Jeff (Tuesday, March 9):
I realize that I never properly responded to your question about catchers. My strategy on the position is tailored somewhat to the format of the event - beyond just the obvious plan to wait on catchers in leagues that require just one catcher. In "only" leagues like LABR and Tout, I like to invest in catchers - not necessarily in the first tier guys (a group that appears to be dwindling), but catchers that get a full amount of at-bats and won't necessarily kill you with their average. Given how important it is to compile at-bats, usually it's worth the premium it takes to get them, though that theory was put severely to the test last year if you owned Yadier Molina, Joe Mauer, Wilin Rosario or Salvador Perez, among others. Losing Mauer and Carlos Santana (unless your league only requires 10 games played at a position to qualify there) this year tightens the available pool, however.
I'm not quite as committed in mixed leagues. I think, though I'm not sure, that it's better to fill both spots earlier rather than later in the 15-team NFBC formats than in the 12-team leagues. Adding six more slots to fill has a big enough tangible impact. I sort of got that backwards in drafting my LABR team versus my "Beat Jeff Erickson" league. Fortunately I'm going to take another crack at that format Monday while pairing up with Vlad Sedler.
Chris (1:50 pm PT, Thursday, March 5):
There's a bunch to unpack here. First, that you'll get 1/6 of the "free loot" rather than the 1/12 is of course possible, but it's a bad basis for a general draft strategy. In the same way 93 percent of Americans consider themselves above average drivers, I'm sure many people think they can acquire a disproportionate share of the free loot, but believing it doesn't make it so. And collectively, we know it's not possible. So maybe you possess this unique skill, but it's more likely you merely think you do. (I actually do, but that's only because I have a magic stat I'll never disclose that tells you which terrible pitchers will suddenly become good.) Okay, fine - I'll tell you. It's walks plus home runs squared divided by the cube root of IP minus pi times e. Seriously, though, that all goes back to player evaluation which I addressed at the outset of the first post - you might have the best projections, but there are a few reasons to believe you don't, and if you do, it's probably not by much.
The second issue you raise is interesting - the idea that if you need reliable closers, and I know you were scarred last year by having bad ones, you need to take them in the top eight rounds, and then if you take two elite starters on top of that, now you have four pitchers in your first eight picks. For an example of how that might play out, see my "Beat Chris Liss" draft. Does the hitting look weak to you? If so, in what categories will I come up short? In the 15-team format, it might be tougher to get the hitting you need later in the draft, so maybe one elite SP and two top-10 closers or two elite SPs, one top-10 closer and some lesser closers is the way to go. But the bar in those leagues is lower too - two 30-save closers, plus whatever you get on waivers and in the late rounds is probably enough in the deeper format.
I'm also on board with waiting on middle infield both due to the exaggerated scarcity premium you mentioned and because there are fewer standouts in the middle rounds. The bar for a decent mixed-league middle infielder is down to 20 combined homers and steals, and there are enough Chris Owings/Rougned Odor/Scooter Gennett/Aaron Hill types late that can come close to that.
I'll leave off with a final question: What do you do with catchers? Do you need two quality ones, or can you simply punt the position, use those middle round picks elsewhere and live with the deficit of drafting some Robinson Chirinos/Rene Rivera types who have some pop and seem to have starting jobs?
Jeff (6:00 a.m. PT, Thursday, March 5):
It's funny you're bringing up draft structure now, as in my writeup for my "Beat Jeff Erickson" draft, I'm going to discuss that my early drafts (Mixed LABR, NFBC Draft Champions, NFBC RotoWire Online Championship) have all followed a certain pattern - draft one ace early, get two closers I really like, and then wait on starting pitching. For the record, that's two 15-team mixed leagues and one 12-team mixed. And the difference between 15 and 12 is really stark - if you want to get those two aces, you have to get them with two of the first three picks. That's a much tougher sell, especially if you're drafting outside the top five or so. In fact, in the NFBC 15-team leagues, if you're drafting 10th or later, you might not even get a chance to go 2/3. That was the case for me last year when I had the No. 12 pick, and my top tier of starting pitchers was closed out by pick 40, and I didn't even get one ace. But hey, I swooped in on the bargain that was Dustin Pedroia! Yay!
In my 12-team league, I got Greinke at 3.3 (took him ahead of Sale (got cold feet on him), Price, Kluber) after five other SPs had been taken. By the time my next pick came around, I would have had to dip into the Lester/Hamels/Wainwright/Zimmermann tier, which I opted against. Maybe the answer, in that format, is to take aces with my second and third picks? It's also a lot easier to accomplish that if you get a crack at Kershaw in the first.
