(The full, nine-inning Playbook was originally published during the spring of 2020. It has been updated for 2021 where applicable.)
Your work is far from complete at the end of draft day.
While it's true that the majority of your competitive chances in a given season hinge on the success of your draft, your management of your team in-season more often than not proves the determining factor in your final standing. For a real-life parallel, the draft is like purchasing a house; the remodels, repairs and maintenance represent the in-season work you do to it that ultimately enhances its value.
Unfortunately, it's the in-season work that often falls by the wayside with fantasy baseball managers, especially those who enjoy other fantasy sports like football (ramping up in late July), hockey (mid-September, in a typical year) or basketball (early October, again in typical years). At the time that we should be most focused upon our championship quest, we're most apt to be distracted by our other interests.
It doesn't help that a hefty volume of available fantasy baseball advice pertains to draft-day strategy rather than in-season. Sure, there are plenty of lineup advice, trade target and pickup recommendation columns, but it's not often that strategy regarding these in-season transactions is discussed.
That's where this edition of The Playbook comes in: Part 1 explained the various types of league transactional settings, but now let's examine successful strategies for each.
Your league's method for assigning add/drops matters
The decision as to whether your league will dole out player acquisitions via a Waivers, Free Agent Budget or (gasp) No Waivers (also known as "first-come, first-served") system is among the most significant, so don't take it lightly. Nor should you casually make the decision whether to cap the number of transactions allowed either within a single week or the entire season.
In addition to your choice needing suit the interests and schedule of your league's participants, it also has a huge say in your player acquisition strategy.
In a Waivers system, teams are ranked in a predetermined order of priority for claiming the player, with the team earliest in the order ultimately the one awarded said player. The order typically goes in the reverse of the draft order to begin the season, then in inverse order of the league's standings during the year. The order can reset weekly to reflect the reverse of the standings, or the waiver order can begin in the reverse of the draft order, with claiming teams simply moved to the back of the order and no reset.
As most Waivers systems only apply to three specific types of players -- the entire pool immediately exiting the draft, any player recently cut by another team or a player who has recently joined the eligible player pool (such as an American League player traded into a National League-only league) -- there isn't a significant need for strategy in a standard mixed league: You place claims on the waiver-eligible players you want every time you see them available on the free-agent list, and simply hope that you're the earliest in the order so as to earn the claim.
It's the deeper leagues, or offsite leagues that have more nuance to their waiver systems, where a more calculated approach is necessary. The most obvious are those aforementioned AL- or NL-only leagues, where possessing the top waiver priority at the time a player traded into the pool from the other league is paramount. This season, players like Javier Baez and Kris Bryant (Chicago Cubs, NL), Brandon Belt (San Francisco Giants, NL), Danny Duffy (Kansas City Royals, AL), Eduardo Escobar (Arizona Diamondbacks, NL), Starling Marte (Miami Marlins, NL), Kyle Seager (Seattle Mariners, AL) and Christian Vazquez (Boston Red Sox, AL) appear the most likely candidates among higher-profile fantasy names to be on the midseason trade market, and that's before getting into elite names who could be moved in blockbuster deals such as Josh Hader (Milwaukee Brewers, NL), Jose Ramirez (Cleveland Indians, AL) and Trevor Story (Colorado Rockies, NL).
In my experience, fantasy managers are much more timid to spend a favorable waiver position than is necessary. Granted, in an AL- or NL-only league, especially in the weeks leading up to the midseason MLB trade deadline, it's worth being more conservative with placing waiver claims so as to be in striking position should a Bryant or Story get traded into your league, but it's wiser to be aggressive with your claims wherever possible. The more chances you take on new, intriguing talent, the better off your team in the long run.
A good rule of thumb: The greater the volume of appealing talent available via waivers at once, the more aggressive you should be. In these periods, you're likely to see the largest number of overall claims made for players in your league, meaning the quicker your league's waiver order will turn over. That's why the best times to strike in general are immediately after the draft and directly after the MLB trade deadline on July 31. In a league with a more restrictive waiver system, two other likely times are the first two weeks of the regular season, as roles are beginning to be defined, and the 16-day point of the season, after which point many of the top prospects still in the minors have been kept there for long enough to delay their eventual MLB free agency by a year.
"Burning your waiver position," as many describe it, is a less damaging strategy at these specific times, because more teams will be doing it.
