Fantasy Baseball Strategy – Part III

Building Your Team: Draft and Auction Strategy

Assuming you’ve read the other two sections above, you know the pool of players, have a good idea of how much prospective offensive production is worth, and understand your league parameters. Now you just have to execute on that knowledge at your snake draft or auction.

1. Draft Strategy

The plan for the first 2-3 rounds of every draft is dependent on your spot Most of the time in subsequent rounds draft spot means little, as ADP (Average Draft Position; or market value) is softer, and so there’s tons of what could be on the board.

A. Subjective Rankings vs Average Draft Position (ADP) – You have some opinion about players beyond your number-cruncher rankings, and some of that opinion is on-market, and some is off-market. And since optimising a draft is about the best players per slot, if your opinion is in the numerator (who you think the best players are, because you love them), market value is in the denominator (what those players cost). Your task therefore is to understand not only what players will do, but also what those players cost.

Basically, my draft (as opposed to auction) rule is to be aggressive: always draft the player you think is the best on the board, as long as you don’t think that one of the several options on the board will come back to you in a later round. Don’t worry about drafting the own-your-ADP-best player. ADP is useful only insofar as it tells you when you can wait until the next round in drafting a player. The only player you can “reach” is a player you select in Round X when a 80-plus per cent probability exists that he’s available in Round X+1. Otherwise, no matter what the market says about a player, you always take the best on the board for your team.

B. League Depth – The size of the league you’re competing in, specifically the size of the universe of players (AL-only, or mixed), the number of teams there are, and the size of the rosters and benches, is paramount. In shallower leagues (e.g., 10-team or fewer mixed), there are more than enough quality players to be had late, as well as on the waiver wire’s ‘Honey Bee’ portion (the best options). As such, the ‘whales’ are truly elite, and the ‘minnows’ are barely more valuable than replacement-level stars. You should draft explosive players with the most upside (like Miguel Sano and Byron Buxton) earlier than usual, regardless of the steepness of the downside. You’ll always be able to find something adequate in case they flop, so there’s less of a penalty.

The deeper your mixed league, or the more narrowly specialized your ‘only’ league is, the more that equation drastically tilts. The waiver wire is generally thinner, and mildly productive professionals such as Hunter Pence and Adrian Gonzalez become notable upgrades from what’s available for free. In that case you almost want to care more in the mideseaon about a player’s floor than about his ceiling — at least for those early couple of rounds. If your late-middle pick doesn’t pan out, he’s pretty hard to replace, and whiffing and missing on those who go in the middle rounds might be especially costly.

C. First Round – This sets the tenor for your draft, starting your foundation of categorical basis in strength and weakness, and positional strengths and weaknesses too. Every slot is different, but for the sake of generalization, let’s split it into early, middle and late positions.

1. Early Position

This could be 1-3, or even 1-5 depending on the shallow depth of the elite player pool. In 2016, it appears that the ‘Big 3’ hitters are Mike Trout, Paul Goldschmidt and Bryce Harper, in any order, and then Clayton Kershaw wherever. In the early round, my bias is mostly to ignore positional scarcity and get a player who will help you collect gargantuan stats in four – or ideally five – categories, even if that player is a pitcher.

However you feel about the question of positional scarcity in general, I think it’s especially ill-advised to be concerned about it in the first three picks when the drop-off in value from one person to the next is the steepest. If you’re going to take a shortstop in the first three picks, you better have a real general stud like Hanley Ramirez in 2009, where you’d be drafting him anyway based on his projected stats slot on your roster alone; the fact that he happens to put up more points at his spot helps. Think of positional scarcity as a bonus.

2. Middle position

This is after the initial fall-off from the consensus top group – picks 5-8 in some years or later as the case may be – where the non-elite first rounders are largely interchangeable.

Those are pretty much my feelings in early position, except you won’t get as much across-the-board production. In general, you’re looking at a sure 3.5-to-4-category hitter (Giancarlo Stanton) or a riskier 4.5-to-5-category hitter (Manny Machado.)

3. Late position

That is typically the last 3-5 picks of the first round. You will have the choice of an upside player with the least amount of experience (Carlos Correa), a non-superstar five-category producer (Andrew McCutchen), a superstar coming off a down or injury-plagued year (Miguel Cabrera or another superstar starting pitcher (Max Scherzer).) Of course, where you’re willing to sacrifice pitching will be dictated by the historical trends of the time and the type of outlier – in the early 2000’s, you had Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez as perennial Top-five type pitchers and worth every penny, and Kershaw has earned his early draft selection the last few years.

