Floored 2021 Blog Series: Draft Recap and Another Great Day in Floored History

It was another great draft day, Yahoo’s new ‘Draft Together’ feature was mostly seamless though not all chose or were able to join. But some guy that definitely wasn’t Max called in and ruined everything. 

As always, any draft analysis needs to start with a scoreboard, so here is ours. This was built from a consensus set of projections; as in, not just using Yahoo or Steamer or THE BAT. This should present a more well-rounded picture. For example, Yahoo looooved Mike Yastrzemski projecting him for more than 20 points of batting average and slugging than other systems. Is that valuable to know that one computer system sees something special? Maybe. But a more well-rounded picture of all the players is more likely to set the baseline we are looking for in any projections analysis:

Roto Scores, each team's rank in each category, 10 being the best 

all starting hitters, first drafted bench hitter
	R	HR	RBI	SB	BB	K	AVG	SLG		W	SVH	QS	K	ERA	WHIP	SUM
BJ	9	9	8	8	8	2	3	7		1	3	3	2	5	5	73
Dave	8	7	9	5	5	3	9	8		2	2	2	1	4	4	69
Arthur	6	2	1	7	7	9	8	3		3	10	1	3	1	1	62
Dean	3	1	3	9	3	10	10	2		10	6	8	10	7	7	89
Paul	5	5	7	2	1	6	6	4		5	6	6	6	8	8	75
Carl	7	8	4	6	9	1	1	6		8	4	9	8	3	3	77
Keith	4	3	2	10	2	4	2	1		7	9	6	5	6	6	67
Cory	1	4	6	4	4	8	4	5		6	8	5	7	9	9	80
Max	2	6	5	1	6	7	5	9		9	1	10	9	2	2	74
Michael	10	10	10	3	10	5	7	10		4	5	4	4	10	10	102

We’ll start off with the standings first and then go into hitters and pitchers. Michael ended up about where you’d expect him to with his high-end keepers and extra first round pick. He didn’t draft the pitching volume that some of the other teams did, but still grades out very well overall. Keith, Max, and Arthur have the most ground to gain here, we’ll break down where the teams can improve in the next sections.

The other takeaway from the standings are four tiers: Michael in the top tier, Dean/Cory behind him, BJ/Dave/Paul/Carl/Max next, then Arthur/Keith at the bottom right now.

	all starting hitters, first drafted bench hitter
Team	PA	H	R	HR	RBI	SB	BB	K	AVG	SLG	HR/PA	R+RBI/PA
BJ	7428	1826	1034	338	1041	130	747	1660	0.273	0.481	4.55%	27.9%
Dave	7292	1849	999	325	1052	104	679	1652	0.280	0.482	4.45%	28.1%
Arthur	6963	1734	955	269	899	114	735	1422	0.278	0.463	3.86%	26.6%
Dean	7000	1809	942	258	925	132	599	1273	0.283	0.463	3.69%	26.7%
Paul	7239	1849	952	309	986	75	536	1579	0.276	0.475	4.26%	26.8%
Carl	6990	1617	984	333	942	108	803	1809	0.261	0.476	4.76%	27.6%
Keith	6987	1735	945	283	925	187	549	1634	0.270	0.460	4.05%	26.8%
Cory	6787	1689	919	289	969	84	618	1443	0.274	0.476	4.26%	27.8%
Max	6384	1562	925	315	964	67	688	1480	0.274	0.490	4.93%	29.6%
Michael	7331	1799	1055	359	1101	83	823	1615	0.277	0.497	4.89%	29.4%

The first thing to note here is the plate appearance projection total. Max and Cory lag the most in this category but their efficiency stats (HR/PA and R+RBI/PA) didn’t really suffer. Their low PA projected names like Will Smith and Adam Duvall are good hitters on a per PA basis. Another observation here is that Keith drafted way too many stolen bases, the rest of his offensive numbers suffered because he focused on guys that steal a lot of bases but don’t do much else with names like Victor Robles and Andres Gimenez. Max will be in a tough way early on with a number of injured players drafted; he will be lagging in At Bats compared to his opponent. The next observation I have is that Carl lags well behind the league in K and AVG. Unsure if this is a strategy or an accident… I have ended up there before both on purpose and by accident. Finally, you can see Arthur and Dean well behind the pack in HRs. They will need to find some power on the free agent wire to keep up.

