Harper Wallbanger’s 2021 Tiers

It may come off as odd to say this, as a purveyor of the best draft tool around, but draft tools can’t do everything. One of the great subtleties to drafting in fantasy baseball is seeing and exploiting tiers within each position. While the Big Board will help you see them, it’s another thing to plan for them and make sure you avoid the biggest drop-offs in each position on draft day.

Scroll on down to the bottom if you just want to see the tiers! Tiers should have similar $ values, across all positions. They can be extremely subjective, but I’ve done my best to draw lines between players  primarily based on values as-calculated by the Big Board, while also accounting for potential upside/downside. They ignore ADP completely (note that combining your site ADP with your tiers can help you find draft targets, though). At the bottom of each position, I’ll list an ‘Upside’ tier, low value players that I see value in, and a ‘What’s left’ tier, the guys that I don’t want, but you might be stuck with in late rounds/deep leagues.

Thoughts on Tiers

After calculating player values and ranking them, you’d like to think you could just always draft the best available remaining player… but if there were 4 great players and 8 terrible ones at a given position in a 12 team league, you would want to make sure you’re one of the 4, not one of the 8. This is one of the main weaknesses of using Replacement Levels to calculate player values. And on top of that, if you can get the 4th of the four good ones, you’ll be able to spend time on other positions earlier in the draft without giving up much.

Users of the Big Board will have seen this already, but using the default Big Board custom projections, the distribution of player values looks like this for a standard 5×5 NFBC league:

Included in that plot are green dots representing every above-replacement level player at each position. It’s a little hard to take too much away from just this initial look, but you can at least see here that there are clearly clusters of players that you might say are similarly valuable. The big gaps? Those are what mark out the more obvious tier gaps.

Another way to vizualize these tier dropoffs in the Big Board is in the Best Remaining tab. Around pick 100 in an NFBC league, your remaining players might look something like this:

Here we have lists of the five most valuable players remaining at each position, with their values in green (to the left of the name), and the drop-off to the next player in red (to the right of the name). Large, dark red numbers are what we’re looking for here – they represent big drop-offs at a given position. For instance, right now Mike Moustakas and Marcus Semien are at similar values. But the gap from Moustakas to the next 2B is huge, $5! It’s time to grab him. Also keep an eye on the 3Bs… there are 4 remaining good ones, but they are going to start disappearing quick. Your next pick might be the time to pounce. Depending on your leaguemates’ draft strategies, you may also need to look at ADP to determine when players are likely to be drafted, but the basic strategy remains the same. Don’t miss the ends of those tiers!

One of the best things you can do for your personal draft prep this offseason (besides buying the Big Board) is to look at each position, decide where you think the tiers exist, and start to form a draft plan from there. It’s a great way to familiarize yourself with the players available at each position. My tiers should serve as a starting point but your opinions (or your league settings) may vary! Again, tiers should have similar $ values, across all positions. That way you can compare apples to apples when considering what player to draft when.

2021 Tiers