Rotoman’s Fantasy Baseball Guide 2021 is Coming!

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The bad news is that the publisher decided the retail prospects were still poor enough that publishing The Fantasy Baseball Guide 2021 was not a good idea. We’re holding out hope for the football magazine, and all we can do is see.

The good news (and I hope you agree) is that I’m writing Rotoman’s Fantasy Baseball Guide 2021, kind of the same but obviously different, too.

What’s the same? There will be a lot of profiles, prices, and projections. How many? We’ll see. Everyone who is projected to be a regular, for sure, and lots of other players who might contribute in deep leagues will be profiled. I’m writing all the profiles myself, so there may not be quite as many bits about back-of-the-bullpen arms as usual. But if the season doesn’t start until June, maybe I’ll get to everyone.

There will also be draft at a glance lists by position, and some pieces about strategy and ways to play fantasy that I’m working on.

What’s different? No mock draft. I don’t think it makes sense when the start of the season is indefinite. Once we know for sure maybe we try one.

No Strategies of Champions. I inveigle my colleagues to contribute to the Guide each year by asking them to explain why they’re so good at this game. And so lucky. They do it for a copy of the printed Guide, which I greatly appreciate. That won’t be possible this year, so I let them off the hook.

There may not be a print version. My goal is to have a print-on-demand version of the book available at the start of February. But my experience with this tech is limited, I don’t think I can promise that at this point. But I’m going to try.

There will be an ebook version available in February if the season is going to start in April. It will be pushed back if the start of the season is.

In the meantime, please sign up for The Newsletter. I’ll be putting out an issue each week, containing the player profiles I’ve been working on, some notes on the news, recommended reading, answer reader asks, and some other fun stuff I hope. It will be free, so you have nothing to lose! Click here to sign up for The Newsletter.

I’m also publishing all the player profiles at pattonandco.com. Alex and Colin have made a special membership level for Rotoman’s Guide. For $10 my profiles for each player will appear at the top of each player page. Subscribers to the big package will have access, too, for no extra charge. Please check out the site, it’s great even if you don’t subscribe but you do have to sign up, the subscription page goes live on December 15th, and the first profiles go up about then, too, once we work out the kinks.

Tout Wars NL: Look Back in Anger. Or maybe regret.

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We held Tout Weekend as planned back in March, though not in person and with no party at Foley’s and before many of us knew what Zoom was. We drafted online, on Fantrax, hoping baseball would be back in a month or two or, many of us expected, around the Fourth of July.

That guess was better than most of my draft day picks. Baseball resumed on July 23rd, and with one day of the postseason under our belts, the expanded playoffs will continue for the next month. But Tout Wars is done, as was my team, it turns out, the moment the draft ended.

In that draft I bought a stars-and-scrubs style team. A couple of the scrubs, Dominic Smith and Tony Gonsolin, worked out. If the core of my team had been average those two would have pushed the team toward contention. But the rest of the team wasn’t average. Let’s take a look why:

Ronald Acuna Jr. $44 ($47 value): Earned $29, all prices for OBP 5×5. Obviously didn’t earn out, but compared to Yelich ($19) he was a better buy at the same price, in spite of the time he missed. You pay great players a lot because even when they aren’t great they contribute a lot of stats. Acuna and Yelich showed that in 2020, small consolation to me and Justin Mason, Yelich’s owner who finished 2 points ahead of me in the standings.

Walker Buehler $30 ($29 value): Earned $8. When your ace is a tres you’re going to have problems. It doesn’t appear that there was anything wrong with Buehler when he was on the mound, but he missed some starts with a blister in September, and was unlucky in wins when he got five innings in pitching for a team that led baseball in runs scored.

Ozzie Albies $27 ($33 value): Earned $10. He came on at the end, showing why it wasn’t madness to expect a lot. Missing a month of a two-month season puts you in the hole, to be sure.

