i guess he was but he shouldn't have been. we discussed him at length in the fantasy thread last year around the time sano and then seager got called up because of his power and speed translating as well as it does to coors, and despite his strikeouts his stats overall looking incredibly appealing. butttt his path was blocked by tulo and then reyes. i actually ignored him completely for the first bunch of drafts until the chapman suspension was announced and it actually looked like there was a decent chance story could make the opening day roster so i just picked him up everywhere he was undrafted to that point and started stockpiling him wherever i could in subsequent drafts

my hitting benches are so vast that i can afford to having massive shares of a late rounder isn't really particularly risky

Are they all Yahoo? random opponents?

How do you know you will get paid?

GLGL. Don't care for baseball but will follow along.

How does running a fantasy baseball team compare to a football team timewise? I've done 10+ FFB teams the last 3 years and it's been tiring. Can't imagine doing what you're doing.

I was thinking how something like this would work in football, and I think it would be nearly impossible. In football if you lose your 1st/2nd rd pick to injury (pretty frequent occurrence), it's almost a sure fire loss. But in baseball I feel like you can survive it because of how less impactful one specific player is to your whole season.

For example, I'm really curious to see how all his pollock teams end up.

It's yahoo pro leagues vs randoms. Can assume payouts are safe.

I have 6 FFB leagues two that I am the commissioner of and I probably put half the time in on those that I do my 3 FBB leagues.

I have one friend that always say, "I won't play fantasy baseball, I already have a full time job."

Hell of an undertaking, SRM. Good luck, I can't imagine even attempting something like this.

all random yahoo pro leagues

without a script or some method of automation there is exactly zero chance this works in football. i spend maybe 15 seconds per team setting up my lineup each day and that still comes out to over 50 minutes. and even if you could automate it you still have to deal with last second pickups as needed which makes it a lot tougher than say, global player swaps

so far it's not that grueling. i mean i'm at work anyway while i'm doing all this so it's not really a big deal in that respect. the most time consuming thing is making any global pickups and the only reason that's hard is because yahoo's interface when viewing a player's availability in all your leagues is such garbage that it slows me down

also i've decided posting my rosters and updating them in my spreadsheet is way too time-consuming especially given the fluidity of my rosters so i'm scrapping that. instead i'll just post the scores and standings of each team and log trades by buyin level as they happen

do you have the same team name for all teams?

had to vary it so i didn't lose track of what teams i did or didn't setup, so all my $20 leagues are micro1, micro2, micro3, etc. $50 are small1, small2, etc, $100 big1, big2, etc

edit: had michael saunders in all 203, dropped him in 40 to pick up span or taylor with the intention of picking him back up a couple days later then he proceeds to homer and now there's articles on him blowing up my spot

rats

how do you keep track of them all then? or do you just cycle through team by team?

i feel like spreadsheets will have to be the way to do it once you get to the "need to abandon X % of teams to focus on the winning ones" stage. or just changing names to like "forget this team 1"

You realize multiple teams you don't have a starting catcher, planned?

For the first couple of weeks ya. I don't think having a lower tier catcher is worth not rostering a sleeper target, so if I didn't get Mesorasco and there were too many players I wanted not to have I just didn't roster a catcher. I think I have that situation in ~20 leagues

Why not stash DL'ed players then, like even Grandal? Seems like more stashes for you if that's your plan

Because nobody goes on the dl til opening day and in the meantime im wasting a roster spot. Same reason I didn't grab Devon Travis anywhere. After the first week when I've exhausted my 6 pickups I'll adjust

I have to think time management is a factor in some of SRM's moves. Not picking up Travis, for example, isn't efficient, but it's really unlikely to matter; you're going to have injuries and need those DL slots eventually, so stashing a potentially mediocre 2B for 2-3 months probably doesn't play anyways. That hour is prob better spent on trades with fish.

agreed, but not starting/rostering a catcher to stash hitters, but not stashing in DL, seems inefficient

i'll start by freely admitting my philosophy on this could be completely wrong

after about 100 drafts or so the last 6 rounds of my drafts would usually involve the exact same players: mesoraco, suarez, schoop, domingo santana, aj reed, michael saunders. in the event i would get sniped on one of them (usually mesoraco), i would take the highest upside position player available that wasn't one of the latter 5

in the times i would get sniped on mesoraco i would never bother to take a catcher unless one of the latter 5 got swiped opening up a spot for me to take one if need be and there wasn't another upside position player i valued. in those instances i would be left without a catcher simply because i would rather roster those 5 players than take a replacement level catcher i could always snag later on

over the course of a full season not having a catcher is obviously inefficient, but for my purposes drafting one just to have one in the early going is equally inefficient. my offenses will always be plenty good and time will always open up the ability for me to plug in a catcher but in the meantime it's more important for me to accumulate as many potential trade assets as i possibly can, or to assemble players i can plug in to replace starters i trade away while consolidating my roster

In a 10 category league, is completely punting 2 categories each and every week over the course of the season viable (Wins and Strikeouts)?

I agree that if you can guarantee you dominate the hitting categories, as well as saves, and top relievers should normally win ERA and WHIP, you should normally be able to win most of those categories but dominating them each and every week seems unlikely as variance happens.

I'm having trouble thinking that purposefully giving yourself 44 losses out of a possible 220 to start the year is a winning strategy, as you will need to win 62.5% of your other categories just to finish at .500 -- I agree it is possible to overcome if you can maintain eliteness at every other category but am not sure the variance will allow as your entire team will have weeks they under-perform as well.

Are you going to be watching for good starting pitcher free agents as the year goes on?

Note: I agree SP cold very well be over-rated, I just think punting completely is a mistake. Being able to micro-manage SP's on a weekly basis is a much bigger advantage than just punting completely.

Over time I believe you can assemble an elite rotation from nothing much easier than you can assemble an elite offense from nothing. Think of it this way: in a h2h league with no caps on starts of innings which 1st round hitters would you give up 1:1 for kershaw? If you can't name any then which 2nd round hitters would you give up? You're not getting value on kershaw's adp but you still burned a pick that you could have had Arenado or correa or Rizzo or whatever else to get him. Too mich emphasis is placed on drafting a balanced team that you lose sight of the fact that its a 23 week season and even if you lose 10-0 in each of your first 2 weeks it isn't going to sink you

My RP emphasis is to buy some time while the pitching heavy teams sink and have no choice but to sell. Im subjecting myself to a ton of variance, sure (hinojosa krod and tolleson ravaged my ratios in a lot of places) but it's still better to be trading from my position in 2 weeks than from the position of the guy who needs hitting

Even if you assemble an elite offense later, you'll be lagging behind other elite offenses that were former earlier than yours.

And if for the sake of argument I decide to punt SP for the full season, 62.5% sounds a lot bigger than it actually is when you're a prohibitive favorite in at least 7 of the 8 remaining (im mediocre in steals in a few places) Sure I have a non-zero chance of losing 10-0 and 0 chance of winning better than 8-2 but over a season I should be winning these categories more than im losing

I saw this pretty late

is there a screen shot or list of your rosters anywhere?

insane man. Looking forward to following along

I was gonna do a master spreadsheet of rosters but that takes way too much time considering how fluid my rosters are (made 6 trades today alone for instance and more than a few pickups). The Google doc in the OP is the extent of what im going to be tracking

I can post some of the rosters on request I guess

how many schwarbers?