I have no problem with any of these approaches. I personally would not bet on McCutchen as McCutchen – that’s no fun for me – but you can’t argue that the most you can lose at that kind of pick is a little bit. I would probably be looking for upside much, much later in the first round – a Correa, or Mookie Betts where there might be a possible explosion rather than a potentially possible level – than someone reliable at that late peak, and I would be looking for a pitcher fairly late in the game – there’s no question you won’t by the end of the draft, perhaps the end of the second round at the latest, if everyone else – hell, if everyone else – values pitching less than you do, so you would have to gobble up your hits and maybe skip straight to your second pitcher.

D. Rounds 2-3 – Some prefer to get 70 homers and steals in the first three rounds, while others prefer to get the two hitters and one elite pitcher neccessary. Still others prefer to shore up your rarest positions, and fill in later with more plentiful outfields and pitching. I subscribe to none of those rules, preferring best available player for the first three rounds no matter what. To me, Rounds 1-3 are all just ball busting for statistics, and shoring up weaknesses is something you do later in the draft and in regular season with waivers and trade.

E. Middle Rounds

1. Roster Flexibility

Numerous leagues actually mandate that you take your full starting roster before you can reserve any players, so you’ll want to have as much leeway with your roster as possible. Imagine – if you’ve taken four OFs by the eighth round, you aren’t going to want to take any more OFs if there’s a fifth available in Round 9, unless he’s comfortably the best player available, because you’ll shut yourself out of all future OF bargains. (Exception: if you want to use your utility slot, in which case, you would be shutting yourself out of all future 2B, 3B, SS or MI bargains). Along the same line, if you take two 1Bs early, you’re going to shut yourself out of bargains at first and third base later in the draft, by filling up your corner slot with two best-available players. You don’t want to go too far here – you’re necessarily going to shut yourself out of certain positional players at some point. But other things equal, it’s better to have one big potato and three dungarees with your corner left open, and one second baseman and one shortstop with your left open, in order to maximise your chance of catching bargains.

2. Category balance vs. Surplus

Whereas the first pick or two are all about getting the most total stats, the middle rounds are more about maximising categorical balance: if your 5th or 6th or 12th picks have gone pretty well, you might suddenly find your categorical strong suits and liabilities have flipped from the way they looked just last week. In a no-trade league such as the NFBC, this is even more important, since you can’t so easily turn a surplus into value later in the season. In a trading league – so long as people are reasonably – you can come out of your draft with four closers or nine starters or a team with too many homers and too little steals. Come September, you’ll want balance – but as long as you’ve got everything you need, it doesn’t matter how you got there. You don’t get extra credit for winning the seasons in a landslide, and such a strategy doesn’t return you any sort of end-of-year bonus. But it also doesn’t matter when you get your numbers. If you have nine starters and a huge surplus of wins and strikeouts by mid-summer, you can trade for five closers and get all your saves in late-August and September. It doesn’t matter when you get your numbers, only that you get them.

Just remember there’s not necessarily a perfect trade fit out there for your team, so you’ll have to pay a premium to realign the categories later in the year.

F Positional Scarcity Jeff Erickson and I wrote about this two years ago:

The three hard-to-come-by position players (you can make the case for third base, maybe even outfield if playing five there, but both are much more marginal these days):

1. Middle Infielders

In addition, you typically carry one second baseman, one shortstop and one middle infielder, and second base and shortstop are comparatively scarce, so plan to draft 1.5 times as many of each as the number of teams in your league. In a 12-team league, for example, you might see 18 second basemen and 18 shortstops go in the draft, or players 16-20 at the positions. The 16-20th second baseman might be the slightest bit less productive than the 60-70th OF (5 OF * 12 plus half the UT slot), but it’s not by much, especially when using last year’s rules or when assessing this year’s production in this decade – at least in most formats. All else being equal, you always want the middle infielder to the OF or first baseman, but don’t sacrifice that much production to fill your middle infield slot.

2. Catchers

If you’re going to pay more for a premium at a position, why not at catcher, especially in the standard leagues that want you to carry two of them? (In one-catcher leagues on Yahoo!, feel free to ignore me on this). As the early rounds of mock drafts always make abundantly clear, in a 12-team mixed league you’re carrying 24 to the back end, and that means a bunch of catchers who basically put up zip or who hit for a little power while doing a lot of damage to your batting average. In a 15-team mixed league, the back end of the pool becomes even starker. You don’t necessarily need to roll the two best catchers off the board – often those are overpriced in anticipation of the elevated injury risk at the position, and have shakier upside than you might think – but maybe you want to peg two capable humans who will work without destroying your team.

