Early season strategy for Fantasy Baseball success
With the MLB regular season at hand, the Yahoo fantasy baseball cooperative turns its attention to in-season strategy, highlighting the do’s and don’ts of roster management during the opening act of the ’17 campaign.
Q. What advice would you give fantasy owners to heed over the course of the first couple months of the regular season?
Brandon Funston: I don’t think there is a better in-season strategy than just staying active – making it a daily routine to peruse the box scores and maintain a healthy, viable active roster. If you are plugged in, you’ll have a better chance to notice the early stages of a player slump or streak, and act accordingly.
Of course, you’ll want to keep an eye on closer hot spots and look for speculation pickups in spots where the incumbent is struggling. And you want to surface those players that have opened up the season in a larger role, or in a more advantageous role than we realized. Staying active also means working the waiver wire, cutting loose those failure-to-launch players from the back-end of your roster. It’s nice that Player X was your favorite late-round sleeper, but a late rounder that is stumbling out of the gates needs to go in favor of someone who is getting it done on the wire. Practice patience with your starters, but don’t be married to your bench players.
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Andy Behrens: This isn’t football, people, so you can’t manage like it is. Don’t be the owner who flips half his roster in April, chasing after every random 3-for-5 boxscore you find in the player pool. Baseball is a game in which it can take weeks or months for a player’s true talent to become clear. A guy who slugs 40 homers doesn’t even average two per week, and players don’t tend to deliver their stats evenly throughout the year.
To be clear, I’m not telling you to completely avoid the wire. When a player with clear talent falls into an opportunity — as with Blake Treinen and Delino DeShields right at this moment — you need to react, particularly if they fill clear areas of need. But you cannot kick a proven fantasy asset to the curb because they get stuck in, say, a 1-for-14 slump. Managers who churn their active rosters as if it’s Week 3 of the NFL season aren’t likely to remain in the hunt late in the summer.
Scott Pianowski: This might sound like it’s in opposition to Andy’s point, but I want you to be aggressive with your roster and management. When you see plausible upside, move. The people who wait for proof in any fantasy game are not going to win competitive leagues.
Obviously I’m not telling you to cut a proven or valued player on a short sample. But the final spots on any roster should be fluid. Remember the lesson from the Monty Hall Problem: an informed choice beats an uninformed choice. And specifically with closers and base-running specialists, there’s a very low barrier to fantasy relevance.
Dalton Del Don: Don’t worry about an early slump with established players but be aggressive with your FAAB on relievers. It sounds obvious, but getting a player in April is huge. But my main advice would be to stick with your original draft sheet, as a cold start often is overblown because it happens early. A two-week slump would be mostly ignored if it happened in July, so don’t be rash just because it occurs early on.
Q. What player, or roster situation, will you be following most intently as the regular season gets underway?
Funston: I’m highly invested in the future of the Indians outfield, that being Bradley Zimmer. He’s got the kind of pop/speed combo that should play nicely in roto leagues, and that blend of talent could be on display in Cleveland very early this season if things break right – injuries, a Tyler Naquin slump … the Indians have plenty of question marks in the outfield to open the year, and my hope is that the answers to those question marks remain elusive until Zimmer gets a promotion.
Behrens: There aren’t many good reasons to follow the Padres this year, to be honest. But that lineup actually features a few young players of interest for fantasy purposes, notably Hunter Renfroe, Manuel Margot, Ryan Schimpf and Austin Hedges. And then we have the situation in left field. Alex Dickerson (back) seems likely to open the year on the DL, and Jabari Blash is on a power binge this spring (7 HR). Travis Jankowski and his 30-steal speed are gonna play, too. Somewhere in this mess of a paragraph, we’re going to find a legit fantasy option (or three).
Pianowski: I want to see how the Brewers handle Hernan Perez, who was fantasy gold to us last season. He has several paths into the lineup, should any number of players slump or get hurt. Perhaps he’ll get enough run as a super-utility player, but I’d like to see more, a full-time commitment.
Del Don: I’m just counting down the time until Javier Baez is given an every day job with the Cubs. It seems inevitable, but the sooner the better. He has the feel of a future star, both in real life terms and fantasy.
