This article is part of our Baseball Draft Kit series.
Many try to find a blanket approach to fantasy baseball that will keep them warm at night. "Get an ace or two early," "don't pay for closers," "draft proven commodities," "fade prospect hype." Hey, process over results. That's what many will tell you, but the fact is that results are what matter. It's why you are reading this.
And the only way to get results in competitive fantasy baseball leagues is by putting in the time. The time to understand the player pool on both a micro and macro level, the time to know the market and the time to manage your team in-season.
The player pool is so vast and no two players are exactly alike, nor are any two sets of circumstances exactly alike. You have to turn over as many stones as you can, looking at trends in the underlying skills for each individual player to get an idea of the individual player's unique range of outcomes, and also to get an idea of the "macro" in terms of the entire player pool. How valuable/unique is a player's skill set, really? Is this a player whose skill set deserves to be going in this relative range? If not, is his unique set of circumstances enough to offset the skill differential? Role, home ballpark, division, batting order position, supporting cast and managerial tendencies are all important factors to consider.
Once you know the micro for the majority of the player pool -- at least 600 players -- you
Many try to find a blanket approach to fantasy baseball that will keep them warm at night. "Get an ace or two early," "don't pay for closers," "draft proven commodities," "fade prospect hype." Hey, process over results. That's what many will tell you, but the fact is that results are what matter. It's why you are reading this.
And the only way to get results in competitive fantasy baseball leagues is by putting in the time. The time to understand the player pool on both a micro and macro level, the time to know the market and the time to manage your team in-season.
The player pool is so vast and no two players are exactly alike, nor are any two sets of circumstances exactly alike. You have to turn over as many stones as you can, looking at trends in the underlying skills for each individual player to get an idea of the individual player's unique range of outcomes, and also to get an idea of the "macro" in terms of the entire player pool. How valuable/unique is a player's skill set, really? Is this a player whose skill set deserves to be going in this relative range? If not, is his unique set of circumstances enough to offset the skill differential? Role, home ballpark, division, batting order position, supporting cast and managerial tendencies are all important factors to consider.
Once you know the micro for the majority of the player pool -- at least 600 players -- you will inherently understand the macro. Everything is relative, and the whole point of the game of fantasy baseball is to outearn relative to cost. Every round of a draft presents an opportunity to outperform your competitors with a better pick relative to theirs, and if you do that enough (and manage your team adequately in-season), you will stand a good chance to win your league.
To be clear, when I say "micro," I am referring not only to the traditional surface stats each individual player provides, but more importantly, the underlying skills foundation. A lot of baseball can be boiled down to three things, for both hitters and pitchers: strikeouts, walks and home runs. You can get by by focusing on percentages for those three, but it's preferred to look more deeply at things like average fastball velocity, hard-hit rate, individual pitch whiff rates and pitch values, pitch usage, batted-ball distribution, etc, and look at statistical trends to try to pick up on improvement or decline. Once you understand most of the player pool at a baseline level, you will be able to spot market inefficiencies and make better picks relative to your competition.
I want to take a look at the micro for a few players and analyze how their skills fit in with the context of the rest of the league and discuss why they are undervalued, starting with German Marquez. Marquez got off to a rough start at home last season, but was one of the most dominant pitchers in the game, regardless of venue, over the second half of the season. He averaged over 95 mph with his fastball and both his curveball and slider fell in the 83rd-85th percentile range among 57 qualified starters. So, his average fastball velocity, and the effectiveness of his curveball and slider (by FanGraphs' Pitch Values) all ranked between the 78th and 85th percentile in their respective statistical categories league-wide. The right-hander finished 11th for the season in K-BB%, and ranked fourth in that statistic after the All-Star break, and he did all of this as a 23-year-old. What I'm saying is, Marquez is borderline elite from a skills standpoint. Now we consider team context, and it isn't great for Marquez. The Rockies are a decent team, but Coors Field historically inflates runs by 30 percent. But how much exactly should that downgrade Marquez? Even when factoring in significant regression from his second-half run, it's still not nearly enough to push him into the 70s overall, making Marquez a top draft target. He's an ace who is treated like a No. 2 or 3 because too much weight is put on the team context.
Adalberto Mondesi is one of the more polarizing players this draft season. He's a fascinating case because he's a flawed player, but what he does well is so unique and the team context bodes extremely well for playing time. Try to put the speed aspect of his game out of your mind for a second. Mondesi ranked 31st in isolated power (SLG-BA) among 149 second-half qualifiers, just ahead of Justin Upton and Juan Soto. He ranked 39th in hard-hit rate during that span. Of course, he had a 26.3 K% and 4.1 BB% over that stretch, making it highly unlikely that he continues to hit .286 as he (and Soto) did after the break, but the point is that he has thump in the bat and has been productive against major-league pitching despite the shaky plate skills at 23 years of age.
