(The full, nine-inning Playbook was originally published during the spring of 2020. It has been updated for 2021 where applicable.)
The one constant in baseball is change.
It's not enough to simply scout players and fill out a cheat sheet; it's important to also have a firm read on what's going on around the league as a whole. After all, many of the edges you might find during the draft-prep process center on league trends, things that could shift the values toward or away from a certain type of player.
Baseball has seen a significant amount of change over merely the past half-decade, but especially in the past two seasons. The 2019 season saw a huge surge in home runs, while 2020 was played under the cloud of the pandemic. Rules changed significantly last year, some of which will carry over into 2021, while there are already reports that the constitution of the baseball itself might be different this season. All of these developments have a strong bearing on the fantasy baseball landscape.
This edition of the Playbook brings you up to date on the happenings around Major League Baseball, to catch you up on trends you might have missed that could impact your rankings. Each of the links below will take you directly to any of the six topics covered:
Baseball during a pandemic: COVID-19 had a dramatic impact on the game, from player availability to scheduling to the rules themselves.
Happy Fun Ball no more? The home-run surge might be about to shift.
Closers by committee and the 2019-20 league-wide drop in saves.
"The opener": The thriving strategy of starting a game with a reliever.
Position scarcity: The ever-shifting values at each field position.
The catcher talent pool: Where have all the catchers gone?
Baseball during a pandemic
COVID-19 has been a major strain on everyone, Major League Baseball included, but it is an extraordinary feat that the league was able to successfully conclude a 60-game regular season plus expanded, four-round, 29-day postseason. That's not to suggest it was without interruption, and for a time during the season's first two weeks, there was legitimate worry that it wouldn't play to full conclusion.
Team-wide outbreaks affected the Miami Marlins (8 days) and St. Louis Cardinals (15 days), and in total, there were 43 postponements affecting 16 different teams related to COVID-19. Eventually, the league had to come to an agreement to maintain expanded rosters of a maximum of 28 players, as well as to shorten doubleheaders to seven innings in length. The latter is tentatively planned to extend into 2021.
This all had a significant impact upon fantasy baseball. The team-wide outbreaks caused managers relying heavily upon Cardinals or Marlins players to scramble to find replacements, and in leagues with weekly transactions, it underscored the need to diversify your roster across multiple teams for so long as the virus remains a factor. The shortened doubleheaders cost fantasy managers some volume, not to mention it made it more difficult for pitchers to remain available as frequently. We'll get to the difficulty in filling your saves category a little later on, but relievers don't have nearly as great a likelihood of recording you multiple saves when they're playing a doubleheader today, both of which are seven-inning contests, and another game tomorrow.
As things stand, baseball appears likely to stick to the 26-man rosters they planned at the beginning of 2020, but abandoned after COVID-19 became more problematic. The universal designated hitter, which was used throughout 2020, is expected to revert to the 2019-and-before format, with the DH in American League but not the National League. The latter means that the NL will once again serve as the "pitchers' league," meaning you'd prefer to select an NL pitcher when all else is equal, while players like Dominic Smith and Jesse Winker will find it more difficult to find at-bats.
From a league-structure standpoint, the pandemic is one of the reasons to support larger benches or additional injured reserve spots. The last thing you'd want to see in your league is a team forced to release a star-caliber player simply because its manager needs that roster spot merely to fill that day's or week's lineup. The more flexibility you provide, the smoother and more enjoyable the experience.
Happy Fun Ball no more?
Major League Baseball saw a record number of home runs hit in 2019, with 6,776, then saw another 2,304 hit in 1,796 games in 2020, which is a pace of 6,235 over a typical 162-game season. These two seasons saw the greatest percentage of home runs per plate appearance hit (3.6% in 2019, 3.5% in 2020) in history.
The records, the increasing leaning towards a three-true-outcomes game and the inconsistency in the baseball's performance between the regular season and postseason has spawned a barrage of questions, chatter and speculation regarding the composition of those baseballs themselves. Some scientific studies attributed the rising home run rates of 2019 to decreasing drag on batted baseballs, while the committee of professors selected by MLB to study the effects concluded that seam height on the baseballs and "changes in player behavior," including shifts in their launch angles and exit velocities, also were significant, contributing factors. Some players firmly believed that the baseball was juiced, by direction of the league. And the effects weren't limited to only play at the major league level; these changes had a pronounced impact upon Triple-A ball, which adopted the same baseball as the major leagues in 2019 -- but there was no 2020 minor league season in which for us to gauge the effects year over year.