3. Closers

The main thing about closers is – they’re the only players in the pool who get you saves. You can punt catchers and middle infielders as long as your other position players pick up catches and were all over second head spots, but no matter how good your starting pitching is, it ain’t every getting you saves. I am a no trade or free-agent cuts forever kind of analyst. In a league where you can tank categories and still win–if you stack your killer team at every other position or….well, things could get dicey but–you can probably execute saves at some point in your schedule. However, in a more normal fantasy baseball league where everyone is pretty good, the teams at the bottom all quit and the teams at the top are solid all over the place, you’re going to need to swallow some saves at some point.

G. Categorical Scarcity

1. 1. Averages

It’s worth knowing how often each stat category emerges in your format. In particular 2012 (before the era of juice-leaks and cascading strikeouts changed the game) 14-team mixed had an average offensive starter at around 77 runs, 20 homers, 74 RBI, 12 steals and a .280 batting average (Numbers that have incrementally declined across the board since then). So steals were the scarcest commodity on offence, but cheap speed abounds deep because it is divorced from everything else. There’s very little free power late (barring a bat-average-crushing Ryan Howard-type for your first baseman) because it came attached to RBI and run-production.

But it’s coming out strongly over here than on the pitching side, where tons of relievers, way too many even for anyone to use who ends up with better value than Rick Porcello or Andrew Cashner (who many people did end up using) make it hard to wrap your head around truly meaningful averages anyway (that and the extreme variation in distributions between firms, wherein starters outnumber relievers in some lineups and the reverse is true in others).

2.  Chasing Categorical Targets

From the past 1-3 years of your league results, get a feel for how many homers, RBI, runs, steals, wins, WHIP, etc, are required to finish in the top-4 in every stat category, and draft toward that. If 250 home runs has won fourth place in prior seasons, and your projections tell you that you’ll have 270 homers when Round 20 begins, grab a stolen-base guy instead of another power bat late.

I just don’t mind being a little loaded up at trade leagues, and even if the numbers that I (or any experienced player) came up with for what it takes to be good at each category weren’t exactly correct, there’ll surely be injuries, and you’ll get way more than you bargained for in the last few slots on your roster if you’re nimble in waivers and trades anyway. But still, it can’t hurt to know.

H. Late Rounds/End Game – In the late rounds, it’s all about upside because the players you’re considering would be only slightly more appealing than those likely available off your waiver wire for free. This means there’s essentially zero downside if they don’t work out. Go get those players whose upside is useful even if they can’t hold on to jobs.

In truth, you’d want to do almost nothing but draft straight off that matrix to develop your draft strategy – because if you were doing that, you’d still have to find the middle-to-late-round upside plays. Otherwise you’ve surrendered those ‘sleeper’ types to the few other guys at your draft table that happen to be smarter than you.

I. Injured Players

When considering an injured player there are three questions to ask:

1. How long will he be out?

2. Will he be 100 percent when he returns?

Seriously: it does not follow that just because the slugging outfielder Ryan Braun is expected to return by opening day from his back injury, you have him slating 20 stolen bases again.

3. What kind of production can I expect in his place?

An early rule of thumb: Yu Darvish will be further down everyone’s cheat sheets than usual this year, as he’s expected to miss a month or so. But if you’re in a shallower league where you should have a productive fill-in headed your way (and where you can stash guys on the DL), he’s worth a target in the middle rounds. When you add in the streaming replacement stats you’ll get for those Darvish starts he misses… and the Darvish stats you’ll get for the rest of the year (if he’s ‘healthy Darvish’ again), he could be a difference-maker for you. He’ll drop a few rounds in value in a deeper league where you’ll lose pretty much the entire season of Darvish (or where you can’t stash him on the DL, and he takes up a roster spot) and makes for less of a difference-maker… but even in that deeper league, he’ll still be worth taking a flier on. 2. Kology charts: who’ll get hurt, and which guys will be safer this year This year, we’re incorporating the Kology injury risk model into our draft analysis. (Full disclosure: Lane is part of the K (and hasn’t talked to any of the other Ms and Rs even though they’re in his office complex… Lane owes me a soda.) What this tool does is tell you the likelihood that the players listed in the chart’s columns will get hurt this year. How do we interpret the numbers? LizLoza made a helpful graphic below, which captures the sentiment from a draft in one of her writing groups, saying ‘You: Be gorgeous, smart, and an athlete! WFB: Fuck you.

