Chasing the Draft: Third Basemen
Directly related to this comment from Mike Podhorzer and his piece on the Cheapest Pitching Staff Possible, I often use a term to describe the process by which a manager reacts, in my estimation, incorrectly to the developments of his or her respective snake draft. As Mike pointed out, “zigging” when your fellow managers are “zagging” may allow you a degree of competitive advantage, and failure to do so is what I call ‘chasing the draft’, and while it’s hard to avoid sometimes, it frequently requires that you wad up your draft strategy and toss it in the rubbish bin.
You’ve seen people chase the draft, and perhaps you have yourself. It’s where you feel compelled to take a player at a position because so much quality has just come off the board, you don’t want to be left out to dry. It frequently happens with the ubiquitous closer run although it can certainly happen at any position.
I advocate two things to avoid chasing the draft:
1. Kill your babies
2. Pooch Kick
On ‘Killing your babies’ – please, no, do not bludgeon your offspring. This is a term I stole from an editor I know who uses it to describe getting rid of chapters in your book that you have fallen in love with if you really don’t need them. Relative to fantasy baseball, I use it to elucidate the unhealthy man-crush that we may have on a particular player that blinds us from the reality that you just don’t need to jump that early for such production.
On ‘Pooch Kick’ – there are some positions that it’s just not worth grabbing the next best thing because the next best thing just ain’t that much better than the 12th best thing, and you could better use that pick to grab the position that’s getting ignored. It’s kind of like a half-punt. Thus, the pooch.
Using third base as an example, when Evan Longoria, David Wright, Ryan Zimmerman, and Alex Rodriguez fly off the board in the first couple rounds, does that mean you should reach for Jose Bautista? Maybe, maybe not. But when that manager ahead of you grabs Bautista and you realize your third base plan just exploded in your face, here’s where you have to decide if you take Adrian Beltre two rounds early or if you just say no to chasing the draft and look to another position for relative value. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Beltre, but it’s the panic that sets in which clouds our judgment.
Quick comparison for context:
Player A projection: .290, 23HR, 82 runs, 96 RBI
Player B projection: .285, 22HR, 84 runs, 91 RBI
Now, of course, you need to use your noodle on what projections you’re happy with and which ones you find, as grandpappy would say, full of hooey, but Player A is Adrian Beltre and Player B is Casey McGehee. Why this is important is in most systems, their average draft position is separated by about 60 to 70 picks, and I’m not sure that the difference in production is worth it.
Where you might be faced with the Beltre decision in this hypothetical situation, you could be snagging say, Justin Upton or Jason Heyward and while counting their stats might not lead you to believe they are independently worth that much more than an Adrian Beltre, that most systems demand at least three OF suggests they most certainly are, especially when you can get near the same production out of another 3B five to six rounds later.
Take Mike’s advice and “Zig” where they “Zag”. Kill your babies when you have to and pooch kick your way to a better team.
11
That’s what I hate about fantasy baseball – the violence.
Indeed. I cannot in good conscious advocate either slaying babies or kicking dogs.
weird. that’s actually what i like about fantasy baseball. oh well, different strokes for different folks.
Don’t get me wrong, I completely agree with your point. But I can’t find any system that is that optimistic for McGehee. Are those your personal forecasts? Here’s what I’ve collected for use in my pre-draft rankings:
Oliver: .275, 20 HR, 75 RBI, 86 R (601 AB)
Cairo: .272, 17 HR, 83 RBI, 64 R (518 AB)
Marcel: .282, 19 HR, 85 RBI, 66 R (520 AB)
Zips: .272, 17 HR, 86 RBI, 60 R (530 AB)
Consensus: .276, 19 HR, 87 RBI, 67 R (553 AB)
I gotcha. Used Roto Champ and knew it looked a little rosy, which is why I threw in the clause about you have to trust your instincts on the projections because I really didn’t want it to kill the overall message, but I get you.
Beltre in other systems (sans Oliver) comes out to .287/21/78/76
jonathan,
I think those are RotoChamp projections.
But I think you are absolutely right. The reason for the ADP gap between Beltre and McGehee is that no other person thinks their stats will be that close.
Doesn’t mean Rotochamps is wrong, projecting McGehee at 75 RBI batting 5th in that lineup is beyond conservative as an example.
Kevin Youkilis should also gain eligibility at 3B early in the year, depending on your league rules.
Side note: Is there a good resource for projected batting orders that gets updated?
Fantasy Alram sends out updates on a semi-regular basis trying to predict the lineups for each division
USA Today does a decent job of maintaining projected lineups and rotation. Click through tht “team pages” section under Sports-MLB.
mlbdepthcharts.com does a much better job and he’s constantly tweeting updates this time of year
Sweet, that site looks perfect, thanks!
I thoroughly enjoy kicking babies, but generally try to do it during the embryonic stage as to not face murder-kill charges. As is always the case, what’s old is new again, and if you watch enough Madmen I’m sure you can justify neo-domestic abuse as a hip new trend.
Anyways, I’m lost by the point of this article and thus, the ridiculous response. You’re basically telling us to tier our players so that we don’t overpay 5 rounds before we should? Isn’t that just common sense and not zigging or zagging?
As I say, “No One Likes A Reach, Unless It’s a Reach Around” — Unless you’ve got a great feeling about something and you’re around YOUR projected stats, don’t reach.
I think you have to remember that the people you’re playing aren’t idiots and if everyone sees Casey MaGahee as a grrrreat plan, only one guy will get him. How often do you hear random curse words in round 15? It’s because two or three other guys were thinking the exact same thing as you but didn’t want to “reach.”
uh, no matter anyone’s plan, only one guy will draft any player, including “MaGahee”.
