Draft strategy

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.

Fantasy baseballers, I come to you today with an admission: I’m a total hypocrite. I am the first person that will tell you that the computer-based projection systems like Steamer, PECOTA, ZiPS, etc will beat a human-curated projection every time. And yet, year after year, I find myself *tinkering*. Changing an ERA/WHIP projection here, increasing a batting average or HR-total there. There are certainly areas where the computer systems fall short, since they don’t know about injuries, can be slow to adjust to real-world depth chart changes, and tend to be skeptical of breakouts. That’s why I’ve created tools that allow me to go about this customization/adjustment process in a much more systematic way. With a series of fairly straightforward inputs, these tools convert peripheral numbers into projected statlines, using models originally detailed here which are scaled to the total #’s projected by the Steamer projection system. Thanks to these handy tools, I’ve been able to integrate all of my preseason research this year, including injuries, xStats, and depth chart info, into a set of over 200 custom projections (included in this year’s Big Board). But, I’m all about empowering you all to do these things yourself, so what follows here is a comprehensive tutorial in how to build your own custom projections.

Alright, so if you’re new to this, it might come as a surprise – pitchers… they’re bad. Well, they’re not bad, but they always get hurt AND there are always good ones available on the wire! So how about an arbitrary/empirical correction factor to account for that?! This is the one part of player valuation that really surprised me when I was first getting into this stuff… “The Hit/Pitch Split”!

If you’ve already downloaded the Big Board, and you’ve opened up the ‘Settings’ tab for the first time, you’ve come across this seemingly innocuous box entitled Hitter% or H/P Split. Believe it or not, this box is front and center for a reason! Every preseason countless pages on these ol’ interwebs are dedicated to player rankings, but very few have arisen to describe why, exactly, we commit to drafting the best hitters in MLB ahead of the best pitchers. As noted in the how-to of the Big Board, you can typically pick a number around 67% and do well enough. That will allow you to create rankings that are in line with what the rest of the fantasy industry has deemed the ‘right’ h/p split. But if you want to tailor your draft strategy in an optimal way or want to value players with the ultimate accuracy on draft day, read on and wrap your head around the concept that is the hit/pitch split.

Tip #1: Know where player values come from
Tip #2: Set your Hit/Pitch split
Tip #3: Value your Picks and Make Preseason Trades
Tip #4: Customize your Projections

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 dropoffs in each position on draft day.

(If you want to skip the words and get right to the tiers, here they are)

Tip #1: Where do player values come from?
Tip #2: Set your Hit/Pitch split
Tip #3: Value your Picks and Make Preseason Trades

Fantasy baseballers, I come to you today with an admission: I’m a total hypocrite. I am the first person that will tell you that the computer-based projection systems like Steamer, PECOTA, ZiPS, etc will beat a human-curated projection every time. And yet, year after year, I find myself *tinkering*. Changing an ERA/WHIP projection here, increasing a batting average or HR-total there. There are certainly areas where the computer systems fall short, since they don’t know about injuries, can be slow to adjust to real-world depth chart changes, and tend to be skeptical of breakouts. This year, I’ve created a tool that allows me to go about this customization/adjustment process in a much more systematic way: the DIY Projection Tool. Thanks to this handy tool, I’ve been able to integrate all of my preseason research, including injuries, xStats, and depth chart info, into a set of over 300 custom projections (included in this year’s Big Board). But, I’m all about empowering you all to do these things yourself, so what follows here is a comprehensive tutorial in how to build your own custom projections.

Tip #1: Know where player values come from

Alright guys and gals. It’s still January, which means we need to hurry up and talk about the nerdiest aspects of fantasy baseball before all the normies come back to baseball world after the Superbowl. Today is part two of the 2018 Big Board Player Valuation Series: “The Hit/Pitch Split”! Readers of “Tip #1” will know that an integral part of player valuation is deciding how to split the values between hitters and pitchers. If you’ve already downloaded the Big Board, and you’ve opened up the ‘Settings’ box for the first time, you’ve come across this seemingly innocuous box entitled Hitter%: