With less than a week’s worth of games having been played, it’s more than a little too soon to be drawing conclusions about our fantasy teams based on their results. We may be tempted to take comfort in owning Mitch Haniger, Matt Davidson or Tyler Skaggs, all of whom are off to surprisingly good starts, or be bummed out that we are getting next to nothing out of Yu Darvish, Paul Goldschmidt or Willson Contreras. These players’ histories strongly suggest that we not get too confident or distraught based on their tiny samples of work so far this year.
While it doesn’t make sense to get hung up on results, it’s not too early to evaluate our process. Virtually every league has already gone through a round or more of waivers or FAAB bidding, and those of us who put forward winning bids have had some add/drop and start/sit decisions to make.
Over the course of the season, I will be checking in with my Tout Wars and Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational squads. As we get deeper into the season, I’ll be digging into some of the results, particularly with players who are over- or under-achieving. For now, though, the most useful lessons are those that can be gleaned from my decision-making processes.
To look at my bids from those two industry leagues, there might not appear to be any monumental moves, but there is an opportunity to put one of my favorite strategies to the test. Before I get into the specifics, here are the details of my first set of in-season FAAB bids.
Tout Wars mixed auction
Format: 15 teams, 5×5 Roto with OBP instead of Avg
FAAB details: $1000 FAAB budget, $958 remaining; players won through bidding must be started in the coming week
Bids: $36 for Darren O’Day, $10 for Tyler Austin (contingent bids: $0 for Ryan Rua, $0 for Adam Engel, $0 for Drew Robinson), $0 for Ben Lively (contingent bid: $0 for Andrew Cashner).
The Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational (TGFBI)
Format: 15-team mixed, standard 5×5 Roto
FAAB details: $1000 FAAB budget, none spent prior to bids
Bids: $20 for Manny Pina (contingent bid: $20 for Alex Avila), $26 for Hunter Strickland (contingent bid: $21 for Darren O’Day), $11 for Jake Junis, $0 for Ben Lively, $6 for Nick Ahmed.
I made most of these bids with the intention of finding the best available replacement for a player with little to no current value. I wanted a closer in both leagues to replace Alex Claudio and Tyler Lyons, respectively, who were suddenly thrust out of their teams’ long-term ninth-inning plans. In TGFBI, I needed a catcher to fill in for Salvador Perez.
If you look a little closer, though, you might wonder, “What’s the deal with Ben Lively?”.
The simple answer is that he was expected to make two starts this week. Then again, so were Matt Boyd and Andrew Triggs, and both were available in TGFBI. Nonetheless, I decided to pursue the least owned of the three, not only in TGFBI but also in Tout Wars. Partly it was because I liked Lively’s projected matchup against the Marlins, which was to be preceded by a start at the Mets that didn’t look dangerous enough to neutralize the appeal of facing Miami.
My choice to target Lively also had to do with the sort of pitcher he is. All things being equal, it’s good to get strikeout pitchers, but when two-start pitchers are involved, I can tolerate a low K-rate. A mediocre or below-average strikeout pitcher can still outperform a decent strikeout pitcher when a pair of starts offers the chance to double up on innings.
Lively is the sort of contact-friendly pitcher I like with two starts. He has a recent history of low walk rates and efficiency, so he can rack up more innings. Though he is a flyball pitcher, in his 2017 rookie season, Lively posted a healthy 21.5 percent soft contact rate and limited flyballs to an average distance of 315 feet. With two starts, not only can he offer a reasonable number of strikeouts, but he may provide a dozen innings or more of useful ERA and WHIP.
It also didn’t hurt that I figured I could sneak the lightly-owned Lively through with a $0 bid in both leagues. The more I can stream viable two-start pitchers at little to no cost, the more I can save up to use on high-ceiling FAAB targets who I might be able to use every week.
This particular plan had two flaws. One was ignoring the apparent quick hook of new Phillies manager Gabe Kapler. The other was neglecting to check in with Mother Nature, who kicked up a Monday snowstorm that cancelled the Phillies’ opener with the Mets and endangered Lively’s all-important second start against the Marlins.
Even before the first pitch of Week 2 was thrown, my pursuit of Ben Lively offered a cautionary tale to any fantasy owners trying to find sneaky-good, yet available, two-start pitchers. You have to look at managerial tendencies and weather, as well as the player’s statistical indicators and matchups. Then you have to ask yourself if you still want to roster the pitcher under the worst-case scenario.
In the case of Lively, the answer was different for each of the two leagues in question, because the opportunity cost of starting him was different in each league. In Tout Wars, the cost of starting Lively was putting Tyler Anderson on the bench. Though the lefty has some potential as a strikeout pitcher and gets a nice matchup at the Padres, between his inconsistency and a slight velocity drop in his first start of the season, I don’t mind giving him a breather. In TGFBI, I had to make the tough decision to bench Marco Estrada. With a choice between starting Lively at the Mets or Estrada at the Rangers, I would have opted to use the Blue Jays’ righty.
Though my FAAB process has already strayed from my plan, that’s not going to stop me from using this as an opportunity to test a hypothesis. Over the last couple of seasons, I have relied heavily on streaming pitchers (mostly two-start, but sometimes also those with one exceedingly good matchup) to bolster my rotation. My memory tells me it’s been mostly a successful strategy, but I have not put it to a proper test. Not until now.
From this week going forward, I am going to compare the success of the projected two-start pitchers I pick up against the pitchers I bench or drop to make room for them. This week might not provide a fair test of Lively’s value, given that he now appears destined to make just one start. Fortunately, I also successfully bid on Jake Junis in TGFBI, and he lines up for starts this week at the Tigers and at the Indians (at least for the time being). All he has to do is outperform a one-start Mike Foltynewicz (at the Nationals) to have earned his spot in my TGFBI rotation.
Even if Lively and Junis falter this week, it won’t necessarily mean I need to find a new approach to filling out my rotation. Just like the actual competition in a fantasy league, judging the effectiveness of a particular strategy is a marathon, not a sprint.
Statistical credits: FanGraphs, Baseball Savant.