Nolan Arenado $35 ($40 value): Earned $13. His auction price was depressed because of the threat he might be traded to a less commodious ballpark. My bet was he wouldn’t, and he wasn’t. Alas, he was not having a great season when he hurt his shoulder in early September, and he struggled after that until he was shut down. Players slump at times, and in the short season there was scant time to get a second chance to fix things.

Will Smith $14 ($14 value):  Earned $12. He got on at a good clip, missed 10 days with a neck injury, and will have better seasons than this one, which was fine.

Wilson Ramos $13 ($17 value): Earned $6. A bad season for Ramos.

Reisel Iglesias $13 ($13 value):  Earned $17. Finally, someone who performed as expected, maybe a little better.

Yasiel Puig $5 ($3 value):  Did Not Play. Tantalizingly close to signing with the Braves in July, he got the Covid and did not get another chance. He was one of two shots at picking up a significant producer for cheap for a think outfield.

Mike Moustakas $22 ($22 value):  Earned $9. All my stars tanked. Moustakas, like Albies, was hurt for much of the season. In my notes after the draft I said that I really wanted Corey Seager, a switch that would have helped my team quite a bit.

Dylan Carlson $8 ($8 value): Earned $2. There were two risks here. One, that he wouldn’t get a chance, the other that if given the chance he wouldn’t produce. I felt certain enough that he’d get the chance that I’d take the risk he wouldn’t produce. He didn’t. Given my needs I went for it and took a shot that didn’t pan out. If the rest of the team was working this wouldn’t have mattered.

Mike Foltynewicz $12 ($12 value):  Earned -$9. I was going to get either Folty or Lamet for $13, I thought. I didn’t get Lamet, was pleased to have Folty, until the season started. Another close call.

Ender Inciarte $6 ($6 value): Earned $4. Part of the reason he got as many at bats as he did was because Acuna was hurt. Still, it was Markakis’s decision to come back and play that cost Inciarte playing time. Well, that and his own limited offensive production.

Freddy Galvis $7 ($7 value): Earned $8. As expected, the poor OBP offset most of his offensive contributions, but not all.

Chris Archer $5 ($7 value): DNP. Had season-ending neck surgery in June.

AJ Pollock $7 ($14 value): Earned $23. I was pleased as punch to get him at $7, and he came through. Too bad it was wasted.

Wade Davis $2 ($4 value):  Earned -$9. He only lost so little because he only pitched 4.1 innings. A calculated risk that he’d be a saves source. Didn’t count on the return of Daniel Bard, or Davis’s shoulder going out.

Sean Newcomb $2 ($4 value): Earned -$12. Rounding out a pitching staff, you throw your darts and hope for the best. Sometimes you get the worst.

Of my reserve picks, Dominic Smith earned $19 and Tony Gonsolin earned $23. A winning year is when your core team does okay and you’re able to augment with good pick-ups.

Notable waivers pickups were Ben Gamel ($4), Andres Gimenez ($12), Donovan Solano on August 3 ($15 for the season), and David Peterson ($9), all good, but at the end of August I sprung for Jose Israel Garcia, Julio Mateo, Taylor Clarke and Trevor Rogers, all with potential but in the end hurtful, not helpful.

In the end, I finished with 50 points. My draft day roster finish was similar, next to last, but with only 40 points, so I improved. For now, that’s the positive message I take away from this weird season.

Ask Rotoman: Canha Worms

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Dear Rotoman:

I play in a roto 5×5 league which uses OBP instead of BA. Why is Mark Canha rated so low?

Andy

Dear Andy,

First thing, my prices and rankings are for batting average leagues. I’m a big fan of using OBP, it makes total sense to credit hitters with walks, especially when we penalize pitchers for them, but OBP hasn’t caught on yet. So my price, $11, reflects Canha’s weak batting average, not his very good on base percentage.

That said, a few facts argue against that $11 price.

  1. Canha earned $17 last year, and $11 the year before.
  2. He went for $15 and $14 in the CBS and LABR expert leagues this year, both BA leagues, and $16 in Tout Wars, which uses OBP.
  3. My own projection is rosier than any of those carried at FanGraphs, and when you price it it suggests Canha is a $16 player on par in BA leagues, a dollar or two more in OBP leagues.

