Rates & Barrels - Fantasy Baseball in November?! Draft-and-Hold Strategy w/JH Schroeder

Episode Date: November 22, 2024

Eno and DVR are joined by John Henry Schroeder to discuss draft-and-hold formats -- fantasy baseball leagues with no in-season pickups -- and how to approach those leagues in a way that is different than a typical February or March draft. They cover roster construction goals (and a few pitfalls to avoid), the unique risk of low WAR players in this format, playing time trends relative to draft position in 2024, and a few projections that they will likely disagree within heading into 2025. Rundown 1:38 JH’s Path Into High Stakes Fantasy Baseball 3:34 Draft-and-Hold (Draft Champions) & Gladiator Leagues 5:19 Why Draft This Early? 7:22 A Critical Roster Construction Mistake To Avoid 15:17 How Important is Categorical Balance without In-Season Pickups? 23:01 The Risk with Low WAR Players 29:16 Low WAR Players We’re Still Interested In 34:15 Playing Time v. Draft Position 41:57 What Outside the Box Idea Flopped the Most? 49:54 Ideal Roster Balance w/50-Round Draft-and-Hold Builds 52:51 Other 2025 Projections You Will Disagree With Follow Eno on Bluesky: @enosarris.bsky.social Follow DVR on Bluesky: @dvr.bsky.social e-mail: [e-mail] Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/FyBa9f3wFe Subscribe to The Athletic: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Hosts: Derek VanRiper & Eno Sarris Producer: Brian Smith Executive Producer: Derek VanRiper Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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including yourself. Join for free at rakuten.ca or download the Rakuten app. That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N, rakuten.ca. Welcome to Rates and Barrels, it is Friday, November 22nd. Derek VanRyper, Eno Saris and a good friend of ours, John Henry Strader joins the show today. Today we are focusing on draft and hold leagues. Leagues with no in-season pickups. Over at the NFBC, we get the draft champions format we'll talk about.

They've got gladiator leagues running right now. And our buddy, J.H., is as deep into those leagues as anybody we know, but he also plays everything else. So we thought he'd be a great resource for us to talk to about what's really different. What do you do tactically in a league that does not have in-season pickups? J.H. thanks for joining us today. Glad to be here guys, a lot of fun. So J.H. has been a friend of ours for a few years now and

we actually co-managed some teams. Eno has talked about having a co-manager in the NFBC main event. This is J.H. he is the co-manager. We've co-managed some teams in the online championship as well. So we all know each other pretty well tactically, have a lot of, I think, general agreements of how we want to play fantasy baseball. And I have found J.H. is even more rigorous at FAB than I've ever been by a few miles. So I learn a lot from him, which is great. I think that's a good part of a partnership is you can learn something from the person

along the way that adds a ton of value. J.H., what's your relationship with baseball though? How long have you played fantasy baseball? What formats do you like the most? Just tell the listeners a little bit more about your background and kind of how did you get to this point where this hobby is such a big part of your life?

I probably have a similar story to a lot of people our age. Red Money Ball, sort of right when it came out, loved it. Did my first Yahoo League in, I think, 2004, freshman year at college, and it was just sort of hooked from there. I really wanted to work in baseball. I actually did sort of work in and around it for a few years. I worked for a large agency in Chicago.

I would represent at about 400 players. I did mostly arbitration work for them. I was a video guy at Sports Info Solutions, which anyone who's worked there knows. That's sort of a grinding job, but you're working with baseball every day. And then sort of probably the coolest thing I did is I worked in player development for Dodgers for a year,

basically as a minor league video guy. That was also a lot of fun. I was very heavy into Yahoo leagues for a long time and sort of just getting tired of them. And I think it was actually the Roto Wire podcast that turned me on to NFBC. And I started playing with a friend of mine in 2017. I can always remember when I started

because the very first league I did, I drafted Kyle Schwaber in the second round, a catcher eligible Kyle Schwaber, and he tore his ACL in left field in week two, and I think I came in 14 out of 15 my first year. So that was my introduction to the NFPC. That's the NFPC learning curve right there. It doesn't matter what you know, how sharp you are,

it seems like when you enter for the first time, you're gonna get a little bit roughed up. Doesn't help to have bad injury luck quite like that. But yeah, so we wanted to dig into Draft and Hold and Gladiator leagues in particular. For anybody who's not familiar with those, important for us to sort of explain the differences between the two. The Draft and Hold leagues are actually the older of the two. They're called

draft champions leagues in the lobby over at the NFBC. Most of them have a $150 entry fee. They've got some $400 ones out there right now. They are 15 team leagues. This time of year they've got slow clock options at two and four hours so you can do this and go about your regular life unless you're compulsive like me and you're constantly checking to see if people are picking fast, which oftentimes they do not. But there are no in-season pickups, it's 50 rounds.

So the players you draft over the course of a few weeks, those are the players you have on your team for the entire season. You do make your lineup changes on Mondays and Fridays. Fridays are hitters only, Mondays are when you change out your pitchers. So same as all the other in-season NFBC leagues that we talk about as far as what you do tactically to adjust the roster. The Gladiators are relatively new.

