I’m fairly new to playing fantasy in the NFBC universe. Although the platform is synonymous with high stakes, my experience on it could more aptly be called “some stakes”—I’m not dropping $1,800 on Main Events or $10K on a Diamond league.
Despite playing fantasy at a fairly intensive level for 25-plus years, I didn’t even know NFBC existed until a few years ago and last year was my first time venturing into its waters. Before then I had played almost exclusively 12-team leagues, whereas the high-profile NFBC contests are 15-teamers.
Last year I played two Draft Champions leagues: 15-team, 50-round draft-and-holds—you draft 23 starters and 27 bench players with no FAAB or waiver moves during the season. In that sense you have to draft your own, hermetically bounded free agent universe. This requires knowing roster depth charts, guessing at possible closer changes, anticipating real free agent destinations and future moves by big league orgs—eg, will Prospect X get called up early or not until September?—and drafting pitchers. Lots of pitchers.
I did not do well on my DC maiden voyage. The learning curve to build a successful 15-team roto roster proved steep. In addition, DCs tend to keep the true fantasy degens warm through deep winter, well ahead of typical draft season. That’s another underrated challenge: by definition you are not likely to stumble into a “soft” league. The people drafting fantasy baseball teams for money in November tend to be uber-prepared.
We learned some expensive lessons along the way and lo’ and behold, this year my best fantasy squads are 15-teamers. I again drafted two DCs and though we have only an outside shot to finish third in one of them, I have held first place in the other since week 6.
In other words, we’d led the league since the beginning of May—20 weeks! At the peak of its powers in July, my Diamond Dogs team led second place in that DC by over 20 points, and maintained an advantage in the 15-20 point range for many weeks. Even six weeks ago, we had 114.5 points while the second-place team, “RR”—which had steadily risen from seventh in July—reached 97.5 points.
Readers may know that I’m a Tigers fan, and if a fantasy league win probability model existed, we might imagine that Diamond Dogs had a similar WP to my favorite real team’s 99% chance to win the AL Central back in mid-July. Not that we ever felt comfortable, much less cocky (about the Dogs or the Tigers). I knew the team had a weakness.
Well, much like the Tigers, the last five weeks especially have not been kind to my fake first place team. The gap between RR and the Dogs closed at first incrementally as the opponent simply played well, then more rapidly as my players concurrently played worse. Whether Tigers or Dogs, it’s been like watching the slowest of slow motion car crashes while being strapped into the vehicle about to be smashed. My thoughts sounded like Andre The Giant on quaaludes.
Finally on Sunday, at the close of week 26, the deathly contact was made. I checked the standings that evening and felt an icy shock. Is this what Lucy Westenra experienced the first time Dracula bit her?
Even with the gap steadily deteriorating, we began week 26 up by 4 points. My Dogs didn’t have many avenues to move up, but with just a couple bats waking up, we could yet keep RR at bay, or even extend the distance if their team faltered. But instead we dropped 1.5 points in batting average, RR gained 2.5 elsewhere, and voila (or whatever the terrorized version of voila is—oh sheeeiit?), we were tied:
Let’s analyze what went wrong.
What’s The Counter When A Strength Stumbles?
The Tigers primary problem is pitching depth but they have also relied too much on slugging, which has led to too many strikeouts lately, and likewise our Dogs do not hit enough. We made a point to get strong pitching this year in 15s, and that team was led by Logan Gilbert, Spencer Schwellenbach, and Joe Ryan among starters, and Edwin Diaz and Robert Suarez as closers.
Of course Schwelly, that dominant WHIP force, last pitched at the end of June. Gilbert missed time. Ryan has been terrible lately. We had solid depth and a lot of good volume built up, but many of our arms are on IL or have proven untrustworthy lately (cough, Mize, Scherzer). Diaz had made six straight appearances without a save.
Having 11 healthy pitchers for 9 spots means I simply have not had enough good options in the second half. All of this “throw ‘em and pray” cost us 4 points in pitching categories over the past few weeks, while RR, my opponent, had room to move up in multiple spots.
One mistake was only drafting 22 total pitchers, 16 starters and 6 relievers. We have heard different advice on this. Some will tell you 21-24 pitchers out of 50 players drafted is sufficient. However, with the modern game’s injury rates—almost every Dogs bench pitcher is on the IL—my preference going forward will be at least 25 pitchers, and maybe more. Certainly I want at least 18 starters, taking more shots on guys like Joey Cantillo and Quinn Priester, who were not in a rotation yet but looked like their orgs’ SP6 or SP7.
While I’m fretting over the hitting, attrition has diminished the pitching.
No Batting Average Anchor or Specialist
Of course if we could hit, even a little, all of this would be moot. At its best, the Dogs reached just 10th in the league in batting average. The worst of the slow-mo car crash has been watching that average sink to 15th slowly but surely; no matter who we put in the lineup, it’s usually the wrong choice. We now sit within .004 points of 12th, and we may have to get there to win this damn thing. I’ve never felt as uneasy setting a lineup as I did on Monday. Lenyn Sosa can only take you so far.