Some of the best in the biz make heinous errors when drafting based on falling in love with players. I think Orwell said something about to see what’s in front of one’s nose requires constant struggle, or something to that effect.
RDavies, this isn’t about falling in love with players. This is about a player’s ADP correctly predicting future performance. We can argue about the Wisdom of Crowds all day, but I feel much more comfortable drafting a player that I believe will improve rather than an ADP.
If someone’s a sleeper at 200, aren’t they inherently an average pick at 175? I think we get a little hung up on players being sleepers at their ADP and refuse to see the forest through the trees.
Somehow, we trust that we know more than the ADP makers when we assign a player *sleeper*-status but then lose our mind when someone drafts them based on that upside.
With regards to McGehee, whose name I’ve never correctly typed until just now, I’ll add to my previous statements. Fantasy players will enter into a draft and say, “I don’t need to draft a third basemen early because I’ll get McGehee really late.” I was simply stating that I’ve repeatedly seen strategies based on nabbing late round talent fall apart because they’ll focus on one player that they like in a crowd of mediocre players.
I’m simply saying that if you have to reach two rounds to guarantee yourself a player that you believe will outperform his draft position, then do it. It’s your fantasy team and I’d rather succumb to HUBRIS, THE SIN OF MAN, than lose because I followed the ADP.
That IS the secret, no? Balancing the desire to reach vs “intelligently overpaying vs the field.”
If my gameplan is such that I don’t want anything to do with corner bats later in the draft…then maybe a beltre pick after bautista is best in round 4.
I’ve gotten in trouble trying to be ‘too cute’ and think “I can wait on beltre and still nab a big bat here.” Then Beltre goes and I’m on tilt.
I’ve gone the other direction and taken young breakout candidates too early (Heyward and Wieters last year). I knew the risks, but simply wanted those two guys on my team. Won’t ever know how much better my team could have been if I were patient (read: not obsessed) with the young’ns.
So it is the balance of the two that I’m learning. This year my gameplan is to maximize profit with every pick. First pass will be “what is the field giving” in terms of undervalued players, then I’ll look for upside ahead of the curve.
Instead of taking a square peg into the draft, potentially forcing it into a non-square hole, I’m going to bring all my pegs and then react. My league drafts well, but there are always inefficiencies to exploit. The more stubborn my gameplan is, the less profit-per-pick I wind up with.
Bautista is the best 3B available in any draft. Regression does not mean reverting back to your prior form (which the numbers,e.g. K rate and K/BB ratio, don’t suggest) it means getting sucked back to the mean and SkyDome (Rogers, whatever) is a notorious regression killer – it’s really the only fast surface left in the game with no wind.
Bautista is a ball stinger that hits a lot of flies with low noise accross splits because of a newfound and consistent approach at the plate. Put him in that joint for 82 games and watch the BAIP remain unbelievably identical from 10-11. Plus he’ll steal you 15-20 this year and will play 155+ games.
You cannot reach for him, you can only get put off by the “experts”.
speechless
Obviously a kool-aid drinker.
i have a crush on Martin Prado (in an 8×8 league with standard 5 batitng stats plus hits, obp and K’s). he gets a lot of hits and strikes out not a lot. i just wonder if this is a baby i should consider killing?
YES!
To me that is the point. Kill all the babies.
Doesn’t mean you don’t look for him before everyone else, just means you remove the BLINDERS during the draft.
For sleepers, or late rounds/$1 auction wrap up, I think that’s where you want to find individuals to target. But for the bulk of the draft it can lead to poor decisions if there’s tunnel vision on a distinct set of players.
Then there’s the frustration factor. When my ‘babies’ were taken even earlier than I’d planned to reach, it used to put me on tilt easily. One bad decision leads to two, which leads to a domino effect through the whole process.
What I take from the piece is that “babies” = tunnel vision in a sense. Certainly want to get rid of that eh?
i do that ALL the time. im like oh you took that guy? well i might as well spend 25 effing dollars on jimmy rollins cause i don’t give a f*** any more
I sort of kicked the pooch on SS’s in my 20-team league this year. In fact, I think SS is a great example of a position you might end up doing this the most often this year. It’s a keeper league, and all of the top SS’s were kept from prior years or went waaay too early for my comfort level. It got to a point where the options were JJ Hardy, Jason Bartlett, Miguel Tejada, … you get the picture.
The best guy on the board when I was ready to take a SS was actually Omar Infante (I like him more than those others I mentioned). While I like him, there were other positions out there that seemed to offer much better value above replacement level. Infante offers better than replacement value, but he’s no sure thing. I ended up going in other directions for a few rounds, and someone (who will remain nameless, but he’s Known in these parts) ended up taking him in the meantime. So I took Hardy instead many rounds later–I was the last to take a SS in the 20-team draft, so I was able to put it off later and later and later. Now, Hardy’s no awesome player, but he’s not that much worse than Infante, he may even have better upside. There were something like 5 rounds (which is ~100 players) that passed between when I was about to take Infante and when I finally took Hardy, though, and in that time I was able to get a bunch of nice cogs for other parts of my team. My SS position is going to suck this year, but that fate was already sealed when I was thinking about taking Infante!
-j
That is, in fact, a perfect example. Thanks Justin. And congrats on your draft success.
Well, in that case kicking the pooch requires a very strong caveat. Only kick the yappy nutless mutt if you’ve stalked its owner and are certain that he won’t be around when you hoof it.
Or, alternatively, only put off drafting a player when you’re completely aware of positional needs across the board. Keep track of who has their SS and keep track of where the UTIL factor kicks in (or where additional SS will start getting drafted beyond the scope of a starting roster).
Essentially, tier your positions, keep track of who drafts what, and annotate w/ a UTIL line.
I’d actually be pretty curious to learn when the average player will redundantly draft a position based solely on value…