I have not played a Gladiator yet. They're 23 rounds. You just draft a starting lineup. That's it. And that's your team. So a bit of a war of attrition. No benches at all in that one. And they'll start with a $50 entry fee

so they're pretty approachable in terms of price and as someone who lived in the Mockdraft central era just to date myself a little bit the idea of having fantasy baseball Leagues where people want to like actually do something that matters this time of year is it's been so refreshing to me in recent years I just I love it because it was hard to get people that took mock drafts seriously. It was hard to get 12 people or 15 people together that all cared when the teams would just get posted one time, maybe be written about in a story and then forgotten forever. Now we actually get to see what happens. And I think the big question people have that are kind of skeptical of this, even if

they love fantasy baseball, doesn't this just give you more time for injuries to happen? Like, are you not inviting more chaos into your life by drafting in October or November or December with the whole off season still in front of you before you even get to spring training? So what do you say to people that would kind of look at you and say, J.H., why would you play and draft this early? I think you've probably addressed the primary concern,

which is it's really fun. That's why I like drafting early. I like drafting earlier, really. I do think the one thing that I really enjoy in the early drafts, I think it's sort of suboptimal to load up on rookies and maybe new players. But in October and early November, at least you get a really good price

on a lot of those players. So for me, some of my early drafts are actually my fun teams and I can give some examples. So I actually did the first DC last year that started in September and I had a Jackson, my one share of Jackson's Curio pick in the early 200s is finally DP settled more like 124. My second DC this year, I have a round 26 Roki Sasaki share, pick 387. He's settling around five or six now, probably the only share of him I'm going to have in any of my DCs. And then two years ago I had my first DC, I had a Jordan Walker, Miguel

Vargas in my first DC, both in the 300s. Walker settled probably about low 100s and Vargas was low 200s now. Even at those discount prices, I don't think they were optimal choices, but it's fun to get some exposure to the rookies and you get a better, I think you get a better price early in the year. One thing that the early drafting does that, that makes me think of strategy wise is that the biggest mistake that I see in draft and hold people. And I think the first thing that I could tell you that you need to do if you're going to play draft and hold is to really nail the amount of positional coverage you have.

So you know, make sure you have three catchers or you know, four if you want, but make sure you have basically four people who can play each position. It doesn't have to be four bodies. That's why the multi-positional eligibility guys really help because you can cover multiple positions. But you have to have, I would say, at least three bodies, at least four people who can play each position. Something like eight outfielders, I think, if I remember correctly. You want basically as many starting pitchers as you can get. Like that's the, you solve for X and then the remaining amount is starting pitchers.

But you know, there's all sorts of strategies and things that flow from those numbers. So dialing those in and finding your own number is, is, is, is the next step. But the first step is just make sure you cover your butt because you're drafting right now and the games aren't going to start for another four or five months and you need to have bodies that can play if somebody tears an ACL in the offseason or whatever. So just getting people who can play at every position that will play in the major leagues too.

Like you can have one prospect among those four, but you shouldn't necessarily have two because then you're really weak in that position. You could get really screwed if your two prospects don't come up and your first guy gets hurt and then second guy is a platoon guy or also gets hurt. So that's the one thing I'd say. Early puts a real pressure on making sure that of those four guys,

I think at least two are just kind of vanilla-y, will play guys. You know, right? And so it's funny you brought up prospects and young guys, it's like, you can fall in love with those. At these prices, your prospect young guy can be an exciting guy

and be your third or fourth body at the position. You know, when you start getting into March, oh, he's gonna make the team prices, now you're paying for a prospect to be your second body at a position or something. And that's a little bit riskier because he may never play. And so we're starting to veer into, you know, the strategy of it all. But I think just drafting early, what I think of is cover your butt. Make sure you have guys at every position.

Make sure you're deep at every position. Don't, you know, go off the deep end and forget about, oh God, I've got two, and especially I think corner infield for some reason is the hardest. They don't really, teams don't really platoon at first base or third base and like, or they do, I don't know, I don't know what it is about first and third base, but like, you know, if you forget about first base and you're, you know, the 30th, 40th round, you're like, I have two first baseman, you're screwed. I actually have a good example from last year why you can't just sort of rely on eligibility

as well. So I had, I had a draft last year at middle infield. I had Matt McClain, who was one of my, my most owned players, second short eligible El Marte, Xander Bogarts, Brendan Donovan and Jordan Lawler. That was all my middle infielders. So five guys. Ooh, and you're like, I have four of each. Yeah, exactly.

I have four of each. I have, they're all top 300 picks and all relatively safe. McLean obviously missed the season. Lawler missed the whole season. So when Bogarts was hurt, I have nobody to go in there. So that was rough. That team actually ended up okay for other reasons, but yeah, definitely want three bodies. go in there. So that was rough. That team actually ended up okay for other reasons.

But yeah, definitely want three bodies. I tend to think yeah, three bodies, four eligibility is where I feel good. I know we've, we've disagreed a little bit about catcher. I don't know if the fourth catcher is worth it, you know, because the fourth catcher is gonna be so bad, you might as well just take the zero. Yeah, I think basically once you get past sort of pick 450, there's not a lot of playing time with the catchers. I actually tried to leave last year.

I did two catchers. Uh, they were both top 100 picks and I, I'm sort of open to always backing them up, but you never land on a guy. I'm not going to force it. And I just, so you went into the season with two catchers. Yes. Yeah. Basically because of what you're talking about,

the guys in the 700 range, if you're thinking about your starters missing a couple of weeks, what are the stats you're getting on a catcher that projects for 25 runs in RBI's in the season? Yeah. You're adding one run in RBI in one week. The thing I do like doing is,

that's actually one position where I think handcuffs are fairly useful. So if you like a catcher up top and he has a handcuff priced in sort of the 450 to 600 range and he's talented, that is I think a good value in unpacking guys. So an example last year,

I liked Wilson Contreras a lot. So I backed him up with Ivan Herrera when he sort of fell to me. Yeah, you kind of have to need to like both guys a little bit. So it doesn't always it's not always a great idea. But maybe this one's a little bit tough because they just traded for Matt Thaiss. But if you'd like Miguel Amaya a little bit, Matt Tha Moises Moises Ballesteros is actually a kind of a really fun Prospective type, you know, I don't know if that really fits it, but you could you could do something there Oh, maybe the white socks where you just get Cory Lee and Edgar Cuero and you just you know, it's not gonna be expensive

It's gonna be terrible. But you know, you have the starting catcher for the White Sox It was interesting to add the regiments obviously very expensive But James McCann goes in the 700s and he's at least would be usable every week if it was hurt Yeah I think the main takeaway there is if you see the clear backup on the depth chart and they cost nothing that's probably a good approach I mean Dylan Dingler maybe makes sense in Detroit. If you're going to go cheap and go with, with Rogers as a number two catcher,

like that combo doesn't really cost that much. And they could at least play a lot because a lot of other positions, if someone gets hurt, you've got a utility infielder, you've got an infield outfielder on that depth chart in real life who can take over who they can turn something into a platoon, they can shift other players around and catchers is one of those spots where you can't do that.

