I post one of these every year. My general observations, recycled from previous years.
1. The rules matter. A lot.
2. The ratio of players in the fantasy league to players in real baseball matters a lot.
3. Real baseball has gotten terrible. Not enough balls in play, too many strikeouts, walks, and homeruns. I favor making the ball a bit larger and less resilient. This will make it harder to strike batters out and harder to hit home runs. Perhaps something like this will be tried this season.
4. It used to be that a limit on total innings pitched was binding. But that was when dozens of pitchers would work at least 200 innings. Those days are gone.
5. Luck matters a lot. For that reason, you want to avoid players whose upside is mediocrity.
6. Take what the other owners give you. If they prioritize closers, then you want to try to prioritize something different.
7. Owners’ rankings tend to be “anchored” in the rankings provided by the site. Also, owners have reacted slowly to the drop in the contribution of starting pitchers.
For this year, I will talk about drop-offs. For any given position, how much of a drop-off is there between the 2nd-best player and the 7th-best? Between the 7th-best and the 12th-best? For outfielders, you can also look at the drop-off in the second outfielder, which means from 14-19 and 19-24. And so on for third outfielder.
I thought that with catchers, the big drop-off would be between 2 and 7. But then I quantified it, and the big drop-off is between 7 and 12, where you go from 500 projected plate appearances to 350. So don’t worry about getting one of the top catchers. Do worry about getting one of the last two or three catchers, because outside the top 8 or so, you will be stuck with a part-timer. By round 15, rather than select an OF or SP from the “long tail,” secure your catcher position.
As far as I can tell, the biggest 2-7 drop-off, by far, is in SP(1). Projections put DeGrom, Cole, and Bieber way ahead of the rest. Based on drop-offs, if my opinion mattered those three would be the first three players taken in a draft format. If I don’t get one of those. . .well, that’s why I don’t do drafts. Instead I prefer the auction format.
There is also a big 2-7 drop-off in relief pitchers. But if you miss one of the top three relief pitchers, you can still put together a superior pitching staff. It’s much harder if you miss one of the top three starters. So you can either take one of the top closers late in the 5th round or just wait it out.
There are also big 2-7 drop-offs at first and second base. You can try to get a top player at each position, get a top player at one and punt on the other, or punt on both. I favor the intermediate strategy.
UPDATE: I wrote this a month ago, and subsequently a lot of writers picked up on the way drop-offs matter in pitching.
I participated in two auctions last week, in what I call a shallow league, with only 12 owners and players from both major leagues included. The auctions had totally different dynamics.
In the first auction, the owners were filled with irrational exuberance at the beginning. I ended up not following anything like the strategy that I had in mind going in. Based on (2), I wanted to own a first-round pitcher and a first-round hitter, but based on (6) I had to adapt. Too many other owners had strategies built around first-round players (one owner bought two first-round pitchers, outbidding me to get them).
In effect, I gave away my first-round pick in exchange for three extra fourth-rounders. I would be happy to do that in a deeper league, with at least 15 owners, but in a shallow league I would prefer to do the opposite. In a shallow league, some of your fourth-rounders will end up no better than someone else’s 20th-rounders.
In hindsight, I think I had to adapt the way that I did in terms of strategy, but my execution was poor. For the same money, I could easily have gotten better players.
In the second auction, I was determined to avoid getting frozen out of the top players. I jumped on two of the top first-rounders. But it turned out that in this one the other owners were a lot of cheapskates. I spent most of the auction with the least available money. I figured that with everyone saving their money, the bidding would get wild on late-round players, so using (6) I did my best to pick up mid-round players. As things turned out, I got a second-rounder, a fourth-rounder, a fifth-rounder, two sixth-rounders, two ninth-rounders, and a tenth-rounder. But I got only 5 players ranked in the next ten rounds. In effect, my extra first-round pick cost me a third-rounder and 5 11th-20th rounders. That is just fine in a shallow league, where it’s not hard to get decent players after the 20th round, or from in-season pickups.
3. Real baseball has gotten terrible. Not enough balls in play, too many strikeouts, walks, and homeruns
Amen. It began long ago with the improvements in gloves, which turned many hits into outs, then gained speed with “charting” of where hit balls went. You could move fielders around and really decrease the number of balls that are missed. The most disappointing call in baseball is, “[Excitedly] There’s a high fly ball [deflated] right at the center fielder.” These changed what worked, and the spread of sabermetrics let people in the business know that hits and baserunning were low value, homeruns with a lot of strikeouts high value, and walks surprisingly good for putting people on base and wearing out pitchers.
Baseball is kind of where the NBA was several decades ago where players got so big and fast that the area around the basket kept getting clogged. The game was slowing down and getting boring to watch. An early attempt to change things was the 3-second rule but the brilliant solution was the 3-point shot. A basket from far enough away was worth 3 points instead of 2.
Baseball is trying the equivalent of 3-second rules but it really needs something else, something that actually adds to the game. My modest proposal is 8 fielders instead of 9. They can go anywhere (the opposite of recent proposals to “ban the shift”). It would add a new dimension to the game, a new thing for fans to argue about and second guess the manager about. It would also lead to a lot more hits and base running and more interesting play. So of course it won’t happen.
cool idea!
Love the fantasy baseball content…these types always seem to find each other
I’ve never played fantasy baseball but if I did I know that Jake deGrom is primed for a monster year, and there is a class of impending free agent shortstops who will be playing to join the $300M club.
You hear that a lot-“too many walks, strikeouts, homers”. Ty Cobb bitched that people like Babe Ruth had ruined “scientific” baseball, of which Cobb was a great example.
If you root for a team, you like it when your pitcher gets K’s, and your hitters get walks and hit homers. The larger K/HR rates are a function of a long-term trend towards greater athleticism in the sport.
I’m old enough to remember the baseball of the late 60’s-lots of soft-tossing pitchers, one-dimensional sluggers or defenive specialists, and plenty of really crappy umpiring. The game is better now. And it’s thriving-Fernando Tatis Jr’s $340 million deal being the latest evidence.
In the 1960s, I could go to a game on a school night and be home by eleven. There was no free agency then, so player salaries are not an appropriate metric to compare the two eras. I would love to combine today’s athletes with the ball that was used in the 1960s, or one slightly bigger to account for the larger size of today’s athletes.