“The Strikeout” is a column by Diego Ynzunza dedicated to all things fantasy baseball.
Welcome to the Strikeout, a new weekly fantasy baseball column.
A little about myself: I’m Diego, a freshman at USC. I’ve been playing fantasy baseball for six years and have become a more committed player over the past three.
I participate in a yearly friends-and-family Roto league and an NFBC Best Ball league hosted by the Athletic. This year, I hope to expand into more high-stakes NFBC Roto leagues, as that is where the best fantasy players tend to play.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with some of the terms that I just used, don’t worry. This week’s column will introduce you to some key fantasy terms, league types and ways of evaluating players.
There have been a lot of interesting developments this offseason that have had major ramifications for this year’s fantasy baseball game. First though, I think it would be helpful to introduce the game itself and give some background into how the game works, followed by the different ways that I’m going to be evaluating players.
For those who are familiar with fantasy football, fantasy baseball functions in a similar way. You draft or buy a team of players who will accumulate stats for you throughout the season. You compete against the other teams in the league to see who eventually comes out on top.
The two main scoring systems are rotisserie and Head-to-Head points. Head-to-Head points is more like fantasy football, in which you compete against a specific opponent each week and get a certain number of points for stats your players accumulate. I will mainly focus on Rotisserie, or Roto for short, which is a more traditional way to play fantasy baseball.
Roto is a season-long competition against all the other teams in the league. You accumulate stats throughout the season and each team receives points based on how they finished in a particular category. We usually refer to the Roto scoring as “5 x 5,” as there are typically five hitting categories (runs, home runs, RBIs, batting average and stolen bases) and five pitching categories (wins, saves, strikeouts, ERA and WHIP). For example, if your pitchers have the most wins at the end of the season, you will get the most points in that category. The points are then added up, and the team with the most total points across the board finishes in first place.
There are tons of different formats, including league size, draft style and more. For the purposes of this column, I will be referring to a 15-team mixed (full MLB, not just AL or NL) snake draft. I will also be referring to leagues that set their lineups weekly, not daily. This means that after you set your lineup, usually on a Sunday night, you aren’t able to change it for the week.
A couple of other terms that would be helpful for you to know are the waiver wire, streamers and sleepers/busts.
The waiver wire is the place during the season where you can go to pick up players who aren’t currently on rosters. It can be helpful to pick up a replacement for your roster if there is an injury.
That leads into the next term, which is a streamer. When you need more stats from your pitchers for a specific week, you can pick up streamers for a week in which you think they have favorable matchups.
Sleepers are players who have been previously undervalued by the rest of the community. Busts are guys who are supposed to perform well, but for whatever reason, we expect them to underperform.
As far as the way that I evaluate players, I tend to use three main sources of information. The first is THE BAT X projection systems by Derek Carty on FanGraphs. Some people make the mistake of utilizing the projection systems way too much or too little. For me, I find them to be helpful to give myself a ballpark of how guys’ seasons are projected to play out. They are calculated based on aging trends, past performance and more.
Secondly, I am a big fan of the Athletic and Eno Sarris specifically. Eno is one of the leaders in the fantasy baseball community when it comes to evaluating players. For pitchers specifically, Eno has three numbers that I take into account: Pitching +, Command + and Stuff +. A score of 100 for each means that a pitcher is league average in that category. There are tons of factors that decide these numbers, which I can go into more as I start to evaluate pitchers. The big ones are pitch shape, movement, velocity, ability to command the baseball and the ability to manipulate the baseball in a certain way to acquire new movement on pitches.
Lastly, specifically when drafting, using the NFBC ADP rankings are helpful to know when to pick the players you want. For example, if you see someone who you rate highly getting drafted low, you can wait a couple of rounds to take him.
As far as the sites you can use to play, ESPN, Yahoo and CBS are very popular. However, I’m privy to NFC, which is short for National Fantasy Competition. The NFBC specifically is one of the biggest fantasy sports competitions in America, with thousands of players entering the various leagues that they have available. They have buy-ins ranging from $50, all the way up to thousands of dollars, with a variety of different league types including Roto, Head-to-Head points and Best Ball.
That’s a small introduction to the expansive world of fantasy baseball. So whether you’re a seasoned fantasy veteran or just looking to get your start, stay tuned for the coming weeks.
“The Strikeout” runs every Monday.