Another consideration is stacking your waiver claims, so as to add the maximum number of players concurrently in one waiver run. For example, if you exited your salary-cap draft with three $1 players to whom you weren't attached, and see three attractive, waiver-eligible free agents you'd prefer as replacements, it's the perfect time to submit all three claims. After all, in a 12-team league, the worst you'd be doing with claims Nos. 2 and 3 is to move your No. 12 waiver position to [e] 12 and again 12. No harm done.
If your league opts for a waiver system that resets weekly to reflect the reverse order of standings, there's little need to sweat burning your waiver position, being that it's subject to change within the next seven days anyway.
What a FAB-ulous player acquisition system!
The Free Agent Budget method -- also commonly referred to as FAB -- is my favorite for awarding player acquisitions. It's the most strategic and equitable system, but it's also more complicated and is considerably more schedule-dependent.
As with a draft-day salary-cap draft, the FAB method assigns each team a predetermined budget of imaginary dollars or units with which to "purchase" free agents' contracts throughout the season, with the winning team for each the one that registered the highest bid. Unlike in the draft, though, FAB is generally blind bidding; though the Tout Wars industry analysts leagues at one time did conduct live FAB sessions for the transactions period immediately following the MLB trade deadline.
A typical team FAB budget is $100, but I've been in leagues that used $200, $250, $300 and $1,000. The larger the budget, however, the flukier you should expect your individual salary results to be, with teams more apt to mismanage their funds over the course of the year, causing unexpectedly larger (especially early in the year) or smaller (especially later) winning bids. To use last year's Tout Wars-NL, which uses a $1,000 cap, as an example, six times a player's contract sold for at least $400 (or at least 40% of an individual team's seasonal budget). And if you believe that the short season influenced that -- with the larger budget spanning a shorter schedule, it'd be a rational belief -- consider that during the 2019 season, which had traditional 162 game schedules, seven times a player's contract was sold for at least $400.
Whether to require a $1 minimum FAB bid for each player is another important decision. Such a requirement serves as a transactions cap of sorts, as in a $100 cap league, a $1 minimum means a maximum of 100 player acquisitions over the course of a season. I prefer leagues that allow $0 bids, so as to never force a team to enter a given scoring period with a blank -- or inactive player due to being injured, in the minors, suspended or otherwise -- roster spot, but I also more commonly play in deeper leagues where the caliber players likely to sell for $0 are replacement level-caliber.
Take special care of when to have your Free Agent Budget claims process. ESPN's game allows you to set them on any (or every) day of the week and at the top of any of the 24 hours of the day (though only once daily). Industry leagues like Tout Wars and the League of Alternative Baseball Reality (LABR), as well as many old-school leagues, prefer to process FAB only once weekly, usually as close to the end of the weekly scoring period as possible. I've played in leagues that had as many as four FAB periods, but I find that the optimal setup either has a single period with a deadline of Sunday at 11 p.m. or midnight ET -- so as to run after the ESPN Sunday Night Baseball game, the final one of the week, is likely complete -- or with dual deadlines with one on Friday and the other either Monday morning or at around noon ET before the new week starts.
This applies regardless of how many FAB periods you choose: Do not forget to enter your FAB bids before each and every deadline!
As simple as that sounds, even the best fantasy baseball minds sometimes fall prey to this mistake. A story once shared with me by one of the industry's brightest minds chronicled the time he completely forgot to enter his FAB bids in one of that season's most critical weeks -- the week that a big-name player had been traded into the pool of his specific "only" league. Set a repeating calendar reminder on your phone, if you must.
As with Waivers systems, fantasy managers' biggest misstep in FAB formats is to bid too conservatively, especially in the season's early weeks. While talent can be found on the free-agent list of any league at any time of the year, there are "sweet spots" on the calendar in terms of free-agent finds, as referenced earlier.
Since FAB requires every player to go through the bidding process before being awarded to a fantasy team, a more aggressive approach is necessary. For one, bear in mind that no two weeks on the baseball calendar carry equal weight in terms of budgeting your FAB resources. After all, the players you buy in Week 1 have the ability to contribute to your team for all 26 typical weeks of a baseball season, but those you buy in the season-concluding Week 26 can only contribute over those seven days.
The two columns on the left in the chart below weight each of these 26 weeks by the extent to which an acquired player can contribute to his fantasy team, reflecting the percentage of your budget that you should prepare to spend assuming that all prospective FAB acquisitions during the season had identical chances at success. Since these prospective FAB acquisitions do not, of course, have equal chances, I've adjusted the weights in the two columns on the right to reflect the times of the year I estimate are the optimal times to strike.