(*) MASTER NOTES: Sure, Jim Johnson has been awful... But it says here I'm gonna win!

I win!

Well, at least that’s what one projection says. Despite a strategy that included drafting Jim Johnson, Bobby Parnell and Casey Janssen to take the saves category, and despite Johnson being terrible, Janssen being hurt, and Parnell being terrible and hurt, I'm going to win my league.

I play in just two fantasy leagues, a home league AL-only and Tout Wars mixed. My two leagues drafted on successive weekends, and as we approached the end of week one, I took a look at some projected final standings in both my leagues.

Here’s the weird thing: In my home league, I had a terrible draft. I couldn’t be in the room, so my partner and I tried to use Facebook messaging to manage our bidding. It worked great when we tested it at 11:30 PM on a Wednesday night.

But the draft took place on a Sunday afternoon, and apparently more people use the service, because it was very slow and completely useless for something as fast-paced as a fantasy auction. We ended up leaving about $20 on the table, and have a squad with as much power as the Bad News Bears.

My Tout Wars draft, by contrast, went really well. I did what I wanted to do, with one dumb exception, and came out of the auction with a team in which I was, and still am, really confident.

So, one good draft, one bad one.

And yet the projections say I am going to have a fighting chance in my home league, and that I’m going to win Tout!

Many stat providers these days offer owners a chance to project the final standings of the draft at any stage of the season, adding year-to-date stats to projected stats and then doing up a set of standings with the results.

OnRoto.com, the stats provider for Tout and for my home league, actually offers two projections, including one based on BaseballHQ.com projected stats.

For my home league, the HQ projections have us third, and other set says we’ll be fifth, but both sets say we’ll have 61.5 points, and four of the eight the category scores match exactly.

In Tout, the HQ projections have me 11th, while the other projections say I’ll have a 4.5-point win, one of only two teams over 100 points in the 5x5 league.

Of course the truth is that I can’t trust these projections, in either league. The fantasy baseball season is six months of games, literally thousands of at-bats and batters faced, injuries and flops as well as a unexpected production from unlikely sources.

In a nutshell, the projected final standings are fun, but I don’t trust ’em.

But I do trust the category “bunches.” I did an interview this week with Ray Murphy for the April 8 “Tuesday Tout” edition of the BaseballHQ Radio podcast, and Ray put it perfectly. He said he doesn’t care if he’s projected fifth or second or ninth in a category, because that’s asking for way more precision than even the finest projection systems can provide.

Instead, Ray said, you want to look at each category, identify where the bunch is, and determine if you’re in the bunch, above the bunch, or below the bunch.

In that way, you can identify where the dangers lie, and the opportunities. And you can estimate the likely range of outcomes, by adding up your score if everything goes well and you hit the tops of your bunches, and if everything crashes and you hit the bottoms of those bunches.

I’ve already figured out that I have some opportunities in HRs and RBI, and I might be able to deal from what looks like an unnecessary surplus of stolen bases. I actually did that by design at the auction when I realized that the power was vanishing. Draft for production, trade for balance is the theory, and it works pretty well in a trading league like Tout.

I might also look at swapping in one closer for a starter, since I am at the bottom of a wins bunch where I could gain six points with 10 additional wins, but I don’t figure to lose much in saves.

And so on.

In the end, the way to win the league is mostly just to stay at it, make moves when you can, try not to make moves when you don’t have to.

It’s a long season, and as fun as it might be, you really can't win it in the first three days.

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