Now let's try to measure what exactly is in the stolen-base upside Mondesi possesses by really understanding the scarcity of the statistic. There were 2,474 total stolen bases in the major leagues last season. In the NFBC Main Event, eight of the top nine teams in the overall standings finished with between 141 and 155 stolen bases. That should be considered the high end of any expected range, but let's aim high. Meanwhile there were 5,585 home runs hit during the regular season, with most of the Main Event finalists finishing with between 300-325. So, the top teams had a similar (and slightly higher) percentage of the available statistical pool in a far scarcer category.
Now consider that not all stolen bases are created equal. The useful stolen bases were concentrated more closely than were the home runs. There were 28 players who stole at least 20 bases last season, and five of the 28 did not do enough elsewhere to earn positive rotisserie value in 15-team leagues (Travis Jankowski, Delino DeShields, Michael Taylor, Greg Allen, Rajai Davis). Meanwhile there were 100 players who hit 20 home run in 2018. All but five of those 100 players earned positive value. Home runs of course come with at least one run and RBI, closing the gap in terms of relative value between one home run and one stolen base, but the scarcity of stolen bases is far greater. You could always choose to punt a category in a standalone league, but I don't like doing that, because why would you want to put a cap on your rotisserie point potential, giving yourself no wiggle room to underperform in other categories?
Most projection models have Mondesi stealing between 35-50 bases in 2019. Add the hitting ability and a full season of counting stats to the speed and Mondesi is a first-round player. Granted, the that may be the 80-90th percentile outcome, and the low end of his range of outcomes sees him out of the league by May or June, but he has the speed to account for about 45 percent of the number needed to secure a highly-competitive percentage of the available statistical pool in a big contest, and enough alone to put you middle of the pack in a standalone league. That eases the burden for speed from your other roster spots so much, allowing you to load up elsewhere. Even with the obvious
downside, I'm going to be taking the plunge in the third round, as I don't think he will struggle enough to lose his job on a poor Royals team. Unlike with Marquez, whose team context is weighted too much, Mondesi's team context isn't weighted enough, nor is the scarcity of the stolen-base statistic.
Ryan Pressly has long been a Statcast spin-rate darling and the results started to come in line with expectations last season, especially after he was traded to the Astros at the deadline. It's important to get down to a granular level to understand why he was so successful late in the year. The Astros had him alter his pitch mix, with his fastball usage falling from 48.5% during his time with Minnesota to just 34.6%. Meanwhile the usage of his wicked curveball went up from 24.5% to 37.4%, and with that his O-Swing% jumped from 37.9% to 41%. He finished eighth in O-Swing% overall, and his mark with Houston (if maintained over the full year) would have ranked second behind only Blake Treinen. Pressly is now 30, but he was a new man with Houston, and his skill set is exceedingly rare in Major League Baseball. He will likely be in a setup role to begin the year, but regardless he's worth pouncing on well before reaching his range in ADP. There's a lot of value in avoiding poor matchups for your starting pitchers, and Pressly is a great plug-and-play when you don't like one of your starter's matchups. He also comes with obvious built-in upside as the next man up for saves in Houston.
Defense may not "count" in fantasy, but it's still hugely important, as of course it is tied closely to playing time. But there are occasions when defensive concerns push a player down too far, creating a wide profit margin. That is once again the case with Jose Martinez this draft season. Concerns over his playing time pushed Martinez well outside the top 200 in terms of ADP last year, closer to pick 250. He ended up returning top-100 value. That's an incredible profit, not quite in the same vein as Blake Snell, but still the type of return on investment that moves you much closer to winning your league. And in real life, despite being one of the worst defenders in the league, Martinez was worth 2.3 wins above replacement according to FanGraphs. We know that the Statcast data supports everything he does, offensively. He led the majors in xBA over the past two seasons with a .315 mark, 10 points higher than anyone else (min. 400 batted-ball events). His average exit velocity ranked in the 86th percentile. Martinez's line-drive rates have been nearly identical the past two seasons at 26.6% and 26.1% (league average is around 21%). Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith on a player with upside and Martinez is one of the best players to take the leap with again this year. Have faith that common sense will prevail and Martinez will get regular at-bats either in St. Louis or elsewhere.
These are just a few examples of boiling down the micro and understanding the player in the context of the rest of the league, and then weighing that against team context and the market. What wins people leagues is not usually a particular strategy, but knowing the player pool and the market and finding profit margin throughout a draft or auction. Be wary of analysis that paints subsections of the player pool with a broad brush. Doing so only serves to absolve the analyst of their responsibility to evaluate each player individually.
This article appears in the 2019 RotoWire Fantasy Baseball Guide. You can order a copy here.