But one of the reasons why I keep falling short on a second ace in the NFBC is my paranoia about missing on the closers. The no-trade format, combined with the overall contest, requires you not to miss on these guys. And this year there are only 12-15 closers I truly like, so I've made it a priority to get two of them. That requires two top-10 picks. So there's a consequence - do I really want to spend four picks on pitchers in the top 8-9 rounds (because I'm not even certain that I can get the closer I want in the 10th round - the ones I liked in my "Beat Jeff Erickson" draft dried up by the ninth)? The hitter cost is pretty large when you do that.
But maybe that is the answer - two SPs in rounds 1-3 if you can, then grab hitters until rounds 8-9 when you can get your two closers. Though perhaps you've got more confidence in the third tier of closers and you can grab one or two of them then to make up for the lack of elite closers.
As far as the "free loot" issue goes, I think one of the underlying assumptions is that you're not getting 1/12 of the free loot, you're getting 1/6 of the free loot if not more, because you're confident in your ability to find it better than your competition. Isn't that part of why we are doing this? It's not just about having the best strategy, it's also that believe our ability to analyze players is superior to our competition. It takes a certain amount of conceit to believe that, but that's also a part of why we do what we do, and why people pay attention to our insights. We've put in the time, watched these players more than your average fantasy player, so our customer base responds to what we've seen and read.
Re-reading your point, I see that you've addressed that, at least insomuch as the NFBC goes.
I'll say this about the opportunity cost issue - if you somehow do get shut out of the top tier of starters, I think there are two possible "solutions" to address your shortfall. Let's say you're in the 12-team, and you draft 11 or 12th, and take two hitters to start, thinking that you'll get your aces at 35-38. But your league is especially ace-heavy. I don't think the solution is to take two pitchers from the next tier, but rather, you should double-tap two of the top three closers. You're going to catch up with strikeouts and wins later by volume, by almost always having seven starters active. It'll require you later to use 3-4 reserve slots on starting pitchers, but in the 12-team format there's going to be more supply to stream anyway, and I think that you'll make up that gap.
The other idea is to wait until the fifth or even sixth round, and select 3-4 pitchers from the second and top of the third tiers, and again address the volatility with volume. You might miss on one of those guys, but two others could break out. I did the latter in my Draft Champions league and had such a nice starting point with hitters that I could wait out the process of identifying who the breakouts were and who were the busts. I didn't do well with closers there yet still won the league.
Where can we wait if we're pushing up pitching? Middle infield would be my solution. We play against a number of players that believe in positional scarcity as a driving force in their decisions in the top and early-middle rounds. This is a mistake, especially in mixed league environments. There are more than 36 middle infielders that can earn positive values, so it's unnecessary to select that 10th round middle infielder in the sixth round, or that 12th rounder in the eighth. Yet that happens all the time. It's a unnerving to see the top two tiers at second base and especially shortstop get wiped out, but there are still safe harbors out there. You're adding volatility there in exchange for certainty at the top in starting pitching.
Finally, I'm far more willing to be cavalier about the closers pool in leagues with heavy trading, and especially in AL-only or NL-only leagues. There, everything is scarce, so I'm far less likely to pay the premium that might exist. But then again, that's true of the competition - look at NL LABR last year, where four owners punted saves at the table. So in those leagues, flexibility is so important - you need to take advantage of whatever inefficiencies that the market presents.
Chris (1:24 pm PT, Wednesday, March 4):
We talked about the player ranking process last week, but perhaps an equally important factor in how your team performs is draft structure.
That might sound crazy because if you had far and away the best rankings you'd probably win regardless of which positions/categories you took when, but where (a) you don't know whether your rankings are necessarily the best - and in fact they're unlikely to be among 12-15 teams; (b) where people's rankings are substantially similar; and (c) no one's rankings will remotely resemble the end-of-season perfect ones, maybe draft structure, where there's wider variance from team to team, is where you can more easily separate yourself from the pack.
One of the tricky things about discussing optimal draft structure is it's highly format dependent. There's a massive difference between the one-catcher, super flexible Yahoo! leagues, for example, and the no-trade, no-DL NFBC ones. So it's important to specify what we're talking about. I'm going to assume we're in a 5 x 5 NFBC-online-style 12-team mixed format with two catchers for now, though feel free to add key points about other formats if you feel like it.
In the 12-team NFBC, I've come around to the idea it's preferable to get two top starting pitchers in the top four rounds if possible. I draw the line at Zack Greinke on the ADP list (No. 46), though I can see arguments for Jon Lester (51), Jordan Zimmermann (54), Cole Hamels (59) and even Adam Wainwright (60) Matt Harvey (63), or Aroldis Chapman (39) who can be paired with a lesser starter in the middle rounds and equal the output of an elite starter/average closer.
