Forget Your Draft — Start Managing

Our drafts are just a small fraction of the fantasy season. The draft is our base, but our fantasy fortune doesn’t rely entirely on our picks. We can’t win without making moves. The goal of our drafts (and auctions) is to get more than $320 of value from our $260 budget. Even with the team I felt best about after draft season, my own rankings and value calculations had me at only $293. How do I make up difference?

Each roster spot is an opportunity to earn some of that $320 goal. Two weeks into the season, it is tough to bench Travis Shaw in favor of Renato Nunez because his ADP (in NFBC Main Events) was 95.08 and Nunez’s was 444.26. This move would have seemed impossible before the draft, but their early season results warrant it. Separating the players, their ADP and potential bias helps us focus on always generating roster-spot value. Rather than thinking about a player earning that value, it might be better to think of it as the roster spot earning it.

Let’s break this down: Using a standard 2-catcher, 5-outfielder league, there are 14 hitter and 9 pitcher roster spots. Todd Zola at Mastersball has undertaken research using 20 years of results to create Historical Draft Slot Values. Here are the averages:

These roster spot values are “average dollars earned since 2010 for each draft spot in a hypothetical ‘perfect’ draft where each player is selected based on their end-of-season earnings.” The total is $262! A long way from the $320 goal. No matter how much we think that we can out-draft our opponents, it is clear that it is still vital to squeeze as much value out of all roster spots.

If you are lucky and your first-round pick stays healthy and performs well, he can earn more than $34. If he doesn’t earn you that, your season isn’t finished. It doesn’t matter who earns the value in each spot. Let’s look at Trea Turner. His ADP this year was in the single digits, and now he is out of lineups until May. Even though the first-round pick is absent (hopefully, short-term), the roster spot can still be used to build value. Rather than lamenting our lost player and second-guessing our draft-day decision, remember that his roster spot is not empty during his time on the IL. If we drafted Turner, we should have anticipated an injury at some point in the season, and we may have spent a late pick on a backup shortstop like Elvis Andrus or Dansby Swanson. In this situation, our roster spot is still earning value… a lot of it! Injuries have already ravaged every team in MLB and every fantasy manager. Fantasy success is about managing setbacks during the 26-week season better than your opponents.

We (almost) always play our top players. We drafted them to be in our lineups everyday. If our first-round pick drastically underperforms or is lost to injury and we have a backup option who is performing well, we can rotate our roster to constantly generate value. It is here that the value of multi-positional players is of greatest benefit. Juggling multi-positional players will increase our free agent options. With luck, you can finagle your lineup so that you can choose any player from the free agent pool. This is a valuable way of ensuring that you can maximize value from all your roster spots, even despite inevitable injuries and cold streaks. This is also how is it possible to bridge the difference between our $260 budget and the $262 historical draft slot values, and get to the $320 goal.

Players Roster spots must exceed projections. Since every player on my team won’t exceed preseason projections, we need to take a two-pronged approach: First, it should be the goal of your draft to find players who are least likely to underperform (especially in the early rounds); second, manage the roster spots to maximize value. When drafted players underperform projections either by lower skills or injury, we can, as managers, find ways to make up the difference. Here’s how…

Streaming Hitters. Cycling hitters in the best matchups is an excellent way to generate roster spot value. Easy, right? Oh, to start every gem and leave every dud on our bench! It’s not gonna happen. As managers, we can take advantage of matchups to stream players into our lineups that have a higher likelihood of success. Starting hitters in Colorado or Milwaukee and benching them in San Francisco or Miami is a strategy that will be successful long-term. Sure, it sometimes will blow up in our faces, but the process is correct even though the result may not be.

It is tough early in the season to let go of players. We drafted players for a reason: We like them! Even in the last few rounds of drafts, we preferred our players over the other available options, and it can be hard to drop them. By focusing on roster spots earning value instead of players, we can more easily drop players who aren’t earning value and add those who are. Sometimes we have to bench our underperforming Charlie Blackmon when he has a five-game week on the road in Miami and Washington. Nicholas Castellanos might play seven games in Boston and Chicago bump Blackmon to the bench for the week.

At the same time, dropping a late-round pick for an undrafted player with good matchups is vital. Churn through your roster each week and add players who have favorable matchups. A little value gained each week nets a lot of value by the end of the season. It is easier to do when we ignore the emotional connections we may have to a player and just consider the inanimate roster spot instead.

Streaming Pitchers. A lot of digital-ink is spilled each week assessing pitchers making two starts. It is the most challenging aspect of team management. It is high risk. Sometimes streaming in a pitcher with two great matchups will see them blown up by one or both teams. In the free agent pool, most available two-start pitchers are of questionable skill, are on poor teams or have difficult matchups. It is especially difficult early in the season with many teams getting scheduled days off and teams dealing with inclement weather. Still, this is a way to add value to your roster. Hitting on two wins and 15-plus strikeouts earns a lot of value.

Adding studs. Finding an ignored player and adding him to your team is the best way to provide and in-season boost.  Adding Jesus Aguilar early last year or picking up Cody Bellinger in April 2017 might be league-winning moves. In previous articles, I have outlined ways we can increase our chances of hitting the jackpot: We need to be aware of playing time, MLB roster needs and changes in skill. By adding new players and dropping the chaff at the end of our rosters, we increase our chances of hitting on a game-changing player. We might get that ignored player who hits big, but, at the very least, we add value to our team by streaming into our active lineup players who have favorable matchups for the week, or are on a hot streak, while leaving the weaker matchups and cold players on our bench.

What makes adding players especially challenging is that other teams in your league will be doing it too. Weekly FAAB for two-start pitchers or players heading into Coors Field can be high, especially if they are coming off a good week. Looking ahead in the schedule and picking up players a week in advance is more cost efficient. It is a challenge that may be ignored by your competition. This is part of the difficulty of squeezing value out of our roster spots.

Even though MLB players are generating stats for us, it is important to be able to draw a distinction between those players and the roster spots that are bringing us closer to a title. It is especially hard early in the season when we remember how much we like the players we drafted. With every draft pick, we chose one player over another for a good reason (or a reason we thought at the time was good!). Now we must ignore that and consider only the value generating potential of each roster spot in our lineup. It can be a difficult transition. In an active league, our teams drastically change throughout the year. Leagues are not won on a draft day home run, but through the weekly grind that add value as we look to keep the lineup moving.