Absent a transcript of what I was thinking when I priced him at $9 in March, and bumped him to $11 earlier this month in the update, here are the caveats:

  1. He shined last year as a full time player after the break, a career year really, but that’s a small sample after more spotty playing time because he’s generally been weak against lefties. He hit eight homers last year against lefties, good, with a .221 BA. Bad. If he loses at bats he loses value.
  2. He’s 31 years old and falls into that class of player who is older, less athletic, platoonable and more prone to lose his job to younger and more athletic players at any time. And if his gains the last two years are real, he’s a classic late bloomer, a type of hitter who generally falls apart quickly as he ages.

Will Canha lose his job this year? Probably not. Could he match last year’s numbers? Certainly, but is that guaranteed? Far from it, and there is some little risk of collapse.

So, I gave him an $11 price because he’s not the sort of player you want to bid up to his career best price, he’s the sort you want to sneak in after all the sexier choices are gone and the boring choice goes a little cheaply.

Still, $11 is probably a little too pessimistic. That’s the price you want to pay for him, but odds are good in BA leagues he’ll go for $13-15, as he did in the expert leagues that use BA, and $16 as he did in Tout. That’s okay. I’ve bumped his price to $13, because it might make sense for you to pay that at some point. In OBP maybe you want to go $14.

And, of course, if you’re a big fan and you want to take him to $16, that may well work out. So, feel free, but you won’t find me bidding against you if you do.

Thanks for the question!

Ask Rotoman: We Heart JD Bolick!

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Dear Rotoman:

This may seem silly, but have you considered putting what was prepared for Fantasy Football Guide online for a nominal charge or free? One of the big annual NHL guides did that in a year where there was strike uncertainty. I need to know what J. D. Bolick thinks of rookies! I have been checking the cigar store for FFG compulsively — a real downer that you aren’t publishing.

Alan

Thanks for your note Alan. If we had started work on the Guide and had something to show we would certainly share it, but because we were in lockdown at the time we usually start work on the mag (the day after the NFL Draft), and the publisher was unsure whether he would pay for it, we didn’t start working.

And so, not unexpectedly, no work was done, and hence we have nothing to share.

I sent your note to JD and he was grateful for the support. And we all look forward to the chance that next year we’ll be back on our regular schedule. We’re sorry to miss this one.

Best,


Ask Rotoman News, June 25 Edition

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The biggest news is that The Fantasy Football Guide 2020 is shelved. The publisher was getting too few advance orders from skittish retailers, and so we’re taking a pass for this season. We hope there’s a football season this fall and you can enjoy it without the Guide.

The goal is to be back for baseball come January, if possible.

In the meantime, we have baseball potentially starting up. Updated projections and prices for buyers of The Fantasy Baseball Guide 2020, reflecting the 60 game season and the unbalanced schedule, will be available on July 9th on the Updates and Corrections page here.

Feel free to ask Rotoman any questions about this strange and endangered season.

Despite pessimism about the chance the full 60 games get played, I’m looking forward to reconsidering baseball again.

Last time I bought this team in the Tout Wars NL auction back in March.

Retro Drafting is a Thing.

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I’ve now done three retro drafts, for 1982, 1990 and 1999. I wrote about the 1982 draft here, and have written about the 1990 and 1999 drafts at pattonandco.com, in the Stage Four thread.

I’ve finished in the Top 4 each time, but have yet to win one. I’ll be drafting next Wednesday night, taking apart the 1986 season. Fred Zinkie selected it because he won last week’s 1999 contest, jumping a mighty 11 points with his last round pick of Ryan Klesko.

I took apart the draft a few different ways. First I looked at how many draft dollars each team bought in hitting and pitching, using my earnings values (which give positive value to the Top 108 pitchers and Top 168 hitters based on their 10 category stats).

Then I compared their earnings to their expected earnings for each draft slot (basically my earnings list sorted from highest to lowest), to see their NET value.

