Fantasy Baseball: Successful Strategies for Your Fantasy Draft, Part Deux
Mandatory Credit: Brad Mills-USA TODAY Sports
Earlier this week I covered some necessary steps to guaranteeing success in your fantasy baseball draft. Today I’ll further explore those methods, as well as point out some additional tips to help you become the top dog on draft day.
In case you were sleeping behind the wheel, you can check out what you missed right here: “Successful Strategies for Your Fantasy Draft”
(Seriously, if you have not read the first part, you may be a little lost. Go ahead and check it out)
Step Four: Assembling Your Tiers
On Thursday we covered our list of shortstops and their stats. Now comes the most important part . . . we have fun.
We pick up the Baseball Prospectus and Baseball Forecaster, we pore over the eighty or so fantasy baseball mags there are nowadays, we listen to our favorite podcasts, we grab some beers with our buddy and drive all neighboring women away by debating K/9 vs. K%.
Every now and then as more and more information enters your head, pull up your spreadsheet and start adding notes, rearranging players, and start grouping your players into tiers.
The tier approach to positional ranking is the sentient navigation computer that plans your draft for you while it’s happening. Sometimes it can be crippling when you’re trying to decide between a pitcher, a shortstop, and a third baseman. If you’re using tiers, however, you’ll quickly see that there are five near elite starters left, four near elite shortstops, but only Josh Donaldson and Ryan Zimmerman before you start hitting the dregs . . . well, your decision just got a lot easier. It is nearly impossible to reach for players, unless it’s a pet player you actually want to reach for, if you’re using tiers.
The Elite: Troy Tulowitzki and Hanley Ramirez are definitely the cream of the crop, but in order to justify their lofty price tags they would have to stay healthy. Health, like contact rate and power, is a skill that has to be displayed over time before you can prove that you own it. At this point if either of them put up 550 at-bats it would be considered luck — the same kind of luck that made Michael Cuddyer bat .331 last year. We can’t put a number on “Health Luck” like we can with Cuddyer’s insane .381 BABIP last year, but luck is luck. Draft them if you’re feeling lucky.
The Near Elite: Elvis Andrus’ disappointing 2012 was due to a shabby success rate on the base paths (68%) which led to a career-worst opportunity percentage (16%). His success rate is back up (84%), his opportunities are back up (26%), and all of his other skills say he’s rock solid.
Ian Desmond was a little nicked up last year, but was still able to put up his second straight 20/20 season. Jose Reyes and Jean Segura are high risk high reward guys with more modest price tags than the elites.
The Starters: Ben Zobrist has no upside, but has a high floor. Everth Cabrera dropped his K rate and raised his contact rate by nine points each in 2013, and that can’t all be The Juice. Everyone is foaming about the mouth for Billy Hamilton, but Cabrera is a guy who could reasonably get you 60+ steals this year.
Andrelton Simmons‘ OPS jumped over 150 points from the first to the second half of last year. If Atlanta can do something about his pitiful 55% success rate on the base paths he could put up a 20/20 season.
Everyone seems to have given up on Starlin Castro and a lot of what I hear involves him moping about and having a bad attitude. I blame Cubs’ now ex-manager Dale Sveum, a guy who has no clue how to manage young players.
Calling out 23-year-olds like Castro and Anthony Rizzo in the merciless Chicago media is never a good idea. I don’t know how Sveum continues to get MLB jobs. I spent years blowing out my vocal cords repeatedly screaming at the television when Sveum, as third base coach for the Red Sox, repeatedly waved Manny Ramirez home into certain outs. For some reason Kansas City hired him for this same position for 2014 and I’m putting the over/under on number of times Billy Butler gets thrown out at the plate at 40.
Where was I? Oh yeah. I think Starlin Castro’s going to bounce back, and I’d be happy with him as my starting shortstop.