The reason for this is two-fold: First, you have only nine pitchers in your starting lineup, but pitching categories account for half your total points. Moreover, while starting pitchers help you in only four categories, the presence of 2-3 closers on every roster mean there are really only 6-7 starting pitching roster slots, not nine. And closers help only a little in WHIP and ERA (barring extreme cases like Chapman or Craig Kimbrel) and actually hurt you in Ks and Wins. So you're really talking about contributing one seventh of your production in four categories. And 1/7 times four equals 4/7, or more than half a category per starting pitcher. On the other hand, even five category hitters (which are rare) are only giving you 5/14 of your total output because you have 14 hitters. And even if we say catchers and middle infielders collectively reduce the hitting output to 12 real players, 5/12 is still far less than 4/7. And that's for five-category guys. People are taking Adam Jones (ADP 11) who steals single-digit bases in the first round again this year over Felix Hernandez (12) and Max Scherzer (17).
Second, elite starting pitching seems to be as reliable as elite hitting. While there were more top pitching failures (Cliff Lee, Justin Verlander, Jose Fernandez) last year than in the preceding few years, the early hitting was a veritable minefield including Prince Fielder, Ryan Braun, Bryce Harper, Hanley Ramirez, Carlos Gonzalez and Chris Davis. Even players like Paul Goldschmidt and Adrian Beltre were mildly disappointing due to injuries. So top pitchers seem both more impactful and equally reliable and therefore worth drafting early, especially in a format where you can't trade.
Of course, one must take into account the opportunity cost of passing up a hitter in those rounds vs. that of passing on the pitcher. If Corey Kluber or even Jake Arrieta/Jacob DeGrom can be found either in the middle-to-late rounds or on the waiver wire, isn't it more expensive to pass on the hitter? Put differently, is there so much "free loot," as Peter Kreutzer likes to call it, in the pitching pool that you're better off locking down hitting early?
I would argue against that. If you add up all the available "free loot" from the pitching pool and figure all 12 teams have equal access to it, you're talking about 1/12 of the prospective "free loot" accruing to your team through late picks or waiver pickups who break out. Moreover, waiver pickups in June or July give you stats for only half a season. And finally, even if there's less "free loot" from hitters (J.D. Martinez, Steve Pearce, etc.), there's still some. So you're talking about 1/12 * pitching free loot minus hitting free loot, some of which is only good for a fraction of the year.
The bigger issue, in my opinion, concerning opportunity cost is market value. If your league devalues pitching because it perceives there's more free loot available, or its owners all agree with Mike Salfino they can mine that loot more effectively than others or they wait on pitching for emotional, religious or astrological reasons, the two-elite-starting-pitcher structure early would not be optimal. But that issue holds true no matter what commodity the market undervalues. If for some reason, no one drafted a shortstop until Round 20, it would be crazy to draft Troy Tulowitzki in Round 4 when Ramirez would be available in Round 16. The difference is only that people actually believed that about pitching for quite some time. But in the NFBC, it seems the market has adjusted, and elite pitching (and pitching generally) are no longer heavily discounted later in the draft.
So that's my case for going after two top starting pitchers in the top-four rounds if possible in the NFBC format. I say "if possible" because sometimes the pitchers you trust like Greinke aren't available, and someone like Bryce Harper or Ryan Braun slips, in which case I'd go three hitters and look for Wainwright/Harvey types in Rounds five and six.
One other reason I've had for picking elite starters early is Kreutzer's study, based on AL and NL-only leagues, that $20-plus starting pitchers as an asset class outperform $11-$20 ones and also $1-$10 ones. And in fact $11-$20 ones have by far the worst return on investment (ROI) of the three. The equivalent of $11-$20 only-league starters in mixed-league drafts are roughly Rounds 7-20. So my strategy was to invest heavily in the pitchers whose ROIs were the best and avoid the worst "asset class" until Rounds 16-17 or so where the cost was far cheaper.
But I'm starting to question that premise because the reason the $11-$20 pitchers have such bad ROIs in only leagues might not be applicable to Round 7-15 pitchers in mixed ones. For starters, you're much less likely to drop Justin Masterson (on whom I spent $13 in AL LABR last year) in an only league than in a mixed where you'd cut bait after a month or two. And Masterson was a huge drag on the $11-$20 index. Moreover, when those guys get hurt or lose their jobs, it's not as big a deal in mixed formats where replacement value is higher. So I'm not sure the ROI is nearly as bad for that group of pitchers even if you pay Round 7-15 prices for them as it is in Kreutzer's study. That said, it strikes me as more an argument for not avoiding middle-round pitchers than one against securing top starters early.
Do you agree with this? Also, what other structural elements do you think are important in the NFBC format? Do you have to get elite closers? Is there some position on which you can safely wait? And of course, feel free to expand this to different formats, include 15-team NFBC, Yahoo!, etc.