Oh, I've got a great one. I've got a great one. The Cardinals. Yeah, you like the Cardinals catchers right now. I like both of them. Ivan Herrera and Pedro Páez. I don't even actually know. I don't like either enough to be like,

that's the guy who's gonna win. I do think it's gonna be Ivan Herrera, but Pedro Páah is not bad. And so what you can do is cover yourself for injury and also for maybe Pah wins the job. You know, so like, since they're both like kind of interesting offensively and they, one of them will win the job and the other will be the backup, like that's actually a pretty ideal situation, I think, for a handcuff. Just a broader question for you.

How important do you think categorical balance is in leagues where you can't make in-season moves? I'm perfectly content. If the board breaks a certain way and I can make in-season pickups, if I'm light on speed or light on power, I'm OK drafting an imbalanced team if I feel like I'm getting surplus value.

But I've generally been scared of having an imbalanced team in a league where I can't make an in-season pick up or several in-season pick ups to change course. Do you think people value that correctly and categorical balance is generally important in these leagues? Or do you think people put too much weight on it? I think I'm a little bit unorthodox here, not just in fab leagues but in DC leagues. I'm actually not that worried about categorical balance. You know, everybody talks about hitting 80th percentile in every category, but really what you're trying to do is average 80 across all 10 categories. I think people use that target because that, to me, sort of guarantees you'll win your

league. I actually think that's a bit of an optimistic target. But the way I like to think about it is if you're looking at hitting in your 80th percentile across all five stats, if you can drop back to 50th percentile and stolen base and average, but you move to the 90th and the other four, that's a net trade off. You're moving back 30 points in the category to gain 40. And that's really what your projection values tell you. So maybe a controversial figure is Kyle Schwaber, who I think shows up by projections as a value. He shows up by my projections as a value. And a lot of

people don't want to touch that because you're going to wreck your batting average. But what the projections are telling you is he's a value because his production in the other four categories outweighs what he does in your batting average. So I'm open to guys like that. I'm open to being imbalanced. I've tried punting one category before. I've tried punting multiple categories. The one thing I would say is if you are planning to punt a category, you have to sort of decide early. You don't want to be six or seven picks in and then have 90 steals on your roster

and then punt steals because those steals are sort of valueless. But I don't mind being imbalanced even in an O-pick. You know, generally the one thing that I've learned over the last three years of getting to know NFC and high stakes fantasy baseball is that I think that not enough people take chances and take more aggressive strategies. And you know, it didn't quite work for us this last year in the main event, but I do

think that we found some quirks, you know, it's not even just like a full punt or a full this or full that you can take soft punts, you punts. You can do sort of things where you're moving the sliders around. It's like if I don't invest as much as people here, I can, you know, so I think more of that. That's the sort of, when you get from 101 is, how do people play this game? How do I put together a representative team?

How do I not end up in the bottom? How do I, that's first. To kind of win the overall and to win your main event and win the bigger stakes leagues, I think you actually almost have to bring some sort of strategy to the table. You have to bring something that's different to the table than everybody else,

because if you're kind of doing the like, I'm building a balanced team and I'm 80% and everything, there's too many people at the table trying to do the same thing. And so you're fighting for the same players and you're in the same spots. And like DVR likes to say a lot, it's nice to be looking at different pockets of players when other people aren't. It's nice.

You know, people talk about, oh, I don't want to lose on a run. There's a run. Well, what if you're, you can make yourself immune to a run because you're just not looking at that player at that time and you're and you're looking somewhere else and You could get a lot of value looking for something else while everyone's oh, I gotta get a closer. I gotta get closer So how did your punt saves teams do because I think the hardest thing in draft and hold is we have to buy closers Kenley Jansen hasn't even signed yet there are free agent people that might close, Tanner Scott might close somewhere.

And what people do is push closing up, up, up in draft and holds. And it just makes me feel super uncomfortable and I don't like it at all. So how did your punt saves teams do? That was probably my weakest category in my DCs last year. Let me just pull up when my percentile's finished. So in my DC teams, I was in the average

on the 58th percentile across my 10 teams on saves. That was actually, my lowest was actually wins, but my pun save teams, my one peer punt last year struggled a little bit. That was a Spencer Strider team, so that, I ended up with a light. It's hard to know why it struggled, isn't it? But 58th percentile means that you're not participating

in these runs and you're not paying top dollar for these closers. I'm generally a little underweight in saves. My best DC last year that was sort of hanging around, it was in the top 50 for a while, was seventh percentile in saves. And that was actually one of the teams I invested most heavily in saves on. I had Joanne Duran and Ryan Presley.

And obviously, Peter got signed over the top of Presley and ruined that pick. And I think just sort of circling back, what you can do wrong in the early drafts is if it's foreseeable that something can, not probable, but foreseeable. So I'm talking like a 25, 30% chance that something could happen that would make your player lose their value. That is, I think, the bad thing you can do this time of year. And for me, that's, that's closers really, like all these mid-tier closers, basically from Ryan Walker through Justin Martinez, there is, at this time of year,

just a ton of risk. Yeah, because there's a trade or a signing of a lot of different players that could happen without a lot of weird stuff connected to it, and all of a sudden, value completely shifts. I mean, that definitely makes sense. And I wonder, as you move through the draft and hold season, once free agency starts to play out,

once we kind of move into January, the air quotes later DCs that you're in, is that when you start to take a few more shots in the pick 150 to 250 range on some second and third tier closers that maybe carried that early risk? You liked them all along, but you just had to wait for a couple of months of off season to play out

before you had the confidence in them to take a shot. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So I much more likely to add a second closer sort of in the 100 to 250 range of ADD later in the season than you are at the beginning. At least that's how I approach the stadium. Yeah, I mean, I think of Porter Hodge or maybe even somebody like Ben Joyce,

where you might like what they're doing, but their teams could sign somebody to be a closer in front of them, and that would suck. But as you get closer and free agency's dried up all those options. The other types of players that I think about in this situation, you know, bring up the table of low war players.

