Welcome to Oak's Corner! I will be joining you every week moving forward (typically on Fridays) with the goal of taking a fun look back at the week in fantasy baseball and also taking a peak ahead at the best games/series of the upcoming weekend. With a large majority of leagues doing their waivers/FAAB on the weekend, I plan on highlighting a few players to keep an eye on over the weekend on whom you may want to place bids. In addition, I plan on taking a look at any developments in the closer market as saves are always a big component of free agency and maybe we can find a way to save money by hitting on some guys a week or two early. If you have any questions or comments at any point, I would love to hear from you in the comments below or you can always hit me up on Twitter @ScottJenstad.
How I Prep
March is the best time of the year. I find it to be the best time for baseball conversation, as everyone is in full-on draft prep mode. Every site has its projections, sleepers and busts, but very rarely does anyone discuss exactly how to prep for drafts and I thought it would be a good way to open this column to share how I go about planning for my drafts. I am a little different than many of the owners I know and compete against in that I try to not start too early on my prep. I am always casually following the news and stories around baseball, but I try to not get into any hardcore prep until February. I love fantasy baseball, but my brain needs a nice break after the season ends and as much as I love the preseason prep, the last thing I want to do is get burnt out on it before I even start drafting.
When I am doing my research, I mostly focus on the NFBC Main Event, a contest with 15-team leagues and a 30 round draft for a total of 450 players selected. Any other league I play in is less deep than that so I can morph my research and rankings from the Main Event to any of my other leagues adjusting for format and league/roster size. Since we all have only so much time to prep, anyone I consider to not be a serious draft consideration, I only give a quick perusal. For those players, I will make a note if that player is someone I would not be interested in carrying at any time or someone I might consider based on a playing time change. During my research, I always find a handful of players outside the NFBC top 500 that I consider to be draftable and I move them onto my list as players I will target in the last three or four rounds.
I then dig in to the rest of the players, the ones I need to be serious about. I know fantasy owners who create their own projections and others that use a site's projections or combine the projections of a few sites. I lie somewhere in the middle of those two as I do not do my own projections, but I do tweak the ones of sites at which I look. I begin by looking at a player's last couple of seasons for his raw fantasy 5x5 numbers, but then look deeper at some metrics to try and determine how I feel about a player going forward. The stats I usually key in on for both hitters and pitchers are K%, BB% and hard hit rate, notably looking for guys on the upswing in those numbers. I am a big believer in looking at hard hit rate in trying to unearth some gems. It gives me a good indication if a player's prior seasons had some good or bad fortune and whether that is likely to swing the other way in the following season. With pitchers, I like to also look at their soft contact rate as I love pitchers who are able to induce soft contact as sometimes they can sneak through as sleepers whereas everyone is always aware of the big strikeouts guys.
Only after I have fully investigated a player's raw numbers, will I then read the player blurbs on RotoWire (also look for any injury news I may have missed) and a couple other sites I respect. I read these after I make my initial opinion mostly to see if I missed anything major in a player's profile that someone else may have picked up. At the end, I look at the player's current ADP to get a feel for where he is going and decide from there how big of a target or fade that player is for me based on that. ADP is very valuable, but can also be dangerous as a tool to form your opinions, which is why I look at it last and use it as a guide for where I may need to think about grabbing a player rather than an indication of a player's value.
As I go through the players, I am always jotting down notes to go back and read, usually the week before I start drafting. Some people use a notebook, but I like to take the notes directly into my draft software so I have those notes in front of me in during the draft. These notes help a lot, especially later in the draft, when I am deciding between two or three players and I quickly can re-visit my thoughts when I took a long look at the player rather than in the chaos of a draft with the clock ticking down.
For my draft rankings spreadsheet, I initially start with the NFBC ADP just to get a rough ranking and from there I compile my own rankings for each position. As I study a player, I will move him up or down on my sheet and also make sure to bold anyone I consider a serious target to make sure they pop off the page so I don't forget that player when in the heat of the draft. Conducting my rankings by position allows me to get a really good feel on the player pool and identify which positions get thin more quickly than others and where each position has drop offs. As a final step, after I have completed my rankings by position, I will break them into tiers so I always know when a position is down to the last couple of guys in that tier.
As for what I take with me to the draft, I am a combination of a pen and paper guy and a computer guy. I see many people do one or the other, but I prefer a combination of the two. I like to keep a running list of ADP and my personal rankings detailed above to cross off, but also like to be able to have my draft software open to use to compare players or search later for specific categories I may be lacking. The paper spreadsheet keeps me focused at all times of the draft and also helps me notice any players who might be slipping further than usual and who is left in each of my tiers. I use my draft software to track my team and refer to my notes, but I do not track everyone's team as I find I spend too much energy on that rather than focusing on the draft. I do not try and hit any specific category targets specifically, but I do set some numbers in my draft software to watch my balance during the draft to make sure I realize the categories in which I am already strong and which I may need to address.
Someone to Fade
Early in the draft, all the players are good and cases can be made for them (for good reason), but I work hard to try and find guys I want to fade in that range also. Last year, that player for me was Kyle Schwarber at around 35 ADP, but he got hurt the first week of the season and I never found out if I was right or wrong. Today, that player is Xander Bogaerts. Don't me wrong, I like the player, but I just hate the price, currently 28.6 on the NFBC ADP. On the plus side, he hits in an extremely nice lineup and as a righty, he plays in a nice park to bang balls off and over the Green Monster. Furthermore, I like the fact that his walk rate jumped from 4.9% in 2015 to 8.1%. But, at pick 28.6, I just see too many flaws to take the leap there. My biggest issue with Bogaerts is I don't see the power repeating and without that, I could easily see him tossing up a 12 HR/12 SB season which I have no interest in in the second round no matter how many runs he scores. Even in his fantastic 2016, his hard hit rate sat at only 30.6%, which was a bump up from the meager 27.4% the year before. I have some concerns about the batting average too with his lack of hard contact and can't get it out of my head that he did toss in a .240 average in 2014, but of course that was as a 21-year-old.
A closer look at his batted ball profile yields some really interesting results. He had a 41.3% flyball rate in 2014, and that number dropped all the way down to 28.5% before jumping back up to 34.9% in 2016. While it is possible that his 52.9% groundball rate in 2015 was just a fluky outlier, it really is difficult to project his flyball and groundball rates since he has been all over the map in his three full seasons. The most recent flyball trend is headed in the right direction, but in the second round, I am not willing to grab the guy who doesn't hit a lot of flyballs or hit the ball hard with a high regularity. He will toss in 10-15 steals, but does not run enough to earn the tag if the home runs come down as much as I anticipate. The price on Bogaerts is counting on a repeat at the very least and that is not a bet I am willing to make. In addition, it's very difficult to bank on repeating the 719 plate appearances he managed in 2016. It's not a popular stand to take on the very popular Bogaerts, but one I am sticking with and I will almost certainly not have him on any teams this season.
Thanks for reading, I look forward to hearing from you and look forward to being here all season!