Whatever your opinion, there was a pronounced impact on fantasy baseball. In rotisserie terms, an individual home run in 2019 was 9.6% less valuable than it was in 2018, 2.2% less than in the previous record-setting 2017, and a whopping 28.2% less valuable than in the pitching-rich 2014 campaign. It was the least a home run was worth in any single year since 2001. Unfortunately, due to the shortened 2020 season, it's difficult to gauge the comparative worth of a home run due to the smaller final totals leading to larger Player Rater valuations for each individual home run. Still, as 53 players hit 11 home runs in 2020 -- the number required to pace for 30-plus over a full 162 game schedule -- which was only five fewer than actually got to the 30-homer threshold in 2019, it seems likely that 2020 would've challenged (but probably not exceeded) that honor for lowest valuation of an individual home run this century.
To use the most recent full season, and players' raw numbers in them to illustrate this effect, a 40-home run season by a hitter in 2019 was the rough equivalent of a 29-homer season in 2014. Essentially, Ronald Acuna Jr.'s 41 homers two years ago, accounting only for his performance in that category, was worth only a hair more than Lucas Duda's 30 homers hit in 2014.
The problem with this analysis, however, is that it's entirely reactionary, and that leads to the larger complication entering 2021: There is already a report out that MLB plans to change the makeup of the baseball itself, which could have a dramatic effect on home runs and offensive numbers. If you don't believe that to be fantasy-relevant, then you probably weren't following the 2019 postseason, during which questions were raised as to whether the baseball had changed then, as the home run rate dipped to 3.4%, and the average fly-ball depth dropped by 3 ½ feet, compared to the regular season.
It's fair to ask: Will the baseball put into play in 2021 resemble something closer to the one used in 2017, when the game saw its second-most homers in history (6,105), or could it revert to the levels we saw in 2014, when there was a lowest-of-the-decade 4,186 hit? The answer to this will have a huge bearing on our planning, but at this stage of the preseason we have yet to ascertain this answer.
Spring training, too, might not offer us many hints. The 2020 abbreviated spring, and Summer Camp, weren't large enough samples off which to draw conclusions. But when we last saw a full spring training, in 2019, the league's home run rate was 3.2%, only slightly elevated from the 3.0% 2018 regular-season rate, and that's with a large amount of those games played in Arizona, an extremely favorable environment for hitters.
A key strategy is to invest a good chunk of time in analyzing the new league trends during the opening weeks of the new season, seeking an edge before the rest of your fantasy league catches on to similar changes. Yes, that's too late to correct a draft inefficiency, but it's possible to correct things on the trade market if you notice an edge before your competition does. Hey, any small advantage helps.
As for how I'd handle the problem with the baseball, I'd probably project a league-wide total somewhere within range of 2017's number -- still a huge one compared to the extensive history that came before it -- but am willing to entertain the possibility that we might see totals closer to the 5,610 of 2018 or 5,585 of 2018. I wouldn't project the kind of shift we saw during the pitching blip period of 2013-14.
Any way you choose to react, I think one assumption is clear: Until we hear the details of a change in the baseball itself that's being used, we should assume that power hitters will again be in relative abundance. Without information pertaining to, or scientific studies calculating the effect on drag on a batted ball, it's wiser to temper your expectations on significant change.
Fortunately, you can rest somewhat on the saying, "A rising tide lifts all boats." Any baseball statistic, after all, is valued on a scale comparing it to your respective league's replacement level.
Closers by committee
Teams are increasingly shifting to closers-by-committee, non-contending teams have been trading away their high-priced, elite late-inning relievers, and with pitching workloads under greater scrutiny during the pandemic, the hunt for saves is sure to be as tough as ever in 2021.
The 2019 season saw only one pitcher reach the 40-save plateau, Kirby Yates (41), the fewest to record that many in any non-shortened season since 1989, and there were only 1,180 total saves across the league. In 2020, there were 422 saves, and if we prorate that to a 162-game schedule, that'd have meant only 1,142 total saves, or 38 fewer than in 2019. Only one pitcher saved as many as 15 games -- Brad Hand's 16 led the majors -- meaning that he was the only pitcher to pace for 40 saves over 162 games.
The Tampa Bay Rays, in 2020, matched a record with 12 different pitchers saving one game, and they did it in a 60-game campaign. Meanwhile, the Baltimore Orioles, Detroit Tigers, Los Angeles Angels, Minnesota Twins, New York Mets, St. Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants all used committees for a noticeable portion of the year.
Attachment to the save statistic has been dwindling the deeper we get into the 21st century, and sabermetrically inclined managers such as Rocco Baldelli (Twins), Kevin Cash (Rays), Craig Counsell (Milwaukee Brewers) and Gabe Kapler (San Francisco Giants) are still likely to mix and match as they close out ballgames. The three-batter minimum rule also did little to coax these managers to go with a single closer option.
