Fantasy Baseball 2024

Time to play a bullpen game?

I write one of these every year. Skip it if you’re not interested.

The Acuna Advantage

If you’re playing in a draft and you don’t pick first, you’re just fighting for second place. If the projections are correct, Ronald Acuna, Jr. will have a big advantage over the next best fantasy player. Of course, if the projections were always correct, the season would not mean much. But last year, it certainly was true that he had an enormous value, perhaps approaching $100 in a $260 auction league.

To make a draft league fair, I think you would have to make the first-position owner give up the number two draft choice and take that pick only at the very end of the draft. Or maybe auction off the first pick: the owner who is willing to give up the highest draft pick(s) gets to have Acuna. Suppose two of us are willing to give up the 2nd pick. To break the tie, we have to offer to give up another pick. If I am willing to also give up my 15th pick, and the other owner is willing to also give up his 14th pick, he gets Acuna.

Of course, you can choose to play in an auction format for every player. I have always preferred auctions to drafts. Auctions take longer, which to me is more of a feature than a bug.

The Bullpen Game

In 5x5 Rotisserie scoring, you might not want to use any starting pitchers. Instead, for pitching you take closers and low-ratio middle relievers. I tried this in a Yahoo mock draft earlier this year, and on a projections basis I dominated the league.

I think that 5x5 Rotisserie is ruined by the trick of playing a bullpen game. The commissioner needs to tweak the categories. One tweak is to have a minimum innings rule, say 1000 innings. If an owner’s pitchers only pitch 850 innings, you add 150 runs and walks-plus-hits to his total (one per inning that he falls short of the minimum).¹²

Even if there is a minimum innings pitched rule, it might pay to blow off wins and strikeouts and go for the other categories. Try to pick starters who won’t blow up your ratios but will get you over the innings minimum. Or get those starters from the waiver wire during the season.

Look, I may be jaded. Last year, I picked four starters who were in the top 20 based on pre-season projections. Three of them finished well out the top 20: Urias, Darvish, and Musgrove. The fourth one was Manoah, who got sent down to the minors and I don’t think was even in the top 20 there. Owners who picked Cease or Burnes or Verlander or deGrom probably felt sorry for themselves. I’m jealous of them.

You can play the bullpen game without putting a lot of resources into closers. Getting four closers near the bottom of the top twenty will be fine. Your top closer can be a lower priority than your 8th or 9th best hitter.

Another place to save resources is on catchers. In a 12-team, one-catcher league, I would rather have two catchers near the bottom of the top 15 than one of the top catchers. The extra catcher provides injury protection and some coverage when your main catcher has a day off.

Spend resources (early round picks in a draft or dollars in an auction) on at least two of your outfielders. The marquee guys really leave the others behind. And don’t take the third outfield spot for granted, or the fourth of fifth if your league has such slots. If you’re not alert, the whole outfield category can get picked clean. You wind up with a final outfielder with neither decent expected value nor upside.

I also would spend resources on top tier players at shortstop and second base, because of the way quality drops off at those positions. If I were in a draft rather than an auction, my big fear would be that after choosing outfielders in the first two rounds and one middle infield star in the third round, there are no other middle infield stars by the time I pick in the fourth round.

With the bullpen game, blowing off wins and strikeouts means that you don’t need any pitchers on the bench. That gives you the freedom to take hitters who are injury risks, use your last pick to get that extra catcher, carry platoon players (assuming you can change your lineup daily), and speculate on bounce-back candidates or prospects who have not yet proven they can handle major-league pitching.

Make all your picks with a purpose. Don’t waste them, regardless of whether you play the bullpen game or not.

Beware of Anvils

In one of his late-1980s annuals, Bill James described a slow player by saying that “he runs like an anvil.” Let me use Anvil to describe a player who will get zero stolen bases even with the new rules.

My point is that under pre-2023 rules, an Anvil might cost you about 8 stolen bases relative to an average fantasy hitter. Now, an Anvil might cost you about 14 stolen bases. I think that is worthy of your attention. The guy who hits between 25 and 35 home runs and is guaranteed to steal less than 2 bases may end up hurting you now, whereas he would not have hurt you in 2022.

I shouldn’t have to tell you to beware of rabbits. The guy who steals 50 bases along with 5 home runs and 45 RBIs will destroy you unless your league has really big playing rosters.

1. There are alternative tweaks. You could replace ERA with total outs. You could add a sixth pitching category of Quality Starts. That would make it easier for starters to contribute and harder for relievers to contribute.

2. I suggested on a message board that Yahoo needs to put in a minimum innings pitched rule. I have zero hope that the suggestion will be implemented.