Justin Mason’s 2023 Redemption Tour: First Pitch Arizona Draft Champions

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 didn’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. I could have easily brushed it off as a bad season or beaten myself up over it. However, I worked my butt off to get better.

Getting better started with my 2022 Apology Tour. I broke down each one of my leagues in depth to see the common strings between each team. It was an extremely illuminating exercise that helped inform my decisions in terms of my prep and drafting in 2023. It was a fruitful endeavor. I cashed in eight of my 20 leagues this season, including my biggest money leagues which led to a very profitable season.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I will be covering my teams that did well in this series, dissecting what I did right and what I did wrong in order to continue to improve heading into 2024. I will also be covering my teams that did not go so well in another Apology Tour series to examine why they were not as successful.

In my second article in the series, I will look at my first draft of 2023, my First Pitch Arizona Draft Champions League. The first 23 rounds of the draft happened on November 5, 2022 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 first.

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.

Here was my team:

My hope was that I could get at least one of the top tier starters with my first pick as they tend to not go as high in early DCs and if both of my top two fell, I could try out a pocket aces strategy. This worked out well when both Cole and Burnes fell to me at the end of the first round. This gave me a huge advantage in the pitching categories especially with the additions of Logan Gilbert in the eighth, Kodai Senga in the 18th, Eduardo Rodriguez in the 19th, and Dane Dunning in the 48th. Adding in Devin Williams, Clay Holmes, and Tanner Scott to help get me enough saves to dominate the league in overall pitching points is really how I won the league. In some ways I was lucky. I only had one real major injury to my starting pitchers in Chris Sale and I was still able to get 98 good innings from him. However, I led the league in innings while winning both ratio categories which was part of the strategy of starting with pocket aces.

I made a lot more mistakes in my hitting. Mullins in the third ended up being a reach, but for the second year in a row, I couldn’t pass him up. Tim Anderson was a huge bust in the fifth round. I didn’t get great returns from Alex Verdugo or Ryan McMahon. I got absolutely nothing from Matt Mervis, who was the talk of the AFL and very little from Jo Adell and Wil Myers. This meant that seven of my first 14 hitters were busts or underperformed.

I did have big hits in my later round that carried my offense. Whit Merrifield in the 17th, Triston Casas and Ha Seong Kim at the 20/21 turn, Spencer Steer in the 25th, TJ Friedl in the 27th, Geraldo Perdomo in the 39th and Zack McKinstry in the 43rd were are vital parts to my offense being able to be great in stolen bases and runs scored which was enough with the strength of my pitching to win the league. One of the common threads of those players was the positional flexibility. Drafting so many players that were eligible at multiple positions meant I didn’t take many zeros throughout the season. When I was hit with injuries in my offense, I had a number of guys to fill in. I was also able to optimize my lineups with good matchups because my team was so flexible. While I had some breakouts, I mostly had guys that played a lot and it was the boring players like Merrifield and Perdomo that ended up really saving me when the risky bets like Adell and Mervis didn’t pan out. Draft and hold leagues are won by these kinds of bets mixed with the breakouts. Take too many gambles and you risk too many zeros. It is a strategy I prefer in these formats and will continue to employ.

I will be heading to Arizona in about a week to defend my title. If you are there for FPAZ or the World Series, make sure you say hi.