The overarching problem was essentially punting batting average in the draft, though we did not expect Teoscar, Gimenez and Cowser to hit 30-plus points below their recent averages or projections. If we could do it again with hindsight, I would’ve taken a Jacob Wilson or Geraldo Perdomo. While good batting average guys become more scarce down the draft, both were available late and profiled as batting average assets, even before emerging as the smash hits they became (they will likely push top 150 picks now).
I want to think about the practical application of this idea in more depth. It may not always work out, but it makes intuitive sense to take shots at specialist types (think Chandler Simpson or Victor Scott II for speed). There are different ways to cover the categories, but I simply did not give myself a broad enough set of bench/free agent skills coming out of the draft.
Managing Start/Sit Decisions
Even lacking a standout batting average hitter, the biggest issue was failing to capture my players’ best hitting on the active roster versus the bench. This can happen due to random chance, especially if either the bench or starting at-bats consist of small samples. But that is not all of the story. Here are the numbers for seven key players who provided vastly better batting averages on my bench (min. 50 ABs):
I can barely look. Suffice it to say, a fantasy team’s active batting average should not be equal to its bench number. We could’ve included Cowser’s .195 active average, but he’s been so generally terrible as a hitter that his .208 on my bench is negligible. Sanchez’s .351 bench number is over barely 50 ABs, but note he’s hit .198 since joining Houston, which is when we needed him most due to other injuries.
Barger and Dingler are obvious ones we could’ve managed better. We had reason to like them despite their expected irrelevance when we drafted the team, months before the season began. They both started hot but I was slow to integrate them, relying too long on Cowser, Ryan Jeffers, and Josh Jung (with his perfectly punchless .252/.253 split).
Of course, once you buy in to a breakout, it’s difficult to pick and choose (beyond bad handedness splits). Barger was legitimately great in the first half, backed by elite quality of contact while batting top 5 in a good offense. Well, in the second half he’s hitting .228 (84 wRC+), but often still appeared among the best options. What if we miss the week he locks back in and rips four homers?
Sosa is a similar story. He was meant to be a deep backup but proved invaluable to replace Gimenez’s feckless production. But in the last 30 days, ole Lenyn the Red is hitting .200. Of course, Gimenez has been even worse. There simply were not better options than prayer, seance, etc.
One potential improvement is employing weekly projections, which I only used in a haphazard manner this year. For much of the season, we relied on our own judgment based on matchups and lineup trends. Of course playing time and plate appearances mattered. In the second half, I began leaning on the weekly projections to double-check my own research and instincts. (Membership in the Bubba & The Bloom Patreon provides Steamer-based weekly projections, among many other tools).
Even though my recent practice hasn’t saved the Dogs, if I’d relied more on the weekly projections in the first half, might I have captured more of Vaughn’s 170 ABs with a .292 and Dingler’s 149 ABs with a .340? Even a quarter of either over some of the alternatives would have put us in better position to win the league.
Again, there will likely always be certain weeks where we get hitter starts wrong. Baseball is too weird. However, we can always improve our process.
Valuable lessons are not usually free. We just hope it does not literally cost us more than the stress and angst of the past few weeks to learn this one.
Songs Of The Week
“Weekend Ritual” & “Liberty Dreams”
Real Companion are about as indie as indie gets. The Boone, NC duo released the album Nu-metal Heroes last summer on their own record label. They are not on Twitter, proof of a powerful self-preservation instinct—in fact we could only find two tweets even referring to them, one of which by Patrick Daugherty of Rotoworld is how we discovered this treasure. Ours was the only “like” to that post.
And Real Companion is easy to like. A vehicle for singer-songwriter Seth Sullivan and multi-instrumentalist Derek Wycoff, to my ear they wear their influences on the sleeve without ever devolving into pastiche or derivation.
In fact I’m not sure I’ve heard anything like this, even if I could say that lead single “Weekend Ritual” sounds like JJ Cale and Beach House had a lo fi baby delivered in the forest on a smoky Appalachian morning. There’s a pleasant, almost sedated vibe that almost lulls you into missing the quiet menace. On the band’s Instagram, Sullivan says it’s “a song about how lonely and boring getting fucked up is.”
“Ritual” floats and eventually flows into “Liberty Dreams,” which sounds a bit like Cale fronting a dreamy version of Pavement. There’s no standard verse-bridge-chorus here, as Sullivan rolls through oblique observations and reminiscences. His melodies are simple but delivered in a bouncing, addictive rhythm, which really hit home as my head bobbed to the line, “watching a jack o’ lantern rotting in the snow.”
In a better world, everyone would know these guys, but one gets the impression they understand the world we actually have and prefer it this way. The vibes are good even if the past was not.
“Liberty Dreams”: