2011 Draft Prep: Rotisserie strategies
These strategies apply specifically to Rotisserie leagues. For Head-to-Head strategies or auction strategies, check out the guides specific to those formats.
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Most Fantasy owners like to keep things simple.
Home run good. Strikeout bad. Simple.
As long as they can distinguish the good from the bad in a Head-to-Head draft, they can use basic arithmetic to determine the best overall player to select.
But in Rotisserie, the best overall player isn't so obvious.
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Granted, the good ones are good regardless of format. Ryan Howard is an early-rounder in Rotisserie just like he is in Head-to-Head.
But his exact value to your team is relative to what you already have. It's relative to your team's numbers. It's relative to everyone else's numbers.
It's anything but simple.
In Rotisserie, you don't get points for each home run Howard hits. You get points based on where your team ranks in each statistical category. If you rank first in a category -- home runs, let's say -- you earn the maximum number of points for it, which is great and all, but it's the same number whether you double up the entire field or edge the second-place team by a single home run.
So if you plan to have a roster featuring Adam Dunn, Dan Uggla and Jose Bautista, maybe drafting Howard in the early rounds isn't such a good idea. Maybe you'd fare better with a Shin-Soo Choo or Andrew McCutchen even though they're slightly lesser players.
The great tightrope walk of Rotisserie play may seem like a brain strain to some. The goal isn't to build the best possible team, but the most balanced team. Statistical scarcity is as much of a priority as positional scarcity. You have to maintain the delicate balance.
But it's not as overwhelming as it sounds. Rotisserie play doesn't take into account every statistic a player can produce. Standard 5x5 leagues use only five: batting average, home runs, RBI, runs scored and stolen bases for hitters and wins, ERA, WHIP, strikeouts and saves for pitchers. And if you understand how those stats interact with each other, you can narrow your focus even more.
Simple enough, right?
Maintaining the delicate balance
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Yes, runs scored and RBI count for just as much in Rotisserie leagues as home runs, stolen bases and batting average do -- that's a mathematically accurate statement. But on Draft Day, you don't have to pay a second thought to them.
No, really.
Maybe in a perfect world you could calculate your team's projected totals in each category and match them up against everyone else's before each and every pick, but with the clock ticking and the heat of the draft bearing down on you, you can't take the time to do all that. It's too much.
You have to separate what matters most from what doesn't, and what matters most are the home runs and stolen bases.
Runs and RBI happen. They're based on opportunity. Players of all shapes and sizes accumulate them just in the natural course of playing the game. Regardless of whether or not they're hitting home runs or stealing bases, they'll get theirs.
But naturally, if they're hitting home runs and stealing bases, they'll get more. The game is set up that way. The biggest home-run hitters bat in the middle of the lineup, where they'll drive in the most runs, and the biggest base-stealers bat at the top of the lineup, where they'll score the most runs. A player's ability to hit or run puts him in the position to drive in or score runs, so as long as you're keeping your home runs and stolen bases as balanced as possible, the rest of the numbers should follow suit.
Some people don't like this approach. They call it irresponsible and lazy because it depends on a correlation that isn't universally true.
But it's true enough to work. Even if you get one of the oddballs -- like Rickie Weeks (a power hitter who didn't drive in many runs last year) or Ichiro Suzuki (a base-stealer who didn't score many runs last year) -- you'll have enough players who do fit the mold that you won't even notice the discrepancy.
The only way you can shoot yourself in the foot is by drafting a part-timer like Jim Thome or Will Venable -- someone who does have the ability to help in home runs or stolen bases but doesn't get the playing time to help in RBI or runs scored. But in standard mixed leagues, you shouldn't be targeting those players anyway.
So what about batting average? It stands alone as the hitting category without a clear partner stat, which is reason enough to rank it behind home runs and stolen bases on the list of priorities. It's also the least predictable of the five categories, which puts you at risk of overemphasis.
Generally speaking, a player has the capacity to hit within 20 points of his career batting average. Where exactly he lands in that 40-point swing is hard to predict, which is why batting average specialists like Ichiro Suzuki and Chris Coghlan often don't live up to their draft status. Anything less than the best-case scenario and they don't have much else to fall back on.
Still, a player has more control over his batting average than not, so you wouldn't want to disregard the category. Just remember you don't need a roster full of batting title contenders to place high in it. As long as you avoid the players most likely to hold you back -- the high-strikeout types like Chris Young, Carlos Pena and Mark Reynolds -- your early-round picks -- the hitters who, by and large, are almost certain to hit .300 -- should be enough to sustain you.
Of course, that's assuming you spend your early-round picks on hitters.
The pitching staff can wait
Most people have caught on to this idea in Rotisserie leagues by now, which explains why, according to our current Average Draft Position data, 19 of the first 20 players off the board are hitters compared to only 12 of the first 20 in Head-to-Head leagues.
Still, every now and then, you'll find some smart aleck who thinks he can gain an advantage by stockpiling all the ace pitchers early.