That's why top closers are slightly more valuable today than they might have been at any point so far in the 21st century, something that might be awkward to read considering all the fantasy advice during that time to take a go-cheap approach to save-getting. Consider that Brad Hand's 32 saves of 2017 were worth slightly less than the seven saves recorded by Anthony Bass in 2020 -- that's a pace of 18.9 per 162 games. The smaller sample size influenced the value of Bass' saves, but it was also a sign that each save has become much more precious.
It's not that you can't fill saves on the cheap, but it's a dangerous thing to take a passive approach to your categorical strategy without bearing in mind the league trend.
Think about this: If you're of the belief that a committee-based league spreads its saves across a greater number of individual candidates, then the categorical production you're receiving from the pitchers in your active spots decreases in turn. And if your competition is getting a 40-save season from one spot where you're getting 20 from two, you're both meeting at the same number but your opponent has the advantage of that second roster spot free to fill with someone else.
'The opener'
When Sergio Romo took the mound to start the Rays' game on May 19, 2018, the decision made by Kevin Cash taking into account his injury-plagued rotation as well as the opposing Los Angeles Angels' depth in right-handed talent atop its lineup, few might've thought it would develop into the fad it did in the 12 competitive months (plus three more postseasons) that followed.
"The opener," the name for the strategy a team uses when it calls upon a traditional reliever to start a game, in an effort to exploit a particular early-game matchup or simply piece together an entire game with relievers, took significant steps forward in usage in each of 2019 and 2020. Using the criteria of only starting pitchers who worked two or fewer innings, there were a record 341 "openers," or 7.0% of all starts made, in 2019, and another 147, or 8.2% of all starts, in 2020. Clearly the advent of the three-batter minimum rule did nothing to curtail the use of openers in 2020.
While it's likely that starting pitchers on the whole should be afforded more leeway with pitch counts in 2021 compared to 2020 -- having an uninterrupted spring training would go a long way towards better preparing them for larger workloads from the start -- it's still probable that teams will closely monitor pitch counts, coming off an abbreviated season only 60 games in length. The opener is clearly not going away, between the trends of the past two seasons and league-wide workload concerns.
The invention of the opener has had a devastating impact on one aspect of fantasy baseball: It is killing the quality start, and it's not helping matters as far as the win category, either. In 2019, there were 1,794 quality starts, the fewest in any non-shortened season since 1967, a year in which there were only 20 big-league teams. That equated to quality starts in only 36.9% of all games. In 2020, only 29.0% of games resulted in a quality start, a shockingly low rate.
What's more, starting pitchers recorded only 52.2% of all wins last season, by far the smallest percentage in the game's history. The five lowest percentages, in fact, have all occurred in the past five seasons, and to put that into perspective, consider that in every year through 2017, at least two-thirds of all wins went to starting pitchers.
Remember: An "opener" cannot, by definition, earn a quality start, as that is earned by a starting pitcher who works at least six innings while allowing no greater than three earned runs, nor can he be awarded the win, as those cannot be granted to a starting pitcher who fails to complete the fifth inning.
Couple that with a 21st-century baseball development most of us have known for some time, that being the increasing pitching specialization leading to decreasing workloads for starting pitchers, and it's getting harder every year to address either of these categories. While it's difficult for leagues to react to this trend during a pandemic, this trend has absolutely reached the point where leagues that use wins or quality starts should have serious discussions among their ownership as to whether they should continue utilizing either category in its scoring.
Similar to the previous topic regarding saves, this development enhances the value of the players in the upper tiers, aces who typically provide the heftiest volume, the most stable skill sets and therefore the greatest odds at amassing wins and quality starts. A Gerrit Cole, Jacob deGrom, Shane Bieber or Trevor Bauer makes much more sense as a building block for a fantasy team now than, say, 10 or even three years ago.
Another drawback of the opener is that it depletes the pool of streaming-starter candidates, generally the back-of-rotation types who draw favorable single-start matchups. With an increasing number of those starts assigned to openers, there's less ability for fantasy teams to load up on them, chasing the wins or quality starts categories. That puts more emphasis on your draft-day strategy, even if slightly.
A final tip: Leave open a pitching spot for the long reliever, perhaps the "follower" to those openers, who is the most likely man to score the win due to his being the one who ultimately completes the fifth inning. In 2020, Jonathan Loaisiga (3 relief wins), Daniel Norris (3) and Tyler Alexander (2) were three of the pitchers most commonly used for lengthy relief outings, gaining greater chances of relief wins.
'Position scarcity'
If you're wondering the reason for the quotation marks, it's because of how overrated the concept of position scarcity has become in recent seasons.
While it was once true that middle infielders were more scarce in talent than the corner-infield spots or the outfield -- the 2010 Player Rater had Hanley Ramirez and Troy Tulowitzki among the top 22 before a steep drop to the next three shortstops at Nos. 75 (Jose Reyes), 94 (Alexei Ramirez) and 95 (Derek Jeter), and no other shortstops within the overall top 125. The current crop is considerably richer in talent than perhaps we've ever seen at those spots.
