Fantasy Baseball 2026

NFBC vs. Yahoo; staying cool on targets

In general, fantasy baseball rewards risk-taking. There are no prizes for finishing 5th, and in fact it’s really only satisfying if you’re in first or a close second near the end of the season.

The players who can win your league are low-priced players who turn out much better than what most competitors expect. Using finance terms, players with the potential to win your league have high option value. Call them the OVs.

Where to carry OVs seems like it should be very different in the Yahoo format vs. the NFBC format.

• In the Yahoo format, you can change your lineup daily. That means that you can use your bench, especially pitchers, because pitchers do not play every day. That leaves less room on your bench for OV hitters. In NFBC, you can only change your lineup weekly. One of the best uses of your bench in NFBC is for low-priced OVs.

• In the Yahoo format, there are 12 owners, and the rosters (including the bench) are only 23 players. In NFBC, there are 15 owners and the rosters are 30 players. This means that there are lot more decent players left over after the draft/auction in the Yahoo format. That in turn means that if you pick OVs and they don’t pan out, you can replace them easily. And with fewer owners you have less competition for promising players who become available during the course of the season. So this strongly favors going for OVs in the Yahoo format. Spend resources on the very best players, and then fill out your team with OVs.

• In the Yahoo format, only 10 hitters can play on any given day. In NFBC, 14 hitters play. If you spend a lot of money on two or three hitters, in Yahoo you will not have to play a lot of weaker hitters and OVs. In NFBC, you will have more soft spots in your lineup if you pay up for star hitters.

• In the Yahoo format, the worst hitter in your lineup might be good for 20 homers, 8 steals, and 65 RBI, If you take a “steals specialist” who is good for 30 steals but only 8 homers and 50 RBI, playing him costs you 12 homers and 15 RBI, which can hurt you more than the 22 steals he gains. But in the NFBC format, your worst hitter might be good for 15 homers, 5 steals, and 55 RBI. So your steals specialist gains you more in steals and costs you less in homers and RBI.

I think of expensive pitchers as having downside risk, or negative option value. They are more likely than expensive hitters to badly underperform and/or lose time to injury.

• In the Yahoo format, you can make use of 11-13 pitchers. You can get a good pitching staff without owning the elite pitchers. In the NFBC format, you have your 9 pitchers and not much value in substitutions from the bench. This makes elite pitchers relatively more valuable.

The bottom line is that I think that the Yahoo format favors paying up for top hitters more than for top pitchers. In NFBC, I think that the format favors paying up for top pitchers more than for top hitters. So in NFBC, I think that the consensus top 3 pitchers are plausibly in the top 6 of players you should want. In Yahoo, I would pass on the top 3 pitchers and instead spend resources to get top hitters and “near-elite” pitchers.

David Shovein approached the NFBC this year with a hitter-heavy design. Last year as I recall he went pitcher-heavy and even though he drafted Cal Raleigh he ended up with middling results. I myself ended up horribly. I went hitter-heavy, but my hitters under-performed, in some cases really badly (Jasson Dominguez and Masyn Winn, for example). More than half of the pitchers I picked up in the auction got injured, and then the pitchers I picked up from the waiver wire to replace them got injured as well.

Costly Targets

The reason to target a player is a belief that the market undervalues that player. As an economist, I am mostly inclined to assume that the market is efficient (Shovein makes the same assumption). If so, then the average cost of a player in earlier drafts or auctions is a good measure of the player’s value.

If you target a player, let’s say you are willing to spend 10 percent over market value. Be wary of doing that too often. In an auction with a $260 total budget, if you have $100 in targets and you spend $110 on them, you have “wasted” $10, which is the difference between getting an average player ($11) and getting a fringe player ($1).

Shovein was lucky that his targets came cheap. He was willing to pay $27 more for his top 6 hitter targets than what he ended up paying. Had he been forced to pay his maximum prices, he would not have been able to afford his second and third starting pitchers, leaving him with one top starter (Yamumoto) and five $1 starters. That would have been hopeless.

Does it work the other way? In theory, if you spend $100 on players with a market value of $110, then you have profit to work with to take an $11 player instead of a $1 player. The problem is that there are binding roster constraints. You cannot use a 4th shortstop or a 24th player. So I do not believe in taking a player just because you can get a below-market price.

For drafts, you can measure the percent over market as the percent by which you reach for a player. If the player on average would be drafted at pick 150, a 10 percent reach means that you take the player at pick 135.

The prudent approach to an auction is to come in with sets of targets at each position at different prices. Suppose you get outbid on a $25 target at one position. Ideally you will have someone at a different position to use your $25 on.

I am thinking in terms of getting one $40 player, two $25 players, five $18 players, two $10 players, five $8 players, three $5 players, and five $1 players.

If you convert this to rounds, I am aiming for one 1st rounder, two 3rds, five 6ths, two 11ths, five 13ths, three 16ths and 5 23rds. I’m trying to trade away some picks in rounds 4 and 7-12 to get more picks in the 6th round. The 6th round is the point in a snake draft where there are several players who can fill needs for you, but you can only take one, letting the rest slip past. I’m also trading away picks in rounds 17 through 22 to get a few more 13th rounders, because after round 15 the differences in player values are just not that clear to me. They all look sort of like $1 players.