So, JH put together this thing. I sorted it by ADP. So, what you're looking at right now are sorted by ADP, players with less than two war per 600. At the top is Spencer Steer, who is not good defensively. One thing that I can say for him though, is that he has multiple eligibility and has played different places in the past.

So he might actually be a little bit safer than a lot of the other people on this list, because even if he doesn't put up a great war, he's a decent hitter and he can play, they can find a place for him. You know, and so I think he's a little bit safer than a lot of these, but other names that show up here like Michael Toglia, First Baseman, who might not be that good with the bat and maybe Colorado just find somebody else.

They have other people in that system. Trevor Story, like if he can't play short, he does he enter a mix you know at second Where you know the other people can play steal its time willy castro is like a super sub Which means he's not really good enough to be a starter every day And if the Minnesota gets healthier if they stay healthier through the season does he put up the same stats that he put up last year But one of the things that guys I really think about is Jonathan India, who is not good defensively, surprisingly bad offensively, and has been rumored to go to a new park, a new team,

where they may just be fine with putting him in a platoon because they don't have that long-term relationship with him where they feel like, oh, we drafted him, he's a red, we gotta play him him or we at least got to make him feel good about his role. Connor Norby I think is, uh, is a really interesting player that, you know, once you get to a 281 ADBP, maybe not as worried about this sort of stuff. There's guys that disagree on this list.

Nolan Jones is on this list. And I, I think I like him fine enough to take that shot. Even if war doesn't love him. Nolan Jones is on this list and I think I like him fine enough to take that shot even if war doesn't love him. There's also the war I'm sure you're using right now is steamer projections. I prefer the bad X, but it's not out yet. So that's something to think about. Elliott Ramos seems pretty safe to me in that outfield.

I don't think he's that bad defensively. So you can disagree with some of the stuff, but thinking about low war players early in the off season, these are guys that could get replaced by Infree Agency or, you know, could get a platoon partner in free agency or get pushed to the DH Flotsam and Jetsam by a better defensive signing, you know, so that's a type of player I think about other than relievers. I think the one thing that also happens this time of year is Schumer comes in as the first projection out and they have some sort of massive plate appearance projections for some

of these types of players and maybe the three to four hundred range and they appear to be huge values but if you're a half war first baseman with, you know, 100 or 105 WRC plus, and maybe you're going into the second year arbitration, they might seem super safe because they're on the bad team, but the bad team is cheap, so they not tender them. And then all of a sudden, they're a free agent with half a war, and they're going to be signed as a bench bet somewhere. Thai France was that a little bit for me last year, he had a pretty low war war projection. Um, and yeah, it's, it's great as long as he's in Seattle and they're, they're not trying anything else, but it was actually much riskier, um, 600 plus.

Project just off the top of this was Spencer Torkelson who, you know, the tigers are improving, you know, what if they, he, you know, what if, uh, they just like start liking Malloy better? You know, they've got options. They've got a young team where there are players coming up through the system that, you know, at some point, I know you were 1-1, but the team is good now. And you haven't been good for a while.

So that could be part of it. Luke Rayleigh is on a Seattle team where right now his play-to-preference projection is for 450, which might be useful. They're not done. They do so much in Seattle in terms of over the course of the season. I actually had a note about that, like what you're thinking about what can happen. So I sort of put Tampa Bay and Seattle as two teams where they never sort of have a finished depth chart. So comfortably making the playing time projection for anyone on those teams is outside of the stars is, I think.

Steamer loves Junior Camarero. And I'm like, yeah, dude, I get it. But it is still Tampa. And you still don't know that Junior Camarero is the everyday third baseman until he is the everyday third baseman. Like I'm like, I'm always nervous about Tampa. I've like they announced basically that Johnny DeLuca is the, the, the starting center fielder, you know, now that they traded Jose Siri to the Mets and I still don't believe them.

Like I don't know. It could be anybody. People like Chandler Simpson, the prospect who has a lot of speed, but I don't know if he has the bat. It could be Dylan Carlson. Fangrass has somebody named Magnum. Mangum? Jake Mangum, a 28-year-old outfielder

that Tampa got from Miami as getting 30% of the playing time in center field. And I had never heard of that person's name before just now, and I could totally believe it. I'm never gonna write off the possibility that the Rays found somebody in the Marlins organization and actually will give them that playing time. But yeah, I think it is a recurring,

I think of all the build a bench segments we've done on this show, 87% of them have been on the Rays and there's probably 15 teams we've never built the bench for because it's a little clearer. I think people could just look and figure it out and sort of agree with what's out there publicly. I play Wurdle and spelling bee every single day. That's the first thing I do. Play Wurdle while making coffee. I pour myself a cup and do the crossword, which is the jewel of my morning.

I started Wurdle 194 days ago, and I haven't missed a day. So what's our starting word today? I think it should be ocean. Storm is a good one. B-R-I-S-K because it's a brisk day outside. At this point, I'm probably more consistent with doing the crosswords than brushing my teeth. I don't think there's a day that I've missed it.

