There is no way to minimize the importance of your fantasy baseball draft. The deeper the league, the more important the draft is in winning a championship. With that said, no one wins a championship on draft day – even in a 15-team league. The baseball season is six months long, and your level of success on the waiver wire will make or break you.
If you play in a league that uses straight waivers, you must be diligent enough to get the players you need, but don’t lose your top waiver priority when the options aren’t worth the bid. If your league uses FAAB bidding (Free Agent Acquisition Budget), you also need to know when to be aggressive with your bidding and when to be more conservative. After all, you’re on a budget.
The best fantasy managers seem to have a knack for knowing who to bid on and how much to bid. Some of them use excel spreadsheets with advanced formulas, but a lot of them use their God-given intuition. But there’s another aspect of FAAB bidding – knowing who to cut. One of the mistakes managers make is losing patience with a player who gets off to a slow start.
Knowing when to cut bait with a player is also largely driven by experience and intuition. Players get hot and cold continually. Baseball is a streaky sport, and you must have a firm understanding about how quickly a slow start can heat up and how quickly a hot start can cool down. Last year, Jorge Mateo was the poster child for a hot start that ended in a Siberian winter.
The Mateo antithesis in 2023 was Marcell Ozuna. I used a late draft pick on Ozuna, who was coming off two seasons of injuries and poor performances. I hung on to him for a while but finally decided this guy was a lost cause. All he needed was to learn I had cut him from my TGFBI team. He finished the season with a .274/.346/.558 slash, 100 RBI and a .906 OPS.
The lesson here is to not turn over your roster or your bench too quickly at the start of the season. Trust your draft and forget about any commentary from some garbage fantasy baseball team pundit (like me). You didn’t draft a player because you thought he’d be great for the first two weeks of the season. You drafted him because of the overall potential to contribute to your team.
Don’t get me wrong. There is a time to drop a player and move on, but before you start adding and dropping players because of a few bad games, ask yourself if the player you are adding is really a better player, or just off to a better start. In my life, I have made more errors of commission than omission. I don’t want to make a mistake like I did with Ozuna in the future.
The 2024 season got off to a strange start with the Dodgers and Padres squaring off in the Seoul Series last week. If you wonder why the MLB scheduled a regular-season series in South Korea, consider that tickets to South Korea’s first major league regular season games sold out within an hour after they went on sale. Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto are gods over there.
The Sunday before the North America Opening Day on Thursday was an important date because it was the first opportunity for fantasy managers to bid on and acquire players available in the free-agent pool. Let’s use TGFBI as an example. This 15-team NFBC league had a total of 450 players drafted three weeks ago. Suffice it to say, the baseball landscape has changed since then.
Let’s start with the all-important closer position. Managers like me who were unfortunate enough to draft Devin Williams just saw 30 saves go out the window. Williams was diagnosed with two stress fractures in his back a couple of weeks ago and will probably miss three months. His back soreness came on during spring training and just days after I used my fourth-round pick on him.
On Sunday night, I locked in my FAAB bids, with Griffin Jax, Michael Kopech, Joel Payamps and Abner Uribe in my waterfall. I was outbid on Jax, who is expected to fill in at closer for the twins while Jhoan Duran recovers from his oblique injury. I bid $33 on Jax, but it wasn’t enough. However, I did land Kopech for a $32 bid. Hopefully, he’ll wind up as the White Sox closer.
That might be a leap of faith because the right-hander’s move to the bullpen was just announced a couple of weeks ago. Kopech was initially being stretched out as a starter but had posted a 7.71 ERA in three starts in spring action. Kopech, once one of the top prospects in the game, still throws hard and does seem better fit to the closer role as durability remains an issue.
I initially considered investing in the Brewers bullpen after Williams went down, thinking that it would make sense to hedge Williams with either Payamps, or Uribe, to get my saves there. But I was spooked by Milwaukee manager Pat Murphy’s comments about “the fireman’s hat being passed around to different relievers every night when they spin the wheel after a victory.”
I wish my crystal ball had been working early Sunday because more bad news was coming with the announcement on Monday that Arizona closer Paul Sewald had been diagnosed with a Grade 2 oblique strain and would be starting the season on the IL, too. Sewald was my seventh-round pick on the same ill-fated TGFBI team. If I had only known, I could have rostered Kevin Ginkel.
Ironically, my biggest bid on Sunday night was on a starting pitcher, Luis Gil. The Yankees hurler made his MLB debut in 2021 and started his career with 15 2/3 scoreless innings. He is the first player in MLB history with a scoreless start in his first three appearances. Unfortunately, Gil required Tommy John surgery in the spring of 2022 and hasn’t pitched in the majors since.
I opened my FAAB checkbook and paid $74 for Gil, who earned the final spot in the Yankees rotation. My bid was just $3 more than the second highest bid in my league. Gil had earned the spot with a great spring and will fill in for Gerrit Cole, who is likely to wind up on the 60-day IL with an elbow injury. That was another injury that occurred after many drafts, including TGFBI.
If you drafted Cole, check your waiver wire and see if Gil is still available. He has looked nasty in spring training, posting a stellar 2.87 ERA, 0.83 WHIP, along with 23 strikeouts and just six walks over nearly 16 innings. Gil relies on a 97-mph fastball, slider and changeup. His strikeout upside is high, but he comes with ratio risk, as he’s averaged a walk rate over 12% in the minors.
Another pitcher that drew some interest was Bowden Francis, who went for $40 in my TGFBI league. Francis learned last week that he had earned the fifth starter role for the Blue Jays, with Alek Manoah beginning the season on the IL. With Kevin Gausman returning to Grapefruit League action Monday with an impressive outing, I have doubts about him hanging on to the job.
There was only one position player that attracted a bid over $20. Victor Scott II went for $21, and anyone who bought him cheap got a bargain because he was widely expected to be sent down this week until the Cardinals announced Tuesday that tests revealed an AC joint sprain for Dylan Carlson, who was the starting center fielder. Scott stole 94 bases in the minors in 2023.
Keep in mind there are two types of free agents to acquire with FAAB. One is a player with upside, like Gil or Scott. This is a player with staying power who might start and contribute to your team. The other is a streamer – a player you rent for a short term, hoping for an immediate statistical impact based on an advantageous upcoming schedule or a positive shift in their value.
Thomas L. Seltzer, AKA Doubting Thomas, writes about baseball and football for CreativeSports. Be sure to follow Thomas on Twitter@ThomasLSeltzer1.
