing too much into injury risk/huge regression candidates like Nick Castellanos, Anthony Rendon, Shane Baz, Huascar Ynoa, Ramon Laureano etc. I also should have invested in another closer in the first 23 rounds. It forced me to speculate too much on closers after we resumed the draft in January and I was unable to secure one that would remain closing for most of the season. Add that to Iglesias being traded to a set up role, and it was hard for me to gain traction in saves. Outside of the saves issue, I actually liked what I did in the first half of the draft.

The top of my rotation was pretty great with Scherzer, Musgrove, and Lopez. The problem was the lack of depth in my rotation. With injuries and poor performances my pitching just never came together from the back end of the draft. I think if I had been able to get one or two more reliable starters, it would have looked a lot different. My offense had the same issues. I definitely had some disappointments in the first 23 rounds with my hitters, but I got virtually nothing other than Jose Trevino from the back half of my draft. That put the nail in my coffin as injuries inevitably built up.

Conclusion
In draft and hold leagues, at bats and innings pitched are how you win. It is a volume game. My inability to do well in the back half killed me. I definitely made mistakes in the beginning, but I could have overcome them with a strong end game. It was an early draft, so it is to be expected that sometimes those go awry.