Like explanations for whether or not Jennifer Garner is hot, there are almost as many draft strategies in fantasy baseball as there are players willing to try them. Trying to win all categories with balanced hitting and pitching is still the way 99 percent of us play, but here are a few outside-the-box stratagems being bandied about on fantasy blogs, and some players who fit in well to those gambits:
1. 10 Rounds of Hitting/Streamer’s Delight
This strategy says pitching don’t matter. Or rather, that you’re more likely to find top production in a late-round, breakout star (see Edinson Volquez, 2008) than you are by spending a round 4 pick on a tier 2 guy coming off a career year (see Aaron Harang, 2008). You fill up on safe hitting—studs at the corner infield positions, solid no-risk options in the outfield—and focus on rebound or high-upside starters in rounds 11-20. In ESPN’s March 2 experts draft, Jason Grey does a serviceable job of this, taking his first hurler in Round 10 and winding up with a Scott Kazmir, Josh Johnson, Clayton Kershaw, David Price, and Johnny Cueto.
Upside: No one beats you in the batter’s box (assuming you picked your offense well)
Downside: Old arms breaking down, young arms not panning out, and facing the grim reality of saying to you bar buddies: “Really need a win out of Jeff Karstens today.”
Players You Need: Mark Teixiera (picking consistent offense is key), waiver-wire wonders like Kevin Slowey (last year, at least)
2. Punting Steals
This is one I might try this year. The idea: Steals are just one category of many, and outside the elite base-nabbers—Jose Reyes, Jimmy Rollins, BJ Upton—steals guys often don’t offer a whole lot else. (Critics would argue they score runs.) If you’re punting a category, it goes to reason that you’ll need to be that much better in ALL the other categories, which requires you to draft high-batting average and RBI production guys early and forgo sexier picks like the three guys above. It’s not the most fun way to play, but at least you don’t have to deal with the Michael Bourns of the world. This rudimentary eHow article takes you through the steps, but most experts argue you should only punt categories later in the season when you know you’re on solid footing in other categories.
Pros: Allows you to protect yourself from bad trades, spending too much value on one category.
Cons: Riskier than a Bernie Madoff IRA.
Players You Need: Dustin Pedroia: top of the order OBP guys in high scoring offenses to keep your run production healthy.
3. Ace In the Hole
This very usable strat says to reach for your favorite elite starter (hello, Tim Lincecum!), grab another useful No. 2 guy somewhere near round 6-7, and hope those two can pile on the wins and strikeouts while keeping your ERA and WHIP healthy. Of course, there’s always the chance your guy is a bust or gets hurt or both (see, Harang, Aaron), but doing this allows you to wait on the rest of your pitching staff until much later in the draft, and lets you take upside sleeper picks and gamble a little bit with the back end of your pitching group. So when Chirs Volstad posts an 18-win, 200 strikeout season, you can say you saw it coming in spring training. I’m normally not a fan of CBS’s fantasy writers, but Eric Mack has been putting out some useful sleep watches this spring.
Pros: Fun with sleeper pitchers and rookies. Nothing says “in your face” than winning a league with a pitcher who started the year in AA ball.
Cons: You’re putting a heavy bet on one player, and he if gets taken before you get to him, your draft is all FUBAR’d.
Players You Need: Tim Lincecum. Enough said.
Have a favorite strategy or thoughts about these? Let us know…
At some point I will do my due diligence in discussing a broad range of topics, both dealing with and without fantasy sports and all things fantasy. However, for now I seem to be stuck on my Metropolitans from New York. I could tackle many a topic as we head into Spring Training (hey, those Mets are 1-0); from the sudden full time left fielder that nobody had ever heard of before last August (that’s Daniel Murphy for those that are still oblivious), to the suddenly uneasy Ryan Church (and not from another concussion this time); from the completly undue crucifiction of Luis Castillo alongside the unfounded halo around Orlando Hudson to the overall disgrace of booing our own breatheren in battle; from September 2007 to September 2008. As a Mets fan, there are just countless items to chose from. I saw a post about fantasy pitching, so I’m opting to keep with the pitching motif.