I'm definitely a Monday or Tuesday player right now, but I aspire to do Friday and Saturday puzzles. I have seen you do spelling bee during meetings when you're supposed to be paying attention. That never happens. When you win a puzzle, will during meetings when you're supposed to be paying attention. That never happens. When you win a puzzle, where you get that you're a genius, I always take a screenshot and send it to my wife. The New York Times crossword.

It really is a moment of zen that cleanses my brain. I wish the days were shorter and that the wordals were longer. Join us and play all New York Times games. At nytimes dot com slash games. As far as some projections, early projections you will disagree with, there were a few names on that list that caught my eye. One is Noel V. Marte injured last year, PED suspension. He's still very young.

If you buy the track record that delivered the hype last year, that player is still there and if they're talking about trading Jonathan India, that opens up a spot on the infield. I could just see the projection systems not really having anything good for Noel V. Marte because his 2024 was so bad. But the context behind that for me is something I'm willing to just look right through

because it was such an unusual season for him. So I could see myself having a lot of Noel V. Marte even though he popped up on that list of low-war, high-volume players. Yeah, that's kind of the Nolan Jones for me. It's kind of the year after the hype. He still does a lot of things nice, well, athletically, and it is a team that kind of needs some young players

to take off, a la Breton Doyle last year His competition Nolan Jones in the outfield is Sam Hilliard Jordan Beck Sean Bouchard, I mean Sean Bouchard is kind of old Sam Hilliard has been given chance after chance after chance I don't he's running out of chances I don't think Chris Bryant's gonna play much in the outfield anymore and Beck and even Zach Veen are not that that exciting to me. So I think Nolan Jones is, is fairly safe playing time wise actually. Just going back to Marte, I probably disagree a little bit with the DVR, at least at least in a DC format. There's certainly a scenario where, where his upside hits and he's back to normal.

Everything's great. There was, I think a lot of projection last year on, you know, a really excellent sample of batted ball in his debut. So, 91.3 exit velocity, 116 max basically. And everyone's like, well, this is the fantastic prospect we've all been told about. I was sort of off of him as a prospect because his minor league numbers were more pedestrian. So then he had this great debut and I was really happy. a 200 ISO in the liners. Yeah. Yeah. Then he had this great debut.

Finally saw this bad at ball stats, like everything looks great. And last year, everything collapsed. And you know, maybe maybe the player we saw last 2023 comes back, but market definitely backed up a little bit this year, and least in DC that's not really a risk I'm interested in taking right now. Yeah, maybe an easier player to draft February and March in leagues where you get some moves, you can just cut them if it doesn't work out. But it just fits the type of broken season

that projections have a harder time with. So that's what I'm always looking for. What do you make of Dylan Cruz? Eno and I are kind of split on him. I think I'm a little more optimistic. Eno's a little more pessimistic because of the wild fluctuations in his pull rate. Obviously a lot of hype coming out of LSU as a prospect and plenty of ways he could be valuable. But the projections actually come out a little bit lighter on Dylan Cruz than I would expect.

But we see that a lot with young players. So is he someone you're interested in despite that lighter war projection? I think one thing that you see in a lot of these players is they're on bad teams. And so if you're a low war player on bad team, you're safer than say you're on the Dodgers or the Yankees or the Astros. And he's a prospect on a bad team. So I think the combination of those things makes you maybe look past that a little bit. I actually just got to my projection for him.

I thought I was being pessimistic and when the numbers finished, he actually came out as a slight value for me at ADP. I think the big thing is, is I didn't realize how much of a base stealing threat he is. He's a very good runner and then you put that on the Nationals. My projection is for 25 steals for him.

So I think that gives him a pretty nice floor. And the playing time should be relatively safe. I do have, I am projecting that there's a chance he gets sent to the miners like any prospect could be. So I think my plate appearances are maybe slightly lighter than schemers, but I think my steal projection makes a value step. We saw something pretty interesting that you sent us

with playing time relative to ADP. So the chart if you're watching on YouTube that I think people should definitely check out. We'll have to like tweet this or something too or share it on Blue Sky. Yeah, this is really cool because what you've got is ADP on the x-axis and plate appearances and innings pitched on the Y axis. And of course, there's just a downward trajectory for both of these stats. People are buying playing time at the beginning

of the draft and it gets worse and worse. And when you get to the 600 ADP and 700 ADP, you're just taking shots in the dark. A couple of things stand out to me. On the starting pitching chart, there's a nice little jump up in projected innings pitched in the sort of 250 to 300 range. And I kind of think that's a little bit the Seth Lugo bump. That's like the, what I find available to me at 250 to 300 that I try to buy as much

as possible in DCs are boring pitchers with boring projections that seem relatively safe in a roll, especially if they're in a park that you could at least use them half the time. You may buy a guy for 160 innings and only get 140 innings out of him because you don't want to pitch him in New York or you don't want to pitch him in LA. He's still going to give you 140 innings out of him because you don't want to pitch him in New York or you don't want to pitch him in LA. He's still going to give you 140 innings. You still got him at ADP 300, you know? And so I'm not at all surprised to see a late jump there. But the thing that really stood out for me is that both of these charts in the

50 to 100 range have these really big drops. There seems to be some sort of trap among hitters from 50 to 100 and pitchers to 50 to 100. And that just seems weird that it'd be true for both hitters and pitchers. I have a little bit of an inkling that 50 to 100 is a little bit of the YOLO rounds. YOLO, you know, where you're like,

okay, this player has obvious flaws and I don't have him projected for great play appearances or great in his pitch. And so I'm not going to, uh, I'm not going to take them really early, but I have to take them before 100 when other people are going to start doing this. So a little bit of early big swings. And the other thing that I thought of was catchers and closers. You know, there's a fair amount of catchers and closers that go 50 to 180 P and they would wreck your plate appearance projection and your innings pitch

projection. So, uh, I wonder if that is part of what's going on there, J.H. What have you found when you look at the players specifically that went in that range and just sort of generally, if you think there is something that is true for both hitters and pitchers in the 50 to 100 ADP. I'm mostly inclined to say this is sort of one year noise. I did similar charts last year and I actually think

that was actually ended up being a good range for starting pitchers. We saw the dip this year. There's a reason that these guys aren't sort of locked top three, four rounders. You can, so again, so this particular chart is October to December ADP from last year. And also it was early ADP too. Exactly.