And I compared these things to their actual finish. Here are the data:

Looking at this, it doesn’t really pass the smell test. Dean earned more than Fred? How did Jeff finish so high while earning so little?

Someone over at pattonandco.com pointed out that Fred added Pedro Astacio, who I had valued at -$20 on the season. That appears to have cost him two points in ERA and WHIP combined, because of the way those categories were grouped, but gained him many more Wins and Strikeouts.

Someone else suggested that this indicated a problem with my pricing, but I don’t think that’s true in a general sense. But in a very specific sense the issue of who gets a positive value seems to have a lot of impact on pitcher prices. I wrote:

Doug led in ERA and was second in WHIP. I was second in ERA and third in WHIP. Dean was third in ERA and first in WHIP. Fred was first in strikeouts and fifth in ERA and WHIP. And the three of us are way ahead of the other nine teams, with Fred finishing just ahead of seven of them. That’s efficiency. 

I think this shows not a problem with my pricing, but a problem with pricing in general. The dollar values work, but they then have to be applied to the right stats when you’re constructing your team. In other words, it’s not the meat it’s the motion.

But one issue to be aware of is that pitcher value very much depends on which 108 pitchers you value. The math will tell you one group, but as we can see, for a team in a particular position, a player like David Cone or Pedro Astacio will have real value and supplant one of the 70 inning relievers with a low ERA and Ratio that usually reside in the $1-$5 range.

So, if you go and reprice the actual pool, so that the worst pitcher is worth $1 and the 108 add up to $1092, the value of Pedro Martinez drops from $55 to $25. (I just did that.)

In the prospective leagues we usually price for, this phenomenon drives up the value of the best pitchers, but when we know what the stats are going to add up to it seems to do the opposite. Here’s how the Retro earnings looks with the pitching pool repriced. 

This doesn’t really make sense to me logically but eyeballing the Dollar totals in this chart makes more sense to me than the earlier one.

Note: I also adjusted the hitters in a similar way after noticing that the total wasn’t adding up to $3120. These results look more like what I would have expected, demonstrating that in a retro draft to get good prices you need to know which players will be selected.

The XFL 1982 Retro Draft Was Last Night!

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For 17 years I’ve played with a bunch of friends in a quirky keeper 5×5 (OBP) fantasy league called the XFL. We hold a $260 auction in the fall at First Pitch Arizona, keeping up to 15 players off the previous year’s rosters with a $5 increase (+$3 for players picked up before they had ML playing time). Then, in March, usually, we have a 17-round supplemental draft to round out our 40-man rosters.

Only this year, you know, we didn’t have that supplemental. We first put it off until April 20, and then as that date approached we collectively realized that it made no sense to spend time on something when conditions in the majors this year may be totally different, or that there may not even be a this year, so we postponed.

Which led to the idea of doing something. Anything. What that turned out to be, under the direction of Ron Shandler, was a draft of the major league players from 1982. I’m not sure why Ron chose ’82. I pushed for 1980, since that was the first year of our game and Dan Okrent’s piece about the Rotisserie League the following winter in Inside Sports magazine was called “The Year George Foster Wasn’t Worth $36.” But 1982 was fine, it was the first year I played the game, joining the Stardust League that Matthew Berry wrote about recently, in its second year.

There are things about a retrospective draft that are different than they are in a prospective draft. Our regular drafts and auctions before the season is played are shaped by our expectations–our projections–of what players may do, what chances there are that they will do more, or less, and how we put a price on that range of outcomes.

In a retro draft you know what a player has actually done, and you know the context in which he did it. That makes it fairly easy to come up with a value for each player and a ranking of player values. But it turns out that the math only gets you so far. Here’s why.

The Split: Many years ago, in the early ’90s, Les Leopold and I developed the idea that each player actually had two prices. One was his actual worth in the fantasy season just played (that’s his retro price), and his draft price, which was based on his projection and market expectations, what I call in The Guide The Big Price. We theorized that in a retrospective auction you would allocate 50 percent of your budget to pitching and 50 percent to hitting. This was something I tried to test for a long time, but there wasn’t much interest until everyone had to stay at home for months on end.