	all pitchers drafted
Team	IP	ER	BB	H	W	SVH	QS	K	ERA	WHIP	k/9	W/IP
BJ	927	390	308	770	57	56	61	1063	3.78	1.16	10.31	6.11%
Dave	885	374	264	790	57	41	60	938	3.81	1.19	9.54	6.43%
Arthur	1019	451	374	867	60	148	52	1086	3.99	1.22	9.60	5.89%
Dean	1299	543	382	1153	83	84	87	1386	3.76	1.18	9.60	6.38%
Paul	1073	440	342	893	69	84	77	1209	3.69	1.15	10.14	6.42%
Carl	1192	512	365	1063	77	64	87.5	1314	3.86	1.20	9.92	6.49%
Keith	1167	490	359	1044	73	107	77	1205	3.78	1.20	9.29	6.28%
Cory	1076	441	324	909	72	93	67	1243	3.69	1.15	10.39	6.68%
Max	1231	541	388	1050	79	0	92	1317	3.95	1.17	9.63	6.42%
Michael	939	350	288	774	64	79	66	1177	3.36	1.13	11.28	6.81%

Pitching is tough to judge after the draft with all the pitching streaming that the competitive teams do in the league. Last year, a full 25% more innings were pitched above those that were drafted. In addition, with all the injured SPs that were drafted, they will be placed right to the Injured List and backfilled with another pitcher who will fill more innings than are accounted for here. For perspective, in 2019, the most innings pitched by a team was Arthur with 1670 IP, but six teams were over 1350 IP, while 4 teams lagged below 1100 IP. It’s well established at this point that more IP means more W, QS, and K, while ERA and WHIP come down to the quality of the pitching, so weekly roster management will be necessary to stay competitive in pitching as teams build from being projected for between 1000 IP to 1300 IP and ending up at 1600 IP.

Direct observations from the above table show that Arthur is probably too weighted towards Relief Pitchers, having about 50% more SVH projected than the next closest total. In our weekly league, each team’s pitching construction can change quickly to meet up to what you need to beat your opponent, so one would imagine Arthur could drop a few RPs to stream pitchers easily. Conversely, “Max” didn’t draft a single Relief Pitcher (or second baseman for that matter). He will need to do some major roster reconstruction to be competitive week 1.  The good news is that SVH is the most replaceable category available on the waiver wire. Finding the Elite RPs that also get SVH are the unicorns. Finally, Michael is in very good shape with his efficiency numbers like ERA-WHIP-k/9. He drafted fewer SPs than the rest of the league, and worse SP will drag down one’s ratios more than help them, so by drafting fewer SPs Michael may ‘artificially’ be showing stronger ratios when comparing apples to apples with every else’s drafted SPs. Michael will be streaming heavily to keep up with his opponents early on, but his base of SP talent is quite good.

Finally, let’s talk about Pitching and how the league handled it this year. Pitching has been a hot topic of league rule changes over the years, but this year everyone finally appeared to get on the same page. The current rules (in place since 2019) weight starting pitching but this was the first year that bullpen arms didn’t go until relatively late, with the first RP going at pick 54 (Josh Hader) which, with keepers accounted for, was probably about the 80^th player off the board. Consistently, we had more SPs drafted than ever before: 59. Teams are realizing that a strong baseload of SPs is required to make streaming pitching more ratio-friendly. Streaming is only going to make the ratios worse from where one’s full time Starting Pitchers would leave them, therefore if you have a good base, your ending ratios after streaming may still be good as well. Of course, this is where team build strategy comes in…because good hitting is required too. Sounds like a good blog topic for the next few weeks.

Thank you to everyone for another great draft day. It shouldn’t be taken for granted that year after year we have the whole league in the draft room and (mostly) competitive throughout the year. So I appreciate you all for that.