It's never a good idea -- particularly not in Rotisserie formats, where the traditional lineup uses five more hitters than the traditional Head-to-Head lineup. With so many hitters in play, the talent thins out faster than ever, meaning if you don't stock up on hitting early, you might have to resort to a part-time player.
But the better argument against early-round pitchers applies across all formats. The physical demands of the position make it susceptible to slumps and injuries. By drafting an early-round pitcher, not only do you expose yourself to that unpredictability (Adam Wainwright, anyone?), but you also forfeit the relative predictability of a high-end hitter -- the kind that will keep you competitive in batting average and give you the most balanced numbers across the board.
And for the same reasons established pitchers fall off the map from one season to the next, virtual unknowns inevitably emerge. You're much more likely to snag an ace pitcher than a stud hitter in the middle rounds -- if not later. How long could you have waited for Mat Latos, Clay Buchholz or Trevor Cahill last year?
So how do you find them? Again, it's a matter of prioritizing the right statistics.
Pitchers have surprisingly little control over their own destiny. Much of what happens to them depends on the positioning of their defense and the direction the batter happens to hit the ball. The one factor pitchers can control is whether they throw strikes or balls. Thus, the two Rotisserie categories that measure strikes and balls -- strikeouts and WHIP -- are the most repeatable from year to year and the most predictable for Fantasy purposes. You're almost sure to finish high in those two categories if you prioritize them over the others.
And it's not like you won't finish high in wins and ERA. A pitcher who misses bats and limits baserunners typically won't allow as many earned runs, and if he's not allowing earned runs, he has a good chance of winning games. Granted, luck plays enough of a role in that equation that you could finish low in wins and ERA even if you finish high in strikeouts and WHIP, but the same logic applies for any pitcher you'd draft in the early rounds. Generally speaking, the pitchers with the highest strikeout rates and lowest WHIPs are the ones most likely to produce the best across-the-board numbers.
And you'll find enough of them later in drafts to justify passing on the big options early.
No style points for saves
Saves -- nobody knows what to do with them.
That one little category is so different from the rest that it deserves its own separate discussion in this strategy piece -- as do the players who provide it.
Because that's what you're getting when you draft a closer: saves. You can say all you want about his glowing ERA and WHIP, but at the end of the year, all the innings accumulated by your starting pitchers will have so much more say in those categories that whatever extra you paid to get the closer with better ratios will seem like a waste.
Besides, just about any closer will help in those categories, even if not to the same extent.
So why do some go off the board so much earlier than others? Perception, mainly. Mariano Rivera is perceived as the greatest closer ever, so Fantasy owners assume he's going to set them apart in the saves category.
Is he the greatest ever? Yeah, of course. And his consistency from year to year makes him a safer bet to put up elite numbers than, say, Chris Perez.
But is he really so much more likely to put up elite numbers than Perez -- a reliever who allowed two earned runs over his final 33 appearances last year -- that he deserves to go off the board a full five rounds earlier, as has happened so far in standard Rotisserie drafts? Probably not.
That's the difference between Corey Hart and Adam Jones or Billy Butler and Grady Sizemore. It's the difference between a proven impact player and a Hail Mary pass. And for what?
Ability couldn't have less to do with the number of saves a player gets. It's a product of whether his team is leading by three runs or fewer and whether his manager decides to go to him.
So knowing that, knowing how little control a closer has over saves, why would you invest so much more in one than another?
For all the attention Rivera gets in Fantasy year after year, he doesn't always get the saves to justify it. Last year, he ranked 12th with 33 saves. Kevin Gregg had more.
Granted, some factors enhance a closer's chances for getting saves, such as playing for a lower-scoring team. The top three closers this year -- Brian Wilson, Heath Bell and Joakim Soria -- all fit that criteria. But even if they rank one, two and three in saves and finish 10 ahead of everyone else, couldn't you negate that advantage just by starting an extra closer?
Rotisserie affords you that opportunity. You get nine pitcher slots and can use them on however many closers you want. And guess what? With only 30 closers available in the majors, not everyone gets to have three.
To a certain extent, quantity matters more than quality at the position. A Fantasy owner could invest in Wilson and Soria early, forfeiting two elite hitters in the process, and still rank behind the guy who drafted Perez, J.J. Putz and Craig Kimbel in the middle to late rounds. Or Brad Lidge, Joe Nathan and Matt Thornton. Hey, don't sleep on Joel Hanrahan either.
You could argue those closers all have question marks, but after the top three, who doesn't? Rivera is old. Andrew Bailey is injury-prone. Francisco Rodriguez is ... well, we won't go there. All the concerns surrounding the top 10 relievers make the idea of reaching for an "elite" option all the more silly.
Why make the sacrifice when you don't have to? As long as you end up with three closers who stay healthy and keep their jobs, you'll compete for saves. You might even win the category. It's that simple.
But that's Rotisserie. It's learning to make the most of the stats you can control and not to obsess over the ones you can't. If you can wrap your head around that concept, that delicate balance won't seem nearly as unmanageable.
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