Justin Mason’s 2022 Apology Tour: NFBC Main Event

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 thirteenth team I am covering in my apology tour was my twelfth draft of the year. The draft was a live draft with weekly FAAB. It is 5×5 roto with 15 teams and an overall. The league was packed with great fantasy analysts and some top tier NFBC players. I finished 14th.

 

The Draft
An NFBC live draft is an event in itself. I did mine in Las Vegas this year and there were six or seven Main Event drafts occurring at the same time in two different ballrooms. My draw in the draft was a pretty fun group with a ton of industry analysts including Scott Jenstad of RotoWire, Paul Sporer of Fangraphs, Michael Govier of FTN, Dalton Del Don of Yahoo, Dustin McComas of Five Tool, Jeff Zimmermann or Fangraphs who was teamed up with his co-author of The Process Tanner Bell and Dave Potts of RotoGrinders. It was a very fun draft and was probably more relaxed than most high stakes drafts because of the great people involved.

Once again, my draft was pretty strong at the start:

Looking in retrospect, I actually feel decently about the draft of this team. While Hader didn’t return value, he did get me a bunch of saves. For the most part, I got what I wanted out of my top 10 picks, which is pretty good. The problems came after my first ten picks. Regression from Nelson Cruz, Robbie Grossman, Frank Schwindel and Cesar Hernandez was disastrous. Coming out of the draft I knew I was light on power and had almost drafted Hunter Renfroe over Andrew Benintendi. The difference between drafting Beninntendi over Renfroe was the difference between 12th place in home runs and fifth place in home runs.

Clearly my biggest issue on this team was pitching. The start of my rotation was great with Aaron Nola, Joe Musgrove and Patrick Sandoval, but after that I was unable to land a single starting pitcher that really benefited my team. Anthony DeSclafani, Luis Patino, and Steven Matz all got hurt and I invited more injury trouble on my team by trying to stash Jack Flaherty and Lance McCullers. In NFBC leagues, you need to be really careful with stashes because there are no IL spots.

I also ended up with no second closer in spite of drafting multiple specs. The Padres looked like they were going to go with a closer committee with Robert Suarez rumored to be the leading candidate. Mid-draft a report came out that Chris Stratton would be the co-closer with David Bednar. Kyle Finnegan looked to be the leading candidate to get saves in Washington. By Opening Day, Tanner Rainey had been named the closer in Washington and the Padres traded for Taylor Rogers. Christ Stratton struggled and would lose the role shortly after that. I was never able to get that true second closer in FAAB.

April
During the month of April I spent my FAAB attempting to address what I thought was my weakest point which was saves. Unfortunately, I didn’t land much of anything in that department in spite of spending $108 on three relievers.

I did have a good stream with Daulton Jefferies, but I pushed my luck a little too far because he was blown up the following week. However, by the end of April, I was in fourth place in the league with a pretty strong offense and pitching staff.

 

May
In May, I tried to build up my starting pitchers as I had lost DeSclafani to injury, Matz to injury, Patino, and McCullers had a setback.

Initially Tyler Wells, Josh Winder, and Nick Pivetta were pretty nice pickups for me helping shore up my staff. Spoiler Alert: That would not end well. I also made a big spend on Nolan Gorman for a power boost and upside play. While he ended up being fine, I regretted spending the amount I did.

A week later, Scott Jenstad would pick up Jon Berti for $13 and he would go on to steal 39 bases for Scott which was the difference between fourth place in the category and 14th place in the category. Jon Berti signlehandedly won Scott the league. Was this lucky? Sure, but you have more chances to get lucky if you don’t blow huge amounts of your faab on one or two guys early on. The more darts you have the more dart throws you can make. It is something I will subscribe to in future leagues.

By the end of the month, I had a fantastic offense and a mediocre pitching staff and I was in third place, but the standings were very fluid.

June
In June I made one real big move. Eduardo Rodriguez was on rehab assignment and could have been a huge boon for my pitching staff. I felt like he could be the biggest pitching pickup rest of the way. Unfortunately for me, he was placed on the restricted list less than two weeks later due to personal issues and I would be forced to drop him.

By the end of June, my pitching was coming together and my hitting was still among the best in the league. I moved into first place just ahead of Scott Jenstad and Jeff Zimmerman/Tanner Bell. I was feeling pretty confident.

 

July
If you were wondering where it all went wrong, this is the moment we have all been waiting for.

I spent most of the month making pitching dart throws. I didn’t want to put myself in a worse financial situation so I tried to be careful. Unfortunately, I could not land many saves outside of what I got from Kyle Finnegan. What really killed me was my pitching falling apart. Nick Pivetta, who had been great, turned back into a pumpkin. I got killed by just about every streamer: Michael Lorenzen, Chad Kuhl, Spencer Howard, and Janson Junk. This was also the week where Josh Hader began to fall apart, allowing nine earned runs in 1.1 innings during the week of July 11th. I had a 5.33 ERA during the month of July. I was never able to recover.

 

Rest of the Season

To be honest, this league hurt more than all of the others and not just because of the $1700 buy in. I would dig into each move I made the rest of the way, but it was really a bad July that killed me. My team would just kind of be mediocre the rest of the way. That one atrocious month was the difference between a pitching staff that might have been good enough to be competitive and a complete dumpster fire.

 

Conclusion
Pitching was my weakness. I left the draft with too many injuries and questions in the pitching staff and at closer and was never able to catch up. I also did a poor job of streaming, but had I focused more on building a safe, reliable pitching staff in the draft, I wouldn’t have been in that situation. In my drafts for 2023, I will be making pitching depth a priority.