So you can have some of the injury risks. Maybe the guys that are either going to move up or down in the spring are landing in that range and then maybe they'll, they, they all end up injured. So I think some of the pitchers in that dip were like your Kodaisangas. You said Walker Bueller who in December, we might've thought, hey, he might pitch 150 innings. By March, we already knew that they were slow walking him.

Right, so Bobby Miller was in there, Yuri Perez was in there, and then you had some guys that people liked that just ended up getting hurt too. Like Yamamoto was in that group as well and he only threw 90 innings. So it's a little bit noisy, but there's also some sort of injury question marks in there

that didn't get moved down yet. For stream draft. I think that's the range where some guys end up becoming early rounders for the first time. I think you'll see rising prospects, guys that we expect to see debuting the following year kind of initially go there. If everything looks good in the spring, they could even tick up further and go earlier come February and March.

If you're looking at some ADPs for this year, kind of looking at the players in the 51 to 100 range, I see like Brent Rooker is a good example of a veteran kind of popping for the first time. And you had a lot of Rooker on your DC teams last year, but that was around pick 300. Now he's going around pick 75. I imagine you're a little less excited about Brent Rooker at the new price than you were at the old one,

even though he was a great player to have on your teams throughout last season. I think Nolan Jones is a guy that was going pretty early last year that because of injuries was a big bust. Royce Lewis was kind of going in this pocket. It's easy to see in hindsight especially like, oh yeah, that was a first time guy that did have more risk than I realized or just looking back at the injured guys

and go, well he got hurt and if he hadn't got hurt, maybe things would have been different or at least maybe the drop off wouldn't have been as steep as it was. If he was out there, he would have accrued 60% of the value I expected instead of 15% because of all that time that was lost to those injuries. It is a tricky range. I think that you really just have to be clear eyed when you're evaluating all these players. So I do all my own projections and the way I like to do it is I have sort of the same

bias you do that these guys that jump way up, they're going to regress. So I find myself going in and I try and be very pessimistic when I'm evaluating these guys and then when the numbers come out, a lot of times they're still good. So I'm actually in on Brett Rucker's loss again this year. He did come out well. That actually sort of leads into another sort of thing I like to think about when drafting. So the A's are moving to a new stadium

and I think the expectation is that's gonna be very good for hitting. I don't necessarily think that's priced in yet. Sort of think of similar things going on in Tampa where they're moving to a new stadium, it should be bad for the pitchers and great for their hitters. I like to have themes in my drafting. If you get your theme right, your macro right, you can have a very good year and your ideas

are right. I've had a few different themes. I think in 2022, I was very big on on NL leadoff hitters because the DH was coming to the American League. And so they weren't batting behind a pitcher anymore. They're batting behind a real player. So they have more RBI opportunities. I actually ran the numbers and it actually wasn't going to be that big a bump, but that was a theme that year anyways. And I think last year I was looking at central division pitchers just because their schedule was going to be so much easier. So I think my early theme this year is ace hitters, sort

of lightly fading race pitchers because I love all of them, but then targeting race hitters. You mentioned some unconventional strategies earlier, you know, punting some categories and clearly you like to think outside the box. I like to think outside the box. I think you do a better job of it than I do. I just find players no one likes and take a few low to me guys

and throw them on my roster and hope I'm right at a very low price. But what's the most outside the box idea you were excited about that flopped? Part of taking chances is being willing to fail. You have to be willing to just miss a few times and say, okay, that didn't work. Back to the drawing board, either tweak the idea

and try it again or scrap it and then maybe learn to the point of not trying something that's too similar to the idea that flopped. First off, I actually probably have to thank you guys for opening me up and thinking this way. So one of the good things that came out of the pandemic for me anyways, was you were doing all the retro drafts. And it became obvious sort of very quickly that the dominant strategy, how to win that was to punt the category or lightly punt the category. And if

that's the that's the dominant strategy, when you know the stats, why wouldn't that also work when you're using projections instead? So I've been very open to trying to experiment and try different things. I really think that the best values late in the DC are relievers because you're getting much safer goal than any other position. So when I was thinking about how to leverage that, I wanted to know, is there a way to draft a team

where you end up with like 12 or 13 or 14 relievers? What would happen if I took five starting pitchers in the first five, six or seven rounds? So actually, in two of my DCs last year, I took five starting pitchers in the first six and seven rounds. And I ended with about 10 starting pitchers, which is about six to eight pitchers light from where you normally would, and 12 to 14 relievers. So it's sort of a safe spot, but you're taking so many guys late.

You're hoping you're going to run into 50% to 75% safe share on three or four guys. And those were my two worst teams. I don't think the strategy is necessarily flawed. I always like to say any strategy can work if you get the right players. So I think what happened on some of those starting pitcher heavy teams, they both badly missed in wins and Ks. And the way I was thinking about it, so we had those charts up for played appearances and innings. I have a similar chart for strikeouts. So my top six starting pitches in those two leagues, I was counting on about 960 strikeouts or 160 per person,

which is about the average for where they were taking. So those six pitchers missed 25% of the season. So you get to add a reliever and a half in plus your three reliever spots. So four and a half reliever spots, I thought I was gonna get 70 strikeouts for reliever spot. And when I added up my 960 strikeouts from the starters, my, my relievers, my was projecting to get to about 70th percentile case.

And I ended up in about 10. Um, some of that was, you know, half of my. Starters I was relying on got TJ. Um, of course. Yeah. Yeah. There's, uh, some, some Yuri Perez is on those teams. Actually. So the first one I did, my sort of reliable guy was getting for in, in, in DCs and I've had one DC we started at first pitch.

