RotoGraphs Fantasy Awards
The regular season is over, and fans of 22 teams are either rosterbating or sharpening their knives for awards season. Let’s jump in this fricassee with our own brand of blathering: the RotoGraphs Fantasy Awards. This week, our writers will be looking back on the excellence put forth in fantasy baseball this season and bestowing great honors upon them.
In order to save those writers some time, we’ll just define the awards here. Hey, it looks like some of the real-life baseball writers could use a brush up on the definition of their awards. We’ll use less legalese.
MVP
The fantasy MVP is NOT the best player overall. The fantasy MVP is the guy that returned the most value. So we give consideration to draft cost. Hint: in the AL it might not make much of a difference. But in the NL, where a player like Ryan Braun was excellent, but also expensive, you might find a surprise.
LVP
Real baseball isn’t so heartless to award a Least Valuable Player award, but fantasy managers aren’t known for their cuddliness. We’ll spot start a pitcher against our hometown team if we know they’re scuffling. So we can call a spade a spade and ‘reward’ the most expensive bust in baseball with this moniker.
CY YOUNG
Once again, the AL Cy winner in fantasy isn’t going to be Justin Verlander. You spent to get him. Instead, we want to know which pitcher cost you the least and returned you the best value.
BULL CY
The Bull Cy is the same idea, for relievers. Those guys deserve their own award, and not one named after an antacid.
TURTLE
The Turtle goes to the best buy-low in each league. All of our best teams had one of these waiver wire pickups or trade fleecings, so you may have your own favorite. But there are a few consensus second half studs out there.
HARE
The Hare is — you guessed it — the best sell-high in each league. This one is a little harder to pull off these days, what with all those RotoGraphs readers in your league, but they still exist, and looking at them always reminds us that skepticism is healthy.
If you’ve got your own idea for an award, post it. Maybe we’ll set a writer on it.
With a phone full of pictures of pitchers' fingers, strange beers, and his two toddler sons, Eno Sarris can be found at the ballpark or a brewery most days. Read him here, writing about the A's or Giants at The Athletic, or about beer at October. Follow him on Twitter @enosarris if you can handle the sandwiches and inanity.
This might be too ottoneu-specific, but it would be interesting: do you have a way to run all the league winners’ rosters through some kajigger and find out which player(s) appeared on the rosters in aggregate most often? Call it the POP (Piece of the Puzzle) award, or something less stupid.
I suspect you could call it the Mike Trout award
Unfortunately, don’t have a good way to do this automatically…but let me think on it and maybe I can come up with a good way to collect rosters from every first place team…
“fantasy managers aren’t known for their cuddliness”
Stupid glasses and bony elbows.
If MVP is relative to cost, then I can’t help but think that Headley is in the top 3 if he doesn’t win it.
Headley should be an absolute lock for NL Fantasy MVP. As is Trout in the AL.
Headley was not even drafted in most leagues.
dickey wins Cy Young AND MVP in the NL. right?
MVP NL – Headley obviously, Aaron Hill is the only other player I can think of that could make this list
MVP AL – Trout obviously, Encarnacion if you have something against SB’s.
LVP NL – Tulowitzki was an injury, Lincecum is a great choice I saw him drafted at the back end of the second round in some drafts, Votto and Kemp could appear here to some degree…
LVP AL – Bautista, Ellsbury, Longo were all very injured and very expensive, A-Gon killed AL-only teams that drafted him in the first round when he got shipped to LA… Teixeira continues to disappoint.
Cy Young AL – Jake Peavy, no one else is particularly close
Cy Young NL – R.A.Dickey obviously, Gio a close second, but a more expensive player at draft time
Bull Cy AL – Fernando Rodney
Bull Cy NL – Aroldis Chapman
^ Both pretty easy choices
Turtle -My first choice is Jim Johnson. 51 completely free and undrafted saves. Yes, we all read the article about how he doesn’t strike out enough guys. No one’s third closer does. For those of us that drafted Madson/Thornton, he was a godsend on the waiver wire before the season started.
Hare – The Pittsburgh Pirates? Is that a legitimate answer?
Trumbo for Hare
ooh, i was going to suggest repeat winner andre ethier, but this is going to be close…
Brian LaHare, amirite??