New York Mets starting pitching. I have been kept quite entertained these last few weeks listening to and reading about the Mets potential starting five and I can’t get over just how wide the range of opinion is. With that, it’s obviously time for another fantasy jerk to add his two cents. As a warning to you readers, I happen to be on the side of the debate that says the Mets could potentially have a top end rotation. Here’s how it looks right now projecting the starting five:
1. Johan Santana. First, just to get this off my chest, for those of you that have chastised Johan for being, among other things, weak, unpatriotic, selfish, greedy, fragile, whatever for not participating in the Classic you might as well watch field hockey all summer on ESPN Ocho because you just don’t get it. I don’t care about the Classic not allowing him to play for insurance purposes (insurance is a whole separate conversation), or what the Mets may or may not have said if it was their decision. How did it get over everyone’s head that Johan has said all along that he would listen to the advice of the team that was paying his salary. How can that be so misconstrued as being selfish or money-hungry?! That is the attitude we WANT here - team comes first! Even worse than that, how can people question his durability or strength or injury? I realize that the last two Septembers have ended, well nevermind that, but have we forgotten about last year’s second to last game…. with Santana pitching…. on three days rest…. after throwing a career high 125 pitches his start before… with a torn meniscus…. throwing a three-hit shutout to keep us alive??!! We pay him ace money, he was an ace last year, he will be an ace this year. Period.
2. Mike Pelfrey. I have always been a fan of Pelfrey. I probably always will. With our infield, it’s about time we had ourselves a bowling ball, ground ball pitcher. Now working on getting his curve back into the mix should only enhance his record, not to mention a full (successful) year under his belt. There was so much talk about saving his innings, his arm last year and he was worked harder and harder, with more and more positives. Look for a 15+ win season and a pennant.
3 and 4. John Maine and Oliver Perez. Is Maine coming off a shortened season and bone spur surgery? Yes. Is Perez as consistent with his slider as he is with is English? Almost. Let’s quickly brush aside the salary discrepencies with Maine at 2.6 million and Perez at 12 million (another discussion awaits about free agency/arbitration/Scott Boras). Along with Pelfrey, Maine is working to get his curveball back to try and alleviate some of these 110 pitch, 5 inning performances with nothing but high fastballs (thanks for the ditching Rick Peterson). It was made clear to Perez that the Mets wanted anyone but him as our 4th starter and yet here he is, with quite a bit to prove along with that contract. IF Maine stays healthy (no reason he won’t) and IF Perez continues listening to Dan Warthan and forgetting Rick Peterson there is NO reason that these two won’t win a combined 25-30 games with ease.
5. Freddy Garcia/Tim Redding/Jon Neise. With all the negative talk about not having Derek Lowe or CC or Korea Japan the third, do people really not see the potential here? WORST case is Tim Redding wins the job and we have a mediocre number FIVE starter. Best case is we suddenly find Freddy Garcia circa 2004 and have struck gold. In between we have Neise, the future generation that we hope is not the Paul Wilson/Bill Pulsipher “future star” that has stuff, just not age or experience. Even if he ends up at triple A, think of the possible call up in case of injury or to strenghten the club in September…. And no, forget about Livan Hernandez being anywhere in the mix. If that happens, we’re in worse shape than I thought.
It’s the time of year when keeper-league players need to start thinking about who they’re keeping and who they’re throwing back into the draft pool. The old adage, purported by oh-so-many well-respected fantasy baseball writers is to never keep pitching. Always keep hitting because hitting wins championships.
Well, not always. Following that advice last year I gave up on “Tiny” Tim Lincecum, someone I had picked up when he was still in the minor leagues, made a point to go see when he was pitching in town, and generally fawned over like a six-year-old version of me did with Will Clark. “Look at that curve! He just threw a 98 mph heater!” But the word from on high was to toss all pitchers back in and hold on to your hitters.
The problem was I had no hitters. I let go of Tiny Tim and kept Derrick Lee and B.J. Upton. Not bad options, but given how many 1Bs were out there, a top tier pitcher would have done more to keep me out of last place.