I decided that I was going to try and just cobble together closers. One thing that happens is you get guys, you know, injured may not have the role, all that stuff. But also like you started talking about like roster spots in there, you know, like you kind of have to dedicate maybe an extra roster spot to the closers if you're doing this, because you'd wanna have more chances.

So now you maybe have seven relievers, you know, which is aggressive. And the worst part about having seven relievers is those late relievers that you're taking shots on. Yeah, maybe one of them becomes a closer. It's really low percentage shot and then they're not useful in any other way usually, you know? So like sometimes you end up playing them because you're like, well, I've got no other healthy arms and now you're playing a middle reliever for the Reds or something. You know, it's like, you know, I don't know how great

playing Fernando Cruz was last year for you, but that's the sort of thing that can happen is you take Fernando Cruz, think he's going to be the closer and he has like a four ERA and you're pitching him in Cincinnati and you're hoping that he gets like three strikeouts this week or something. It's just, it feels dirty and nutty and gross. So in this league, by doing this, I do think that I have decent starting pitching. I have Logan Gilbert, Joe Ryan, Ryan Pepio, Hugh Darvish, we're only halfway through. Andrew Rasmussen, that feels good.

I have Brent Rooker's on this team. I got him in the sixth round. My middle infield feels good. CJ Abrams and Luis Garcia. I feel pretty good about this team generally. My closers are Michael Koepke was my first one in the three, six, nine, 10th round. I got David Bednar in the 13th, you know,

and then I got Clay Holmes in the 25th. And that's a pretty bad group. Like, what do you think the over under on saves is from my three? Let's see. I was going to be more generous. Yeah, I was thinking like 37 and a half. I had to make the number. I like David Bednar. We were talking about the risk of closers in the 150 to 250 range and we know the Pirates are cheap and yeah, they had to roll this Chapman, but he's a free agent again. Bednar

was tipping pitches. We talked about a lot of lot of this show. It wasn't like the stuff backed up So if you could just correct that I think an offseason especially can go a long way towards helping that David Bednar should be their primary closer again I think 25 plus saves and a solid closer to is a very fair expectation for him And he's getting priced below that right now And the one thing I would say about Holmes and Koepke is that they don't actually fit what I'm saying with the Fernando Cruz thing. They would be okay to throw even if they weren't closers.

They're going to probably, Koepke's going to be on a good team. If he's not the closer, he's a setup guy, you might get wins, you might be the fifth inning guy. They might even make him a starter. So Koepke is a good arm, Clay Holmes is a good arm. I think they're going to have good numbers wherever they go. So I think I did at least by, you know, 80, 90 innings. You know, maybe 100 innings from the three of them. So useful innings. I think they'll probably pitch more than that.

But, you know, will they be on my team a lot? I don't know. I just it feels dirty and nasty. And I and I kind of wish that the rest of my team was better for having done this. But somebody said that on on Twitter, of course, that was terrible team. And I couldn't disagree. It's like, oh, it's not not what I wanted. You know, hinted at this a little bit earlier,

what's the ideal roster balance for you with a 50 round draft and hold team? Is it four plus options at every single position? And do you get that by targeting currently multi-positioned eligible players? Or do you actually try to seek out guys that didn't qualify at more than one position, but likely will over the course of the upcoming season?

Because it's easy to pick up in-season qualification in terms of number of games played. It's just a question of finding the guys that are on a team where they'll have a need. Either they're built that way, or they're one injury away from somebody having to cover another spot. So first off, we did touch on this a little bit. So my sort of baseline is three at every position,

four for infield and catcher, 10 at outfield, 16 starting pitchers and six relievers. And if you're very quick at math, that adds up to 47. So that leaves you sort of three spots to play around with to address where you think you're maybe weak or strong or where you want to allocate more resources. And I generally allocate that to pitchers. I think I lean into relievers a little more than the rest of the market does.

And I've heard your good friends, James Anderson talked about it. He likes two early relievers, might only roster five. I'm more in this six to eight range pretty consistently on my relief pitchers. There's that definite relationship, right? Like the higher you take them, the fewer you have to take. That's that's, that's you're buying yourself another SP slot by taking an extra higher closer.

So that is the benefit of taking a higher closers. Oh, now I can take 14 starting pitchers or whatever. Right. Yeah, exactly. So the more you invest up top, the less you're maybe going to be likely to allocate your, what I call my flex slots, to additional depth at that position. The other thing that I like to think about in the draft is I really like to have two catchers, eight infielders, and eight outfielders by pick 30, or by, sorry, round 30,

which is sort of where I think there's a cliff in batter playing time. That does show up in the graph and that graph is relatively consistent sort of year over year. And if you think about it, there's 30 major league teams. They have nine players. So there's 270 starting spots on major league teams. And that's about when you run out of that. Four hundred. Yeah. So I like that at least 18 hitters to round 30.

I've had as many as 20 through round 30. So about 18 to 20 headers through there. And then I'm heavier on pitchers the rest of the way. I sort of think that 18 is the baseline to make sure you have hitters playing every sort of lineup period. Do you have any other players? We're talking about some players I disagreed with

projection wise a little earlier. I think Noel V. Marte is light. I think Dylan Cruz is a bit light. I'm glad your numbers are kind of backing up what I was assuming about Dylan Cruz. But how about some guys that you've seen through your own projections or through Steamer, you've seen the numbers and just said, that doesn't quite make sense. You can go either direction on this. You could say the projections are too high.

