Draft Recap, Projections, Breakouts, and Busts

The West Palm Beach Draft Party

The 12^th Floored Draft is in the books! Every year this draft finds a way to shock me. Anything from Dean not drafting a starting pitcher other than his keeper in 2015, to Arthur picking Aroldis Chapman in the 2^nd round in 2017, all the way back to Max breaking the Minor Leaguer barrier in 2012 taking Bryce Harper in or around the 13^th round. It’s always something.

This year, it was the elite Relief Pitching revolution. You guys must be reading the blogs, because there was a major initiative taken to grab Relief Pitchers, closers or non-closers. There were 14 non-closers drafted this year, plus or minus 2 or 3 because some closer jobs are still up in the air. This is a sky rocketing number from last year’s 6 such pitchers taken, and I know for a fact a handful of the 6 non-closers were taken on accident thinking that they were, in fact, the closer. There was also a major drop in Starting Pitchers taken. In 2016, there were 51 starters drafted, in 2017 we bumped up the innings pitched minimum to 30 innings and the number of starting pitchers drafted rose to 53. This year, there were only 41 starters taken. It’s a revolution! Consensus top 20 starting pitchers in the industry like Shoehei Ohtani was drafted in the 18^th round. My boy Chris Archer lasted until the 10^th round. It was madness.

At the same time, I get it. Our rules are set up for this, it was great to see a wholesale shift occurring as early in the year as the draft. It will be incredibly interesting to see people manipulating their weekly innings pitched totals to stay as close to 30 as possible, while still trying to win matchups via streaming starters.

The next thing I wanted to dive into was the dynamics of player evaluation leading up to the draft and the beginning of the year. Fantasy baseball player evaluation occurs on two levels: the statistical projection level and the scouting level. Just like real baseball, in fact.

Take Xander Bogaerts for example, here is what his Fangraphs page looks like:

	Games Played	Home Runs	Runs	RBIs	Stolen Bases	Batting Avg
2015 Actual	156	7	84	81	10	.320
2016 Actual	157	21	115	89	13	.294
2017 Actual	148	10	94	62	15	.273
2018 Projected*	150	15	86	75	11	.289

*Depth Chart Projection system which is an average of the Zips and Steamer projections

You can see quickly that he took a step back in 2017. It was highly publicized that Xander was hurt for most of the year and this led to a lack of production in his (non stolen base) numbers. Projects systems inherently don’t care about this, the numbers are the numbers. Therefore his 2018 projection which takes varying weights of the past 3 years into account are going to be skewed by his 2017. This isn’t to say he won’t get hurt again, but it does leave room for skepticism in the player evaluation, based solely on his statistical projection.

Here’s where the game comes in. Fantasy is all about player evaluation, guessing who will produce the best numbers for any reason. Now that the draft is over, we have staked our claims for the first part of the year. Who was statistically undervalued? Who made a skill change in the off season that will lead to a breakout year? Whose breakout last year was luck-based or fluky and is going to lead them to fall back to the pack? Call your shot. Reply to the email I sent out with two or three breakout players for this year, and two or three busts for this year. The criteria for success will be that the player has to be ranked in yahoo as a top 400 player right now (we can show some leniency on the breakout side because some of the players that were even drafted are ranked by yahoo outside the top 400). A breakout will be someone who cuts their rank by three-quarters (for example from number 100 to number 25) by the end of the year, a bust will be someone who quadruples their rank.  This game is all for fun so don’t pick some guy that’s ranked number 399 and is hurt already, and don’t take number 2 overall and call him a bust for finishing 10^th.  Play to the spirit of the game.  Make your calls actionable.

Call your shot!