But alas, in preparing for this retro draft, it quickly became clear to me that allocating 50 percent to pitching didn’t solve all the problems. The one problem it did solve is that of pitcher injuries and unreliability, which are one and the same for the most part. Pitchers who stay healthy are reliable, but pitchers get hurt a lot. So while we discount pitching in our draft price, splitting our budgets about 65/35, spending half on pitching for half the points seemed like a good strategy.

But if you do that, I soon realized, you’re going to have to compete in all five pitching categories, and if you do that you’re going to bump into the fact that in a draft you can’t really load up your staff with aces. If you have the first pick and take Steve Carlton by the time you pick again all the other high strikeout, high wins starters will be gone. Drafts, obviously, are different than auctions, so once again we’re not testing the split.

Dumping: A draft is a linear playing field. The difference between the price of each successive pick is the same. But the value of the player pool is not the same. So, when you graph, say, the auction prices in a mixed league and compare it to the line of selections in a similarly configured mixed draft, you’ll see that the value of the first 50 or so picks is higher than the line, while after the third round most picks are under the line.

The blue line are actual auction earnings (15 teams, $260) vs the cost in a draft.

I prepared by running the available players through my pricing spreadsheet, adjusting for a 12 team mixed league. Absolute prices weren’t important for this exercise, it was a draft, but I tried to jigger the balance between the categories so that I didn’t overvalue low-ERA low-production pitchers. The danger of doing that is because you’re (I) using computed prices for the player’s season. When we’re ranking players prospectively, we don’t price their optimal performance but rather one that’s in the middle of the range of possibilities. Drafting retroactively, you know what Joe Niekro’s optimal performance was worth, but if the value of his ERA and Ratio outstrip Steve Carlton’s monster strikeouts and wins in your formula, are you putting together a roster that can win?

Maybe.

As it turns out, Brian Feldman (fantasybaseballauctioneer.com) led off with Carlton as the first pick. I had the wheel and took Andre Dawson with the 12th pick and Joaquin “Donde Esta Mi Cabeza” Andujar for some reason. Niekro was still there, higher on my sheet, but at that point my sheet was too big, too many columns, and I misread hits allowed for strikeouts in Andujar’s case and typed his name into the sheet. It was fine, they were close enough, but I had already deviated from my pricing.

At the next turn I took Dave Winfield and Goose Gossage, creating my own mini Yankees run which also set off a closer run. But I didn’t really mean to turn this into a play by play. There are a few other points about this exercise.

If you love baseball and play fantasy baseball this is potentially a great way to get together virtually with friends and spend some hours with a new way to play and talk about baseball. Some of us played fantasy baseball in 1982, some of us weren’t even born in 1982, but we all knew how great Robin Yount’s season was, how bad George Foster’s was. There was lots to talk about while selecting teams.

Zoom allowed us to see the excellent drafting spreadsheet that is part of the Mastersball.com package. A handful of us were also on camera, though the demands of keeping up with our lists meant we weren’t watching each other. The rest were on audio feeds, which was filled with banter and reminiscing.

The spreadsheet updated after each pick with revised standings, but we didn’t start checking that (Todd Zola was updating the sheet and he’d have to be asked to show that page) until more than halfway through. If I’d been paying attention to it earlier I would have seen that by not taking Ricky or Timmy or Willie my pursuit of steals was doomed, which would have changed some of my later picks as I vainly pursued the bottom of the steals pack and failed. This came to a head fairly deep in the draft when I selected Dickie Thon’s 37 saves and didn’t make a dent.

Position scarcity is something I didn’t think about in advance and though I was in the lead for a number of the first 20 rounds my team faded at the end. I don’t think that was caused by scarcity because when you know everyone’s value the math tells you the tradeoffs. If you take Gary Carter in the third you’re getting fewer stats than if you take Gary Ward, do you get that back later? You might, but that’s not a sure thing. A properly formed price list would have the exact 168 hitters with the positions necessary to fill 12 team rosters and prices rejiggered to reflect the fact that some of those catchers are of negative value when you price all players. They’re not negative valued when you have to pay for them, the prices have to change.

