2020 Draft Recap: Let the Sprint Begin

We had 5 of us on the Teams call on draft day…well…11 if you count children and wives that made cameos along the way.

What will the story of this draft be by the end of the year? Will it be that it was probably the least prepared any of us have ever been for a Floored draft before, at least since it became a keeper league? Will it be that Max phoned in his draft by sending his brother, Sam, to draft who was more interested in drafting Justin Bieber’s “brother” with his first overall pick and then stymieing Arthur, Dave, and Michael the rest of the way than trying to build Max a winner? Will it be about Keith’s beard? Maybe we’ll know by September, but in the meantime, here were my takeaways.

Differing Pitcher Strategy

This league has come to be known for a divergence of pitching philosophies. This year epitomizes that with a new rules system that no one knows for sure how it will play out. It is fairly clear that to be competitive, you will need to be close to the innings pitched cap of 675 innings, but how you get there is wide open for debate.

Dave only drafted around 200 projected innings with one starter and six relievers. Dave believes pitchers will not be stretched out enough early so they will not do enough to earn wins and quality starts, making them less valuable overall. He plans to stream his way to get to 675, which by that math, means he needs 475 innings to be added over 66 game days. That’s about 14 innings EVERY day he’ll need to add. Sounds like the dad-to-be plans to spend a lot of time on the free agent wire.

Michael and Ryan, conversely, hit starting pitching early, grabbing 4 in their first 8 picks. The argument here is that, given that everyone will be getting 675 innings or close to it, then they need to be quality innings along the way, a base load of quality innings if you will. So, their 675 will be filled with fewer lower end pitcher innings, at least based on draft day value. Michael and Arthur left the draft with the most innings on roster around 510, they will need to stream less than the rest of the league to get to 675.

Dean made a similar argument via text message to Michael about wanting to get higher quality innings on his way to 675, but he plans to fill them with high k/9 relievers. He succeeded. He and dave left the draft tied for the highest projected k/9 of 10.3, the difference being that Dean drafted over twice the number of innings that Dave did so Dave’s k/9 will come down as he streams lower end SP. The success of this strategy will come down to: what ending % of his 675 innings were made up by high strikeout relievers. Dean only used one of his first 11 picks on a pitcher, so he will need to perform very well on the offensive categories to offset what at face value would appear to be a deficit on the pitching.

Lottery Tickets and Busts

With the season only being 60 games long, there is not enough time for statistical abnormalities to rectify themselves. Random players may hit 20 home runs, a pitcher may have an ERA below 1.00, just about anything is possible, and with our shallower 10 team league compared to the depth of MLB lineups, our late round picks could be the ones to break out. Some of the lottery tickets that caught my eye were Austin Riley by Arthur, Yoenis boar-meat Cespedes by Dave, Yasiel Puig by Ryan if he can get healthy and sign, Mike not-his-grandpa Yastrzemski by Keith, Lance McCullers by Sam/Max, Luke Voit by Arthur, Miguel Sano by Josh with Brian working, and Kyle Tucker by Cory with Yordan Alvarez nowhere to be found.

Conversely, avoiding busts is going to be crucial in this short season. There will not be enough time to cut bait on early draft picks if they bust before they doom your season. It’s hard to pick one, but if I had to, I’d say Sam/Max’s 5^th round of Sam Coonrod was a bit of a reach…but I’m sure he was drafted for fantasy reasons.

Odds and Ends

Dean played a game of keep away when Michael opened his big mouth that all the second baseman were about gone and Dean snagged the last good one in Mike Moustakas. Michael will be going to battle with Luis Arraez who will be on a good Twins team, but would have been far better in Floored circa 2017 when batting average mattered more than power.

Sam Nunziata was Max’s ringer that Max aligned in secret while he was working. Sam drafted a team projected poorly, but reviewing the results, there are some interesting lottery tickets on the team like McCullers and Max Fried that could be something. The lack of studs will probably doom the season though.

Projections

The yahoo projections once again fail to mean anything. Dave left the draft room projected in first place because he had 4 bench hitters. With the way Yahoo tallies in-draft standings, all 4 of those hitters’ stats compile on the leader board so Dave had a 30% more home runs, runs, and RBIs than the rest of the league leading him to show as the winner. As always, I ran our opening day lineups with a set of projections from THE BAT accounting for all teams’ pitchers, all their starting hitters and one bench hitter (because generally for off days and out-of-lineup days that one bench hitters’ stats get accounted for over the course of the year), and this is how the draft played out:

Team	R	HR	RBI	SB	BB	K	AVG	SLG
Smoak That Ish	335	112	330	34	239	584	0.259	0.480
PURE DOMINATION	309	100	295	23	213	532	0.256	0.463
GO GATORS !!	334	100	329	18	221	497	0.262	0.470
Hebrew Nationals	318	89	303	29	200	474	0.236	0.461
Detroit Globetrotter	306	91	293	43	172	517	0.258	0.460
Bourbon Street Blues	309	92	299	37	207	527	0.253	0.458
Vaccinated Victors	337	113	336	25	242	496	0.259	0.483
I Hate Fantasy	333	92	305	53	205	544	0.261	0.461
Polygraph Anyone?	347	102	312	55	211	592	0.250	0.453
Championship Drought	334	114	340	25	226	588	0.256	0.484

Team	W	K	ERA	WHIP	QS	SV+H
Smoak That Ish	24	462	3.917	1.215	30	48
PURE DOMINATION	30	533	4.028	1.245	42	22
GO GATORS !!	25	427	3.785	1.220	27	54
Hebrew Nationals	28	477	3.580	1.161	39	43
Detroit Globetrotter	28	496	3.800	1.199	39	43
Bourbon Street Blues	27	453	3.765	1.179	33	49
Vaccinated Victors	28	503	3.770	1.209	29	70
I Hate Fantasy	9	233	3.759	1.187	6	63
Polygraph Anyone?	26	453	3.760	1.217	36	13
Championship Drought	33	564	3.894	1.215	39	39

ROTO SCORE	TOT	H	P
Smoak That Ish	81	57	24
PURE DOMINATION	65	33	32
GO GATORS !!	73	51	22
Hebrew Nationals	75	32	43
Detroit Globetrotter	64	29	35
Bourbon Street Blues	66	30	36
Vaccinated Victors	105	66	39
I Hate Fantasy	71	42	29
Polygraph Anyone?	67	42	25
Championship Drought	90	53	37

What you see here is Dean with a pretty big lead on 2^nd, Michael with a decent lead on 3^rd, and BJ with a decent lead on the rest of the field. A couple of caveats: Michael and Dean draft with these projections in mind, so they are by design going to rate better here; in a 60 game season, projections mean less than ever…but AS EVER, it’s better to start from a solid base and adjust than look at a draft board and draft guys with names Sam, Max, and Bieber…if you catch my drift.

We can learn more by looking at where each team is hurting in projections. Most notably Dave is in bad shape in W, K, and QS; he will need to stream early and often to be competitive here. Arthur’s ERA is projected the highest, this makes sense because he ended up with a lot of SPs that he didn’t spend early capital on, so their quality and ERA is going to be higher. As the rest of the league streams pitchers towards 675 IP, this is going to happen to all of us, his draft just shows us how. Cory is very power light and AVG poor, he will need to find some free agents to fill this void. Final observation, with there being only 60 days, there is going to be a tooooon of movement in the standings every day, probably right up to the end of the season. You can see how close all of those projected numbers are in all of the categories. Don’t give up if you fall behind because one great add or drop could make or break your season.

Ready, get set, let’s go.