You could say they're too light. Yeah. So I've done about 110 hitters so far, so I'm not all the way through the pool, but one guy that my numbers are the most off on is actually probably fairly popular is Mark Fientos. I'm a little bit lower on what Steamer's saying, and none of it is necessarily a huge miss, but it's just sort of all across the board. So someone with sort of his swing rate and his contact rate Does project to strike out more than steamers saying so I have him at a twenty nine and a half percent strikeout rate

So the probably the biggest disagreement just to back up the way I do my projections is I project guys Babbit I so walk in Strikeout rate and from the four of those you have like an R squared to the slash line of 98 or 99. So I like really thinking about those four inputs and then developing a slash line. And when you have a slash line, you can project ones and RB-huts and the rest of everything. I have a tool that gives me a comparison for what I think

the guy is Babip and Aizdo is based off of his Babipall profile. And mine had the intos at sort of 190 and I give him some credit for what he's done. And my projection for his Iso is 199, much lower than what Steve was saying. I think they're at 220, 222. I think that's probably coming from his really high ground ball rate. And he hits the ball hard, but it's not, you know, top of the scale hard. It's just sort of above average hard.

It is a very good bail rate, which I think makes him a little bit of, maybe a home run specialist. So yeah, Mark Fienta is definitely a guy I'm, came out much lower on than probably everybody else right now. I think one guy that sticks out for me is Isak Paredes. He's actually my second third baseman

on that team I don't like. At least my first one is Jose Ramirez. I just saw a tweet that I've got bookmarked and I'll throw it on the Discord that shows the distribution of stats for each stat. One thing that stuck out for me on barrel rate was, I had this like, you might have heard it on the podcast before, but I had this hard time with guys who have like a 6%, 7% barrel rate, you know, where like, is that supposedly average or above average?

It's kind of Jonathan India barrel rate, and supposedly that's average, and you know, average power is good or whatever. But if you look at the distribution for barrel rate, what happens is there's this big hump at six to seven, and then there's like a little tail around sort of 10 to 11 and 12, right? And so I actually don't like being in that big hump.

It's technically above average, but it's below median. And I don't like that. So when I look at Esau Paredes and I see a career 4.9% barrel rate and last year 4.5% barrel rate, you could say, well, that's pretty close to average. And so you give them a 186 projected ISO. He didn't have any power in Chicago.

And I think a lot of the power was the tropes close dimensions right down the line where, you know, I think that that was that fit him like a glove. So I'm seeing now I'm seeing a 107 max CV, a 5% barrel rate. And I'm thinking those things aren't average, those are distinctly below average in the ways that I want to talk about demonstrated power. So when I see a projected basically 190 ISO and 25 homers, I'm taking the under on that. He may be, he may be backed into playing time because you know,

over the way they put their team together, but you know, Michael Bush could end up at third. They could sign a first baseman, you know, they over the course of the season, they could move those pieces around a little bit. So I don't even think Isak Paredes is playing time is, is a hundred percent locked in. Um, so there's a guy where I kind of disagree on the projections and somehow he ended up on my team, yay. Well, that happens eventually, right?

I mean, everyone has a price, I think, at a certain point, if they fall enough and it fits a need. But there's one more thing I wanted to get to with JH before we go. It's just looking back at a few of the players that he rostered really heavily last year. I mentioned Brent Rooker earlier, around pick 300 great pick Matt Chapman good bargain last year I mean

I think the carrying thing for me with Matt Chapman has always been just the glove and any team that's gonna spend money on him Is gonna let him just play a ton because his defense is so good We had a lot of debates about whether the power is gonna come back if he was losing bat speed if that's why he was Going oppo or not pulling the ball. And I mean, when the batsman numbers came out, still like a top five batsman guy and he runs real well. So he's like a super athletic player. So then he stole a bunch of bases, which talk about things that break projections and break your brain. I don't know if you can really like bank on all of those coming back again in 2025. You had a lot of Chad and a lot of Rooker, a lot of Chab and a lot of Rooker,

a lot of Jared Jones, a lot of David Festa too, but that's a late dart, doesn't really matter. So I guess like when you're starting to figure out players that you really like, is there any point where you're like, I have too much exposure to this player because four out of six teams is pretty heavy exposure. I don't really care about diversification at all.

I like a guy,'m going to take them. Um, it did hurt us with Chas McCormick. Yeah. So Chas McCormick was actually my most owned player. That one's slug-folded there. I've actually made some changes to my process, so that doesn't happen. Is that mostly due to, you know, the kind of the low war idea and defense or? Basically what my process was last year is when I was looking at cops for Babbitt,

I gave guys, I gave him a lot of credit for his career, Babbitt, when it wasn't really supported by anything. He was kind of a low sample guy in a way, right? Yeah. And basically, I'm just progressing towards the cops a lot heavier this year. So I don't you don't have some guy that doesn't hit the ball hard or hit line drives with a 330 BABIP like McCormick had. I'm not going to give them as much credit basically. So the way I do diversify is I don't really like to reach for my players maybe a half

a round to a round at most. So if they don't follow me, I don't get them. But if they are there, I'm going to take them. Well, this has been very fun. It's good to just chat with you and talk through some of the stuff we end up texting about throughout the year. Probably could have done a three hour pod with you, but you've got stuff to do.

And, you know, I don't know if people want three hour pods. If they do, let us know in the Discord. The link is in the show description. I mean, I'll make it like I think we're on board to make three hour pods. If everything lines up, I just don't know if everything's going to line up as far as making that one all I'll pay off. But, J.H., thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me, guys.

It's a lot of fun chatting with you. Do you do blue sky? Do you share any information publicly? You like to keep this stuff pretty pretty close to the vest. I don't really think I have anything special to share, but I'm definitely more of a lurker I am on Twitter, but I don't ever post so it can be like the Scene in the movie where the girl gives you only nine digits of her phone number if you want to find me Well, we'll leave it at that you You can find Eno now on Blue Sky,

EnoSaris at B Sky social, I'm just DVR at B Sky social if you're looking for us over there. And again, join the discord, the link is in the show description. That's gonna do it for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We're back with you on Monday. Thanks for listening.