In the end, Jeff Erickson pulled out to a good lead in the last round, optimizing his categories. I failed at optimizing, wasting value by buying too much average, wasting money on steals, and having too low an ERA and WHIP. We’ll be playing again in a couple of weeks, Jeff picked the 1990 season, and you can be sure we’ll all be paying more attention, not necessarily balancing the categories, but more effectively managing the categories we dump. Or not.

Click here for the draft results.

Photo by Keith Allison

Ask Rotoman: What happens to Domingo German this season?

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Ask Rotoman: How will multiple game suspensions for an individual player that were supposed to start at the beginning of the season in March, be calculated when and if the season does start. Will there be a reduction of games due to the late start?

Good question. Here’s what MLB says:

All suspensions of 80-or-fewer games will be served in 2020 if games are played. Should the season be canceled, those suspensions would not carry over to 2021.

MLB.com

What MLB doesn’t say is whether those suspensions will be pro-rated for the games that will be (we hope) played this year. For instance, if the season is scheduled for 81 games, will German’s suspension be 80 games (the full monte) or 40 games (the prorated part).

The canceling of the suspensions if the season isn’t played at all suggests that the suspensions will be pro-rated, I think, in recognition that the punishment is meant to be proportional. This is also how service time will be treated for all players. Given players’ limited shelf life, giving them a full season penalty when a half seasons worth of games are played seems excessive.

But since this isn’t stated we can’t really know for sure until issues like the length and shape of the schedule are worked out, and both players and owners can assess how things are going to go. That won’t be until late May, at the very earliest, it looks like. We hope.

Back In Tout NL. A Draft Recap.

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After five years or so playing in Tout Head 2 Head and Tout Mixed Draft, this year I returned to the National League version of Tout Wars, to compete against old friends, joined by some new faces (for me), including Fred Zinkie and Justin Mason.

With Tout Weekend canceled because of the ongoing pandemic crisis, we decided to have the auctions now as scheduled, rather than moving them to nearer the start of the season for two reasons. We knew everyone already had the time blocked now, just the location would be changing, and we figured that while there certainly will be news between now and when the season starts, the player evaluations we’ve done this spring will be just as valid now as in the future. Later we’ll scramble to fix bad luck, or take advantage of good fortune. That’s part of the game.

I haven’t gone back to read all of the auction write ups I’ve done for Tout NL over the years, but I’m afraid (since I’ve never won) that many of them start the same way. My goal was to bargain hunt in the middle range all auction long, but the bargains at the top were too enticing, so I went where the (extra) money was. This year was no different than any other. Here’s what happened.

Ronald Acuna Jr. $44 ($47 value): Some say he’s not an OBP guy, but why not? Sure, he’s no Yelich, who I had valued at $51, but he hits the ball hard, should have a decent average and walk 10 percent of the time. That’s an OBP guy. He also has power and runs. I was very pleased. Yelich, by the way, also went for $44, which was the superior buy. I almost bid $45. Maybe I should have.

Walker Buehler $30 ($29 value): I pressed the +$1 button on the auction site on a $28 bid, but a flaw in the auction software allows a momentarily earlier bid to take precedence and then bump your bid another dollar. That happened here. Buehler came out early enough that I might not have actually bid $30, there were still plenty of other pitchers to be bid on, but at this price a $1 difference is insignificant. $29 is my median value for Buehler, there’s plenty of ways he could beat it. An equal number he could fall short.

