The Smartening Up of Our Competitors

For those of you who have read my many snake draft and auction recaps, you may recall that I rely on the same strategy season after season. No matter the format, I load up on hitting and pay significantly less for pitching than my competition. There’s a reason I continue to follow this strategy — it works. For me, at least. I have been quite successful following the plan, and when I don’t finish in the money, it’s typically because my offense was filled with busts, rather than my pitching performing like the weak staff I presumably paid for. Unfortunately, the strategy may finally have to be tweaked, as our competitors have official smartened up.

Ever since the introduction of the various ERA estimators FIP, xFIP and then SIERA, the fantasy baseball community has gradually improved their ability to project pitching performance. But if my leagues are any indication, this year owners have taken the biggest leap forward. The idea behind my offense-first draft strategy is that during the season, I will be able to improve my pitching staff in two potential ways — by buying low on pitchers who’s skills suggest imminent ERA improvement (by simply comparing ERA to SIERA) and/or by just picking up those same pitchers from the free agent pool after an impatient owner dropped them. Like clockwork, the latter would occur every single year and I would be able to cobble together a top half pitching staff, while also benefiting from the severe ERA improvement the pitchers’ SIERA marks hinted at.

Surprisingly, this season those expected drops have just not occurred. It’s slightly more understandable in the 15-team LABR mixed league given we’re all industry participants, though in past years there have been such pitcher drops. But frankly I am shocked that even in my local 12-team mixed league, there have been precious few, if any, of these types of drops.

These are some of the names that have remained on rosters all year, despite inflated ERA marks:

*First picked up the week of April 27, posting a 4.69 ERA/3.39 xFIP since

This is not a list of elite arms. I purposely left off those names like Carlos Carrasco, Michael Pineda and Corey Kluber because no one was dropping them even if we didn’t have ERA estimators to consult. Instead, this is a group one might consider near the bottom tier of starters in a shallow 12-team mixer, even if they were performing as projected in the pre-season. And yet, every one of them has remained on a team since initially being acquired at our auction.

The majority of this list includes extremely unproven entities that one could easily justify jettisoning after a couple of bad outings. But we’re far away from just a couple of bad outings as three of the seven still hold ERA marks above 5.00 three months in! Their owners have remained patient though, perhaps with the knowledge that their SIERA marks are drastically lower and the optimism that things should get much better from here on out.

In past years, I can guarantee you that at least half of these guys would be floating around our free agent pool, if they hadn’t been scooped up by yours truly already. Have you noticed significantly fewer silly drops of starting pitchers underperforming their SIERA marks in your leagues as well?

When every fantasy player starts interpreting information identically, our edge is lost. Then it just comes down to luck and injury avoidance and that’s no fun. But the problem with tweaking the strategy to account for our more knowledgeable competition is that pitching ratios still fluctuate wildly, and that’s what we pay for on draft day (along with strikeouts of course). So how much sense does it make to spend 30%-35% of your auction budget on pitchers when a whopping 28 starters currently sport a better ERA than unanimous pre-season ERA champion favorite Clayton Kershaw?

One of those with a better ERA than Kershaw is the inexplicable Mike Pelfrey. That’s the equivalent of Ben Revere breaking out for 20 homers. The latter will never happen, but there’s so much outside a pitcher’s control that affects his ERA that it’s not so crazy that mid way through the season, Pelfrey has a better ERA than Kershaw. And for this very reason, I hesitate to adjust my strategy even if it becomes a bit more difficult to improve my staff during the season than it used to be.