This year, C.C., Tiny Tim, and Johan the Barbarian appear as the first pitchers on most baseball websites’ average draft positions, with most sites putting them in the mid-second round, picked in the low-teens overall. That puts them roughly between a Beltran-Rollins type and a Berkman-Perdroia.
But doing some regression analysis of my own, I looked at the rankings of pitchers in four categories (W’s, K’s, ERA, and BBs) and did the same with hitters (OPS, R, RBI, SB). I pushed those into a Power Ranking, which showed how well each player had dominated the categories (which for head-to-head leagues, would spell points). Tiny Tim (5.7 Power Rank), Volquez (8.5), Ryan Dempster (12.25), and Chad Billingsley (12.5) all ranked higher than the highest hitter, David Wright (16.75). Meaning they led their categories.
Now, the flip side to these numbers is that there’s more competition in hitting—getting the top tier hitters is more difficult than finding serviceable pitchers. That’s true, and is probably the cause of this never-keep-pitching rumor. But the numbers also show this is no hard and fast rule. If someone in my league is dumb enough to drop C.C. or Johan, I’m scooping him up and leaving the others to fight over Nate McLouth. Hell, I might eve keep Dice K, sabremetrics be damned. I just wish I’d done this last season.
The miracle run to the Rox-Sox World Series is long over. With Rockies Nation gearing up for another season of penny pinching build-and-sell, there’s plenty you can point to about why they’re terrible—low payroll, little pitching, the humidor, the altitude, the inability to resign one of the best hitters in baseball. But I have a different theory: it’s the color purple.
Purple. Color of royalty. Color of our majestic Rocky Mountains. Color that a hopeful Carol used as the central theme of her birthday party in a later episode of Growing Pains that the popular girls deemed “lame.” The color purple came into vogue in the sporting industries in 1990s when teams decided that fans responded well to colors like purple, teal, and aqua. They found them exciting, new. Expansion teams like the Diamondbacks, Marlins, and Devil Rays, basketball’s Toronto Raptors, the Baltimore Ravens in football, hockey’s San Jose Sharks and Anaheim Mighty Ducks, all gave in to this Technicolor dream..
But, one by one in recent years, all of those teams have either redesigned their uniforms to mute such pre-post-millenia colors or eliminated them completely. The Diamondbacks are now orange. The Devil Rays and Marlins mostly monochromatic. The Raptors mostly red and the Ducks play in black. (What about the Lakers, you ask? They’ve been around since 1946 and have won 15 championships. They could wear pink if they wanted to and people would still buy Kobe jerseys.) So why must the Rockies don baggy plum tunics whenever they leave the loving confines of Coors Field?
I won’t mention that purple is also a synonym for grandiloquence and exaggerated rhetoric. But what, really, is wrong with it? For one, fat people. With the overwhelming obesity trend in the U.S., we should be more sensitive than to make a bald guy with a goatee and a beer belly go out to see his favorite team wearing a t-shirt that makes him look like Grimace. Others as well. Those crotchety old volunteers that check tickets at Coors field in mulberry golf shirts make you think twice about getting older. I can’t say purple is a particularly good color for me (see popular girls comment, above).
With a different color for uniforms, the Rockies would attract more fans. Yes, the fan base was energized in 2007 and I’m sure Blake Street’s retail shops did well on all colors of Matt Holliday jerseys. The bandwagon was in full swing—for the first two games of the series. The team seemed all but forgotten by the time the series finally came back to Colorado.
Baseball in Colorado has more to do with the sunsets, mountains, and drinking Coors Lights outside than it has to do with what happens on the field. It’s an event, like going to the museum or dropping acid during a Ween show at Red Rocks. You go to games regardless of who the opposing team is (expecting the Cardinals, Yankees, and Cubs), pay $4 to $30 dollars a ticket (double for beer), and are playing pool at the Wynkoop Brewery by the 7th inning.
When the Rockies were good, where are the purple streamers? The magenta ticker tape parades? But, wouldn’t you perhaps buy one more t-shirt were it green and brown (like the actual color of our mountains), white (like the champagne powder), or tie-dyed (hey, Boulder!) than a static, dated color that’s only connection to Colorado is a mediocre appropriation of a patriotic parable? I would. So would the 275-pound guy eating nachos next to me, I bet.