Ozzie Albies $27 ($33 value): You know how you have your guys? I don’t know why, but you have your reasons for your guys. Well, I have my guys, and my guys are the players who consistently rank higher than the prices the experts seem to be willing to pay for them. Albies is one of those this year. He has power, he has speed, he will hit for a decent average and while he’s not a base on balls machine, he walked more last year than the year before (and struck out a little less), which may be normal fluctuation but may also be improvement. If he earned $29 last year and $25 the year before and he’s just 23 years old with 1360 plate appearances, why would you expect him not to do just as well again? Maybe it’s the seven percent walk rate. Looking at my value for him, I’ll admit that I’m probably giving him a little too much OBP credit. If he hits .270 instead of .295 he’ll be worth $27 this year, all other stuff being equal. And really, he could also get better. That’s my guy.

Nolan Arenado $35 ($40 value): After buying three of the first 16 players nominated I was determined to hold off, but 15 picks later the bidding stalled on Arenado. I bid $35, expecting to be topped, but I wasn’t. The only thing I can figure here is that folks are scared of a trade. I’m not scared of a trade. First of all, there’s no guarantee he’s going to plotz if he is traded. Sure, he’s been a much better hitter in Colorado than on the road, but it isn’t as if he’s been terrible on the road. Just an ordinary guy hitting .285, which right there isn’t an ordinary guy these days. Plus, he might not be traded. Plus, who knows how trades are going to go in this weird season. So, I’m willing to take something like an eight percent discount on the chance to have the best third baseman in the game. By far.

Will Smith $14 ($14 value): I’m a believer in Will Smith, so paying the ticket price just made sense. Smith wasn’t a top prospect most of the time coming up, but a look at his play through the minors showed plate judgment and growing power. I don’t see any reason why that should stall at this point. Might he be a low-average guy? Could be, but he walks more than nine percent of the time. His OBP may not be big, but for a guy with his power and quantitative stats, he’ll get on base enough to be much better than most catchers.

Wilson Ramos $13 ($17 value): Ramos is another one of my guys. Three-time Tout NL champion Mike Lombardo, who passed away recently, thought having two good catchers was the center of any winning strategy. Don’t overpay, but get good catchers he’d say, because a lot of teams are going to be playing with garbage. The homage wasn’t intentional, but very appropriate.

Reisel Iglesias $13 ($13 value): I hate buying closers, but when you plan on only buying one expensive starter you can’t afford to punt saves. Iglesias wasn’t quite as reliable last year as in the past, but the top-line numbers are more dramatically negative than the underlying ones. As with nearly all closers not called Mariano, pretty much a dart throw at a pretty good strikeout rate.

Yasiel Puig $5 ($3 value): That value is a little bogus. If you figured Puig was 50/50 to play in either AL or NL, he’d have an $11 value in both leagues. But that’s complicated by the fact that he hadn’t signed when ST camp ended. So there’s some chance he won’t play at all in the majors this year. Calling that a 50/50 shot seems fair, which means his real value should have been $5.50. Not a great bargain, but a little one, and if he does land in the NL he should be a great profit center.

Mike Moustakas $22 ($22 value): I was getting nervous about shortstops, that’s why I bought Moustakas (one of my guys) here. The real guy I wanted was Corey Seager, who was the next guy nominated after Puig. He’s another of my guys. He even went cheap, for $21 ($23 value), but I was feeling cash poor and didn’t pull the trigger on $22. 22 picks later I was feeling like I needed another bat, and when I could get Moustakas at my price I took it. He has valuable position flexibility, can cover corner or middle, so I wasn’t jamming myself up, and he’s moving to a good park. Might one be optimistic even?

Dylan Carlson $8 ($8 value): Taking another risky guy boom or bust guy here probably is a mistake. If either of them works out I’ll have a profit, but the chance neither of them will are good enough that a safer choice might have made more sense. But heck, you have to take chances to win, don’t you?

Mike Foltynewicz $12 ($12 value): I was hoping to pick off him or Dinelson Lamet as ($13 value) my No. 2, but I didn’t get to $13 first on Lamet so I settled for Folty. He had a great second half, which coming off injury may or may not mean something. But if he returns to 2018 form and luck I got him at about a 50 percent discount. That’s at the high end, but I think there’s a better than fair chance there’s profit here.

