Preseason Blog Part 2, Draft Review and Season Look Ahead

Dean, Paul, and Michael had one eye on the computer screen and another on the beverages as they locked in on the draft.

That’s a wrap! It was another fun draft day for Floored, this time taking on a much different feel than previous years. With Paul in his 2^nd Act and not needing to ‘work’ the days before and after Draft Day Sunday, he was on a trip to Atlanta and took his draft party with him. Paul, Dean and Michael all got together at Michael’s house in Atlanta for the draft…and Dean brought the beverages. Arthur and Max got together in West Palm Beach, and Cory did the draft somewhere between the 19^th hole, a car, and a Sky Club Lounge, I’m not entirely sure. I hope everyone had as good of a time as we did with hopefully a few less distractions than we had…those kids, man.

It was a weird draft, with most teams having fairly equal keepers there weren’t a ton of keeper trades, the addition of 8 extra roster spots leading to an uncharted course of how teams would handle it, and the addition of the Net Wins category throwing everyone for a loop.

So how did it play out? Naturally, we’ll start with projections. Remember, the numbers we saw on the ‘Standings’ tab in the draft room is every player everyone drafted and is only using the Yahoo projection system, it’s a good starting point but paints a skewed picture. To normalize that picture a bit I have a set of Consensus projections from 4 of the top projections sites (The Bat, ATC, Steamer, Zips) to get a wholistic idea of how a large group of people think each player will do. As for which players I’m including here, I’m including 2 bench hitters (because that’s all I think we’ll be able to accumulate the stats from week in and week out, note I did not include any bench catchers as a part of these 2 bench hitters) and all drafted pitchers. Depending on how many Relief Pitchers each team owns, it may be hard to get ALL the stats from ALL one’s pitchers, but that’s what I went with. Here is how the data shook out:

Manager	R	HR	RBI	SB	BB	K	AVG	SLG
Carl	1028	353	1050	167	677	1762	0.257	0.476
Dean	1010	281	942	142	622	1270	0.270	0.461
Cory	1072	312	1024	106	755	1699	0.266	0.466
Max	1091	387	1110	119	707	1803	0.263	0.494
Keith	1045	321	1029	81	713	1606	0.268	0.473
BJ	1028	327	1016	143	633	1614	0.266	0.475
Arthur	968	327	988	72	803	1595	0.262	0.479
Paul	993	303	995	68	643	1431	0.267	0.466
Michael	1064	387	1069	75	911	1706	0.253	0.494
Dave	1007	345	1057	74	711	1658	0.267	0.486

 

I’ve conditional formatted the columns here to show you the driving categories, the teams that win in HR and SLG will tend to have an edge in the rest of the hitting categories. More on this later.

Manager	NW	K	ERA	WHIP	QS	SV+H
Carl	13	1881	4.06	1.25	125	94
Dean	21	1934	3.84	1.21	143	83
Cory	23	1776	3.77	1.21	120	124
Max	11	1819	4.15	1.28	125	101
Keith	14	1658	3.88	1.22	106	91
BJ	12	1596	3.93	1.24	114	62
Arthur	26	2029	3.83	1.21	144	83
Paul	19	1579	3.90	1.23	123	84
Michael	13	2117	3.95	1.27	142	137
Dave	16	1837	3.89	1.23	124	73

 There’s a lot to get to here so let’s dive in.

The first thing that jumped out to me was the Net Wins category. Look at how small those full-year projection numbers are! I had a feeling this might be the case in the days leading up to the draft, but it was even more extreme than I thought. Arthur leading the league at 26 NW and last place being 11 NW…over a 24 week season, means that there will be weeks this year where 0 or 1 Net Win wins the week. Of all changes we made this month, this is the one that I think will have the most effect on game play, we’ll see if that pans out. I say that becauuuuuse

Not nearly many starting pitchers were drafted as I would have projected when we bumped rosters to 30…however this is about as many starting pitchers were drafted as I thought would be drafted when rosters were increasing by 5 people (due to the miscommunication). Here is how everyone approached which type of players to draft:

Team	Bench Hitters	Bench Pitchers	No. of Catchers	No. of SP	No. of RP
Paul	7	5	2	9	3
Dave	4	8	1	9	6
Arthur	5	7	1	10	5
Cory	4	8	1	9	6
Keith	6	6	1	8	5
Max	4	8	1	11	4
Dean	6	6	2	9	4
BJ	8	4	2	8	3
Michael	3	9	1	11	5
Carl	4	8	2	10	5
SUM	51	69	14	94	46

94 Starting Pitchers draft is of course a new Floored record, but it’s below the number I expected to be drafted. We’ll see over the first few weeks if people hold onto all their bench hitters or if they choose to stash minor leaguers or if they want to enhance their starting pitching depth or if they want to hold more relievers. All of these roster construction ideas will be justifiable but whoever chooses the most efficient roster construction will have a big edge on the league. We’ll check back in on this in a few months. 

BJ, drafted by Mr. B himself, Brian, chose to stash the most hitters in the league. Dave chose to roster more Relief Pitchers than he can even start, luckily enough of them have Starting Pitcher position eligibility so he can get them all into his starting lineup if he so chooses. Only 4 teams took backup catchers, a much-debated topic in the Smyth draft war room; Dean was expecting a handful more to be taken. Overall, the number of Starting Pitchers rostered per team was relatively balanced across the league. Time will tell if we properly diluted the streaming pitching pool as intended with the rule changes, looking at some of the names still available on the Free Agent Wire, I could see some free agents being useful as a streamed pitcher in a good matchup.

As for the actual Power Ranking projections:

2022 Projected Power Ranks
TOTAL			HITTING			PITCHING
1	Michael	4.50	1	Max	3.88	1	Arthur	2.67
2	Arthur	4.71	2	Michael	4.25	2	Dean	3.33
3	Cory	4.79	3	Keith	4.88	3	Cory	3.50
4	Dean	5.14	4	Dave	5.13	4	Michael	4.83
5	Max	5.29	5	Carl	5.38	5	Dave	5.83
6	Keith	5.43	6	BJ	5.50	6	Carl	6.00
7	Dave	5.43	7	Cory	5.75	7	Keith	6.17
8	Carl	5.64	8	Arthur	6.25	8	Paul	6.50
9	BJ	6.79	9	Dean	6.50	9	Max	7.17
10	Paul	6.86	10	Paul	7.13	10	BJ	8.50

 

Michael, Arthur, and Cory have a slight edge on the field heading into the season…but they’re all going about it very differently. Michael went heavy on SLG with names like Trout, Donaldson, Sano, and Gallo whereas Cory and Arthur are projected most strongly on the pitching side with over 20 Net Wins and sub-3.9 ERAs. Dean’s pitching would also meet those pitching criteria, but his hitting is….lacking (relatively speaking of course for April 1^st analysis). Worth mentioning is how strong Max’s hitting is projected, his base of Vlad Jr. set him up well, but he followed through and rounded out a good team, projecting middle of the pack  in the overall standings and first in hitting. Reminder, projections are just a starting point, these numbers are going to fluctuate wildly team to team over the next 5 months, even if the total league numbers will end up pretty close to these numbers shown here.

Opening day is 8 days; I hope everyone got a little more excited about baseball season this week and is stoked to start another fantasy season!