Okay, so I’ve perused the latest blogs since the Winter Meetings have concluded and came across one that I enjoyed… at least until the closing remarks. It discussed, of all bullpens, the Detroit Tigers. While I agreed with the assessment, I was a bit concerned with the comparison made between the Metropolitans of, yes, it’s Queens and the Bronx Bombers. Now perhaps the tag of Bombers is better suited for those Mets the last couple seasons but I believe that’s where the similarities end.
Being a fan of the above-mentioned team from Queens, I realize the correlation will always be there with the dollars spent. I’m not oblivious. But I feel I have to ask the general population: “With the record payroll year to year, how have those Spankees fared lately?” No, the Mets have not done any better – search google for the last World Series appearance for the Mets and you’ll see those stinkers from cross town in the same listing. But if I may, here are a few of the latest signings to compare…
Francicso Rodriguez – of course we start there. $37 million for 3 years for the obvious number one need in all of baseball. Nobody can disagree with the need for a closer on the NY squad not named the Yankees. Have people forgotten that Mariano Rivera is making $15 million a year? After coming off shoulder surgery? Surgery performed by the Mets’ docs? ‘Nuff said.
C.C. Sabathia – need I say more? Well, I will anyway. Whatever happened to the abundance of Yankee pitching prospects that were going to carry them for the next 15 years? Names that were untouchable in trade talks… oh that’s right, they’ve been traded or they’ve flopped. Now I will agree that my Mets spent some of the farm on Johan Santana but it was the 2007 version of F-Rod. We had a need and we filled it with the top available guy out there. The Yankees decide to set another contract record with the David Wells of 2008. Now by no means am I comparing Wells to Sabathia. But how can someone sign a deal worth almost $200 million and say “It’s too bad it’s the AL and I won’t get to hit anymore.” In his 3 seconds as a Brewer, did he forget he came from the AL? Look at Wells and look at Sabathia… and come see me in a year and we’ll talk. My guess is that by that time, the Yankees will be looking to pick up Barry Zito’s contract.
J.J. Putz – that’s right, the Mets have their own two-letter first name now. The Mets went into the Meetings needing a closer and a better bullpen and in a matter of two days, all looks gold. Yes it’s all on paper right now but time will show… out the door goes a disgruntled player, fallen out of favor and an unproven, unstable kid. In comes a 30+ save/year setup man. While I was a fan of both Heilman and Smith, I welcome Putz. It’s a win-win situation. If he comes to NY thrilled to be a setup man, the Mets have gone from disastrous bullpen to near the top with just those two changes. If Putz decides to be a putz and whine about not closing, his name could become very valuable before the trade deadline. If nothing else, he’s no Kyle Farnsworth…
Okay so this became less money talk and more Mets rule-Yankees suck talk but hey, I’m a fan of the team from Queens. Sue me. I’ll get a Metropolitan lawyer.
Oh Fernando, why have you left us?
I once met a man claiming to be Fernando Rodney’s cousin, on a beach in the Dominican Republic. It was April, warm, the World Baseball Classic in its nascent stages and Rodney had just blown the doors off a hapless Team USA. Bomba—that was what the portly cousin called himself—stared deep into my eyes and said the three words I’d longed to hear: “Brugal rum! Cheap!”
Those were the days.
The Tigers closer situation, one which I once raided on the trading block of MLB the Show 2008, is in complete disarray. Joel Zumaya, who throws the ball so hard you expect it to disintegrate a la the truck in that When the World Stood Still trailer, is hurt and may always be hurt. Rodney couldn’t keep the command on his change up to get guys out and faced a number of implosions late in the year.
GM Dom Dombrowski made some moves at the winter meetings, sending outfield prospect Matt Joyce to Tampa for on-again, off-again Edwin Jackson, but couldn’t get a closer, being out bid n the end by The New York Metropolitans, who are becoming the the Yankees of New York… uh, I mean… Queens?
I never thought I’d ever in my life write these words, but I already miss Todd Jones.
Page will be up and running in time for Fantasy Baseball season. Stay tuned!
