(*) MASTER NOTES: Know thy rules!

I’m headed to New York this weekend for the annual Tout Wars drafts. It’s a bit different for me this year: I’ve moved from the 15-team mixed auction to the 12-team American League-only auction. This was partly to help Tout organizers accommodate other owners moving into leagues or changing leagues, and partly because I left my longtime AL-only home league this year, and I wanted to keep that personal tradition going.

Any reasonably serious fantasy player knows the key to a good, fun draft and a successful year is preparation. And from that point of view, I should say from the jump that my draft prep this year has been highly unorthodox. I usually start studying in mid-January, and I try to do an hour a day or so until draft. This year, though, my wife and I took in a foster baby, literally a one-day-old newborn, on Jan. 21. Having a newborn in the house is not the ideal backdrop for fantasy baseball research. Or anything else. I don’t think I’ve read a book in two months.

As a result, my research for this season will end up having been telescoped into the last week or so before draft. Of course, most of that has been focused on evaluating and slotting the players who will be available at draft, using the BaseballHQ Custom Draft Guide (CDG)  and the HQ player team depth charts. Since this is a very deep AL-only league, it’s doubly important to know about the players who will end up in the last few roster slots and reserve rounds.

My research task is complicated by two factors. First, Tout Wars drafts have liberal rostering rules—we can draft pretty much any player we want, except players on NL rosters. And second, it would be challenging even if we were restricted to active AL players because the draft takes place two weeks before Opening Day. Dozens of players are still battling for at-bats and innings in spring training. So basically, instead of researching and ranking 168 hitters and 108 pitchers, it’s more like 190 hitters and what seems like 2,000 pitchers. And the baby’s crying. Again.

Since forecasting player performance and playing is pretty much 90 percent of the point of the entire BaseballHQ.com web site, I’m not going to focus here on that aspect of prep. Instead, I want to discuss an often overlooked aspect, especially for playing in a new league: The rules.

Most of the rules in most leagues are somewhere between similar and identical. But it's the differences that'll get you, as the poodle said to the coyote. One of the earliest tasks I set myself this year was to understand all the nuances of the rules in my new league. And sure enough, in addition to the aforementioned rostering rules, Tout has a couple of important departures from more "regular" rule sets.

First, the league uses On-Base Percentage (OBP) instead of Batting Average. The CDG lets users set OBP as a category, and OBP performance is about as predictable as BA, so it’s all OK from that perspective. But based on a Master Notes column a few weeks ago, I am looking to find all the batters who have unusually high HBP totals, which are often not baked into OBP projections. As a result, I’ll be nudging the biddability of Shin-Soo Choo, Carlos Gómez, Alex Gordon and Brandon Guyer, among others. And I'd bump Starling Marte a buck or three if this were an NL league.

Another slight but important variation in Tout-AL rules is that players acquire position eligibility based on 15 games in the previous season, not the usual 20. Again, not a huge, game-changing insight, but I want to be sure my draft sheet has every hitter listed at every available spot. It might get me a small edge over anyone using reference material that relies on the 20-game standard. Such an owner might not know, for example, that Oakland’s Jed Lowrie, who is listed in most references as 3B only, qualifies at shortstop as well under the 15-game standard (although what he qualifies for most is a volume discount at the Mayo Clinic). Similarly, it is useful to know that Prince Fielder, described everywhere as one of the AL’s many DH-only hitters, played 18 games at first base last year, and therefore qualifies at the position in Tout. And under the 15-game rule, Marwin Gonzalez actually qualifies at every offensive position other than catcher. And besides an awesome name, Marwin is having a fine spring—he leads the Astros in homers this spring and is second to Carlos Correa in BA. Other "hidden" multi-positionals in the AL include Trevor Plouffe, Eduardo Núñez and even Texas ripper Joey Gallo, in case I find out that Tout has added a batter strikeouts category.

The third unusual rule in the Tout-AL league, and the most consequential from a planning perspective, is the "swingman" rule. A few years ago, Tout removed the fifth outfielder from its roster requirement, and instead uses a wild-card position that can be filled at draft by any hitter or any pitcher. What’s more, an owner can switch the swingman slot back and forth all season between pitchers and hitters.

I haven’t decided what to do with the slot at the auction, but I did check the league drafts from the last few years and found that almost all the Tout experts have filled the swingman slot with a 14th hitter. They’ve taken advantage of the flexibility to add hitters other than OFs, though OF is still the most common position used in the slot.

It's a good idea to pay attention to conventional wisdom about something, especially when the wisdom is coming from a group of people uncommonly wise in the topic, so I'm leaning towards following the crowd and putting a bat into the swigman slot at draft.

Buuuuuuuuuut ...

The conventional wisdom sometimes offers a chance for unconventional action. I'm assessing whether it might make sense for me to zag with a 10th pitcher while everyone else is zigging with a 14th hitter. A decent $1 pitcher stands a better chance of contributing something useful than a $1 hitter. And if I kept my $195-$65-ish hit-pitch split the same, I could increase my per-hitter prices, either upgrading across the board or adding a buck to a higher-rated batter, and add an extra $1 LIMA-value reliever instead.

That possibility, in turn, dovetails with another rule, the Tout-AL innings minimum. The league rules require 950 innings to qualify for ERA and WHIP points, slightly less than the 1,000-inning requirements I’m used to. If I need 50 fewer innings and can use a 10th pitcher to help provide them, maybe I can change the shape of my pitching staff by getting fewer but better starting pitchers. I look at pitcher rostering in pitcher-pairs, each starter paired with one reliever to provide about 250 innings. If I have the standard nine pitchers, I can comfortably reach 950 innings by getting four pairs plus one reliever. If I have 10 pitchers, I can use three pairs for 750 and get the 200 innings I still need from four other relievers.

In all, that would mean three quality starters and seven relievers, including a closer. If the three starters and closer are all $15, that's $60. Add six $1 LIMA guys, that’s a $66 staff, leaving me $194 for hitting (and remember, that’s divided 13 ways instead of 14). I have to calculate the effect on the strikeouts category, since Joey Gallo’s whiffs don’t count, and wins could be an issue even though decent setup guys can get as many wins as $5 starters, but with much better ratios. But can I get enough strikeouts? And what about enough at-bats? Time to launch Excel and open my draft spreadsheet and … uh-oh, baby’s crying.

Gotta go. Just remember the bottom line: Know your rules so you can take advantage of the opportunities they provide.

More From Archives