J. Early Slots vs. Late Slots – Earlier I described the draft as broken up into early (can be “earlier” and “earliest”), middle and late, but you could also break it up into “end slots” (picks 1, 2, 11 or 12 in a 12-team league), “middle slots” (picks 5 to 8) and “in between” (picks 3, 4, 9 or 10). In the end slots, you go pick for pick two times in a row (or over four draft picks), and then don’t get anyone for ages. The advantages are that you can plan two picks at once, the disadvantage is that you can miss end runs, particularly catchers or closers, because they may end before you get back to your turn, as you’ve waited two rounds before your next pick. The middle picks could get snagged into all sorts of positional runs, but they have to wait the dreaded entire round after every pick. The in between has aspects of each. Nothing really “holds” about how to draft from which slot – early, middle, end, in between – but it affects your results more than you can imagine.

One thing I’d say about the end slots is that if you miss a run of good closers, take a mediocre one and live with it so that you get saves. Sometimes where you’re slotted takes you out of your strategy and your best play is to change course and take the best player, even if it’s a starter and you’re strong in pitching. Never let yourself get bullied into a player you don’t think is a good value at that slot. Accept your lot, take the best player available even at the expense of costing yourself roster balance at the time. That’s a tougher call in a no-trade league such as the NFBC, but that just means you have to dip into the closer pool earlier if you’re on the ends.

2. Auction Strategy

While drafts are about aggression – even more so than you’re usually comfortable with – auctions are often about patience, and occasionally excruciating discipline. You can still play to your strengths by targeting the players you like, and you can even pass them up when the bidding gets too high, but you also have to be willing to wait as long as necessary for the bargains, assuming bargains even do eventually arrive (and sometimes, they do).

E. Budgeting — Mid-game and End game — You have two goals with your money in an auction: (1) Spend it all; and (2) Spend it judiciously, so as to grab the most sales you can. These two goals tend to conflict with one another, because many owners hold out forever for sales that never come, and therefore leave money on the table, while other owners invariably spend their money too fast and are frozen out of the better sales that so often come at the end of the auction.

The thing to do is get a sense of your players’ value and a sense of the depth of the player pool so that you can time your check-raises and know when to fold like a cheap suit even though you like a player even though you could have had him for much less than you ended up paying.

One simple answer is to grab 4-5 big-money players – like the $25-$40 types – early (and that will use up two-thirds of your budget), then STFU for an hour or two (until maybe 10 of your 15 owners are bankrupt) and collect the ‘dead money’ to cherry-pick here and there the $1-$10 dregs left toward the end. This way, you’ve guaranteed spending all your money, and now you can troll for deals late too. If the best bargains turn out to be mostly at the guts of the draft it might backfire, but it’s hard to see how you can sink yourself when there’s no cash on the table, and you’ll be in complete control for the end game.

F. End-game nominating strategy. – By the end of the auction, nominating choices will become really tough. If you’re down below $1, then obviously you need to nominate people you want, lest you end up taking someone you don’t want. But you run the risk that someone with $2 will rip them from you.

Even more difficult is when you’re on the one target minor-leaguer you’d like, say, at third base, and you have a few dollars left, and someone raises the one other viable third-baseman in the pool to $1. Bid $2 and you’re likely to get him but without room for your guy. Don’t bid $2 and you will miss, and then your guy will come up with someone skipping on him to outbid you, leaving you with a worse…wait, a worse…a …heck, you take what you can get. (This happened to me in the 2013 LABR with Scott Sizemore looming and the remaining $2. I passed on the backup Wilson Betemit and then got outbid on Siizemore and wound up with … Pedro Ciriaco. And yes, it did matter).

I recommend scanning other people’s lineups to determine whether they are loaded with cash and whether they’re in need of a third sacker – though usually they’ll be in need of several players. Usually they’ll also not care much for the guy you have your eyes on, though.

Hence it is sometimes worth bidding on the player whom you really fancied but who went earlier than was convenient to you, as there’s a good chance you will in any case get scuppered by someone who values the player even more than you do, leaving you with the associated feeling of ‘Well that’s them gone – back to the drawing board.’ If you are outbid, at least you’ll know that one ship has passed. You can hunt for the next best thing.

G. Knowing other players’ flight stage – Although not really a function of your intellect, it pays at the end to know who has how much money left, what points they still need and potentially who else is chasing whom – so you can tell when to hold out for the target and when to take the second choice, safe in the knowledge that you are probably not going to get the target anyway.

The upside of keeping track of everyone else’s purse strings and rosters is that it’s a distraction from the auction – and it’s rarely informative anyway, because people with money can be targeting different positions than you’re thinking, or they can just have some crazy opinion about players generally.