To illustrate, let's use Player Rater data, specifically the scores with which we grade each player, which do not weight for positional impact. In other words, 20 home runs from a catcher is worth every bit the same as 20 home runs from a third baseman. The following chart breaks down value accrued by players at each position in 2020, totaling Player Rater scores for all who qualified there.
"Starters' Earnings" is the total score by each of the top 10 catchers, top 15 at each infield position, top 50 outfielders, top 60 starting pitchers and top 30 relief pitchers. "Average Player" is the average, per-player score among those groups, "Positive Earners" are the total number of players with a positive score, and "Premium Players" are those who earned at least 7.50 (as only roughly 50-70 total players per year reach that threshold).
It should come as no surprise that catcher is the weakest position in fantasy baseball by far, something we'll get into in the next section.
It's the shortstops who stand out, and incidentally, this wasn't a one-year trend. Examining both the 2018 and 2019 Player Rater returns, shortstops also had the high marks with 8.28 and 8.15 per-player average scores and 21 total premium players in those two years. You'd have to go back to 2017 to find an example of shortstop being a scarce position, as it had the low mark in terms of per-player average that season, but even in that season, second base graded as one of the deepest in the game.
With such 25-and-under names as Fernando Tatis Jr., Bo Bichette, Adalberto Mondesi and Gleyber Torres, not to mention top-30-in-fantasy players (from 2020) Trea Turner, Trevor Story, Xander Bogaerts and Corey Seager included among the shortstop ranks, it's no surprise that this once-thin position has become one of the deeper ones around.
First base, by comparison, has rebounded somewhat compared to 2020 but is probably still as thin as it has ever been this century. Only 11 qualify for my top 100 overall, two of whom will play elsewhere in the field regularly this year (Cody Bellinger and DJ LeMahieu), and of those 11, seven will begin the season aged 30 or older and only Cody Bellinger and Vladimir Guerrero Jr., among those who look like true franchise chips, are aged 25 or younger. Another scary thought: Six of the 11 first basemen I ranked 11th through 21st at the position begin the 2020 season aged 30 or older.
While these positional trends have a way of fluctuating from year to year, not to mention that certain players fall into new eligibility and deepen the pool, the above data is compelling enough to eliminate any positional weight in your draft plans, at least in shallow mixed or ESPN standard leagues. Address shortstop just the same as you would the outfield or third base.
A tip to you dynasty-league managers: it's a good idea to think about your long-term plans at first base, considering the current talent pool and prospect ranks.
The catcher talent pool
Catcher continued to be one of the weakest positions in baseball, posting a sub-.310 wOBA for the third consecutive season in 2020. Catchers collectively batted .232/.312/.394, and while second base actually brought up the rear in terms of wOBA in 2020 (.303 to catcher's .308), it's clear that the catcher position has taken over the helm as fantasy baseball's thinnest position from a year-over-year perspective.
Where the "position scarcity" argument weighs thin, at least in shallow mixed, ESPN standard or one-catcher leagues, is that the advantage of paying a premium for a top backstop is mitigated by the limited volume that even the best catchers commonly provide. To put it again into Player Rater terms, last year's No. 1 catcher, J.T. Realmuto, finished with a lower valuation than the No. 10 shortstop (Dylan Moore), the No. 21 outfielder (Kyle Lewis) and the No. 10 relief pitcher (Devin Williams).
That wasn't a one-year development, either: Realmuto's No. 75 overall Player Rater finish was the best finish by any catcher-eligible player since Buster Posey finished 47th in 2015. The No. 1 catcher, on average, finished 105th during the past four seasons, which isn't nearly enough of a return to warrant pushing the top backstop in the draft into the top 40 overall, at least not in shallow mixed or one-catcher leagues. Another way to look at it: Only one catcher -- Gary Sanchez in 2017 -- totaled at least 30 home runs and 90 RBIs between 2017-19, while during that same time span there were 125 such instances at the other positions.
That's not to say that a relatively early -- perhaps borderline top-50 overall, or top-35 in a two-catcher or 12-plus-team league -- pick is completely foolish for a catcher like Realmuto, who brings both polished offensive skills and among the highest likelihood of regular at-bats at the position. There's an "avoidance of a negative earner" angle to bear in mind at catcher. Still, in the past three seasons, 10 of the 24 catchers selected 7th through 12th at the position on average brought positive earnings, and an additional 34 undrafted players also did so, strengthening the positional free-agent pool.
That certainly supports a wait-on-catchers strategy in 10-team standard ESPN (and most any one-catcher) leagues.
We're now through 7 innings of the Playbook. Hopefully you've enjoyed yourself a stretch, and perhaps hummed "Take Me Out To The Ball Game." In Inning 8, we'll get into how to use advanced stats to get ahead.