Fallback Options/Middle Infield Guys: I’ve never been a huge fan of Alexei Ramirez because of his lousy walk rate and dreadful stolen base success rate, but upon further reading this year I found that he has raised his steals success over the last three years from 58% to 74% to 77%. With his career high contact rate of 89 (93 in the second half) and a manager who obviously isn’t shy about giving the green light, up you go Alexei, into the previous tier! Say hello to Everth for me! Hopefully I’ll be seeing plenty of him this year!
(This goes to show that your spreadsheet should be a work in progress right up until draft day.)
The rest of the guys in Ramirez’ former tier are unexciting place-holders.
The Kids: Jurickson Profar and Xander Bogaerts are a couple of prized prospects that could go early — or could slip. If my starting lineup is set and I have a good core of pitchers I’ll snag one of these guys for the upside. Otherwise, I’ll see them next year.
The last tier consists of leftovers that will either hang out on my bench or perhaps fill my MI slot in leagues that use that position.
Step Five: Adding Aesthetic Value
For every position there is a line between two tiers. If your starter is below that line you will be sad. Turn that metaphorical line into a literal one and put a big black block there. If there are only two or three guys left above your Black Line, then scrap whatever plans you had and draft one of those guys. Do not fall under the Black Line!
The next step, and this is very important, is to give each of your tiers a color. During the draft, “accidentally” let people catch a momentary glimpse of your spreadsheet. Such a colorful array of stats will strike fear into their hearts, throwing them off of their game.
Step Six: The RUD Index
RUD stands for Reliability/Upside/Downside. This is a grade you give to each of your players that attempts to simply portray if players come with risk, reward, or both.
First, assign a letter grade — A through F like a school paper — that states how confident you are that the player’s production by the end of the year will meet or exceed your projections. The main factors to consider for your RUD score:
- Health
- Age/Experience
- Underlying peripherals that seem to contradict the player’s recent performance (hit%, BABIP, strand rate, FIP, etc)
- Health
- Changing leagues/teams
- Strange X-Factors (Ryan Braun’s juice, Yasiel Puig’s Puiginess)
- Health
Once you’ve decided on a letter grade for your player, ask yourself, is it more likely that this player greatly exceeds these projections or tanks? If you’re smelling upside, add a plus. If it’s downside, put a minus. If neither, just don’t put anything at all. If you have absolutely no idea whatsoever, like in the case of a foreign import like Jose Abreu or Masahiro Tanaka, add a question mark.
Yeah, I called you “decrepit”. Wanna fight about it? (Mandatory Credit: Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports)
An A+ for Effort
There are two things that are necessary to win your fantasy league: stability and profit. You need to accumulate stats and having a bunch of proven money-in-the-bank A and B players is necessary as a foundation. Your early draft picks and big money auction guys should be doing this for you. Once your base is set you need to find profit somewhere, you need upside, you need your sixth round pick to perform like a third-rounder, you need your $5 starting pitcher to earn you $15, so on and so forth.
When you look down your list of players and see a bunch of A’s and B’s, you have your stability. When you look down your list of players and see a bunch of +’s, you have your upside. Don’t let the school grades fool you, an A- is not always better than a C+.
If your first three picks in a 12 team roto league are Adam Jones (A), Adrian Beltre (B), and Shin-Soo Choo (A) then you can take on some risk at 1B with the likes of the decrepit Albert Pujols (C+) or still developing Eric Hosmer (C+). However, if your first three rounds are Troy Tulowitzki (D-), David Wright (C-), and Giancarlo Stanton (C+) then you should be looking to fill out the next few rounds with the likes of Hunter Pence (B), Adrian Gonzalez (A), and Matt Holliday (B-) — even if they’re a little boring.
If your projections are better than everyone else in your league then you can win taking twenty safe picks. If, however, you’re mortal like the rest of us, and at the end of your draft you have only two players with a +RUD score, you will finish fifth. If, by the end of your draft, everyone on your team is a C or a D, you have a minute chance of winning your league and most likely you’ll finish in the bottom three. A winning team is a balanced roster, not just in terms of speed and power, but in terms of safety and risk.
Join us next week when we talk about auction planning!