Ender Inciarte $6 ($6 value): There were better outfield bargains, but most cost more. Or I thought would cost more. Inciarte has a low price because he was awful last year while battling injuries and fighting for playing time, but he should play more this year and isn’t that old and gets on base, even if he doesn’t run as much as he did (though I hope he does). And most importantly was not that costly. I have a weird outfield, for sure, that’s really all I can say.

Freddy Galvis $7 ($7 value): Budget limited, I had to let my guy Dansby Swanson go for $17. This is going to happen in NL only, you can’t have great players at every position. Galvis has some power but he doesn’t walk much and his batting average isn’t going to be average, which makes him an OBP liability. On the other hand, he has some power which is more than can be said of the other guys I could have picked up. I had hopes of landing Johan Camargo, who would not get as many at bats but could be a more productive hitter, in the endgame. That didn’t work out, so there is work to do here.

Chris Archer $5 ($7 value): It hasn’t gone well for him in Pittsburgh, but he’s earned $7 the last two years. He strikes out more than a batter an inning. At this price I’m throwing darts.

AJ Pollock $7 ($14 value): Okay, here’s one of those outfield bargains I was talking about earlier. He’s not likely to see 500 plate appearances, but he projects out at $18 of earnings for me. LABR paid $13 and I should probably adjust my bid price down to $10 or so, still he’s a good price for a good player who could play more if there’s an injury or trade. Historically he has no platoon split.

Jon Lester $2 ($4 value): Veteran grit, of course, and he’s earned $12, $16 and $7 the last three years. It could be the end of the line, he’ll be on a short leash, but he’ll also be looking to prove something. That he’s ageless.

Wade Davis $2 ($4 value): A second closer? Maybe. Scott Oberg went for $2 as well, to Tristan Cockcroft. One of us might be right.

Sean Newcomb $2 ($4 value): There’s a reason he’s only $2. He doesn’t have the big strikeout pitch, he’s been better in relief than as a starter. He’s also a good age to make some change that either wins him the starting role or not. The bet here is maybe.

Dollar Days:

Dominic Smith: I needed a first baseman. I know, I know. Smith has real upside if he can find at bats.

Jose Osuna: Technically $2 because he was on my mind in my first base misery and I clicked +1 when I shouldn’t have. Not as much talent as Smith, and no greater chance to play. A mistake, my mistake.

Brian Dozier: He hit 20 homers last year and he walks a lot. Discounted because his batting averages are bad and he has no path to obvious at bats.

Tony Gonsolin: Talented arm in a crowded rotation. Not a huge strikeout guy, but throws ground balls. Could be Ross Stripling, if only Ross Stripling wasn’t still on the team.

Touki Toussaint: Talented arm in a crowded rotation, was terrible as a starter in Triple-A last year and not much better in relief in the big leagues. But he’s young and he’ll always have 2018.

Of course I like my team!

The bones are good, the talent for the most part young and exciting or middle aged and moving into good situations. The big risks are having no first baseman, three risky outfielders, and a lot of arms with some pedigree, but one or two of the five will have to step up. But it’s a long season, unless it turns out to be a short one, and this is the price to pay for having some top talent.

So, we wait.

The 2020 Roto-Regs Draft is Over.

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Back in the bad old days of the internet, when AskRotoman had a bulletin board visited by hundreds, before spam and malicious interlopers wrecked it, the regulars at the bulletin board formed a funny league. Funny because the format was different than other leagues.

For one, 20 teams. But only nine hitters (C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, OF, OF, OF, UT) and seven pitchers. A good man named Steve ran the league for a number of years. My memory is that the first year I finished second, and I’ve done worse every year since.

Actually, after the bulletin board was no more (I pulled the plug, sadly) the Regs league went on hiatus, but our friend Tim McLeod has revived it and I had my second new era draft last night.

You can see the results here. I’m not sure how transferable they are. Pitchers flew off the board because each round is so long you never know if the best ones will get back to you. Maybe that’s how we play now, or maybe it reflects these peculiar rules. In either case, it was a fun time.