Bryce Harper – The Fantasy Sports Coach

Fantasy Baseball Auction Draft
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Fantasy Baseball Auction Draft

Fantasy Baseball

Fantasy Baseball Auction Draft

Swag-Diamond Fantasy Baseball Auction Draft Recap and Analysis

7- Edwin Encarnacion, Tor 1B $41 Encarnacion was one of my main targets in this auction. Starting only 3 Outfielders and adding a Corner-Infielder spot makes Encarnacion a nice option instead of blowing your entire budget on Mike Trout ($57) or Andrew McCutchen (who went to @naapsterman for only $45). I was in on McCutchen, but once it went to 45 I backed off. Encarnacion ended up going for the same as Chris Davis and $5 dollars cheaper than Paul Goldschmidt.

15- Troy Tulowitzki, Col SS $31 Obviously I am gambling on health with Tulowitzki, but who aren’t you gambling with health when it comes to the top Short Stops. Hanley Ramirez ($38) isn’t exactly Super Man and Jose Reyes (only $19 to Ryan Forbes who had a great auction) is, well Jose Reyes. I had Tulow as a $30 player so one extra wasn’t a huge deal.

45 Jose Bautista, Tor OF $24 Bautista was my biggest target in this auction. In 5 x 5 with OB% instead of BA% he can be huge. I was hoping to get him for $22 and went to $24 which was one below my $25 dollar rating.

54 Justin Upton, Atl OF $7 All I can say is everyone fell asleep on this one. I only threw out a $7 bid because there didn’t look to be to much action and I didn’t exactly want him, but I wouldn’t mind making someone else pay for him. By getting him for only $7 dollars it opened me up to spend a little more at other spots.

57 Justin Verlander, Det SP $21 Verlander was my #4 Starting Pitcher before the injuries to Darvish and Kershaw and now he is a much tighter 3B. His price was scoffed at a bit, but then Strasburg went for $33 and Scherzer, Wainwright and Sale all went for $26, Verlander’s price didn’t look all that bad.

89 Mike Moustakas, KC 3B $9 Oh boy did I get caught with my hand in the cookie jar on this one. I was hoping some of my fellow owners would be bidding him up on the account of his strong spring and of course when I thought someone would go to $10 they stuck me with him for $9. Moustakas was a $5 player in my ratings and I almost doubled that up.

90 Wilin Rosario, Col C $19 Rosario is a target of mine everywhere. I overpaid for him here, but when I looked at the Catchers that were available after he was put up, there was no one that could come close to what he brings. He ended up costing the same as Joe Mauer and was 6 and 5 dollars less than Santana and Posey, respectively.

94 Jered Weaver, LAA SP $12 Another one where I got caught bidding up. I was hoping some people would be desperate for starting pitching and paying for past performance, but $12 was not a bad price for Weaver. FantasyPros actually has him rated for $12 and I have him as a $10 SP in Mixed Leagues so I’m not too upset.

104 J.J. Hardy, Bal SS $9 I needed a middle infielder with some pop and Hardy was the guy. His BA% doesn’t matter here and his counting numbers are nice for the MI spot. I still over paid (by at least 3-4 dollars) in a mixed league setting, but I didn’t like what was left on the board.

126 Alex Gordon, KC OF $12 Huge OB% advantage and I get him at a discount?! I don’t know why people are sleeping on Gordon this year, but I’m not concerned as I picked him up everywhere. I got a $8 discount according to FantasyPros and he was $8 cheaper than Hunter Pence who is a very similar player.

143 Trevor Rosenthal, StL RP $16 We need to start two relief pitchers and Rosenthal was the last of my upper-tier closers left. I spent a little more than I wanted (I have him at $12) but I had extra money to spend.

146 R.A. Dickey, Tor SP $6 R.A. could be one of those injury bounce back players, but I only wanted him at the right price with his high WHIP so $6 was perfect.

147 Pablo Sandoval, SF 3B $8 Moustakas was not going to be the thirdbaseman I was going to bank on and Sandoval was a nice back-up/starter plan for around the same price. I wanted to only spend $7 on him, but $8 wasn’t out of the question.

165 Andrew Cashner, SD SP $8 Cashner was a big target for me. (no pun intended with his height) With Wins not being a category Cashner is equal to a lot of the bigger name pitchers available and he can always work on getting his K-rate up.

166 Sergio Romo, SF RP $6 Not bad for my 2nd RP. I had Romo as an $8 closer and again I get some value. He’s in my top ten so there’s that as well.

183 Christian Yelich, Mia OF $3 Yelich is a player who i hope gets off to a fast start. He’s a bit of a post-hype sleeper because he was last year’s version of George Springer. A guy with power and speed who could be a huge fantasy player in the future. I’m not confident that future is now, but if he starts fast the $3 investment could pay dividends in a trade.

196 Danny Salazar, Cle SP $8 Salazar was a must because I needed to add K’s after getting Weaver and Cashner. Salazar has top of the rotation strike-out stuff, but I think people are over-paying in redraft leagues. $8 is not bad and is actually below where i had him rated.

200 Austin Jackson, Det OF $4 Huge discount alert. Some people were running out of money and I picked up a steal in Jackson at $4. FantasyPros has him rated at $16 and I have him just below that at $15. So excited about this buy.

203 Clay Buchholz, Bos SP $3 With a DL spot available he is definitely worth the gamble. When healthy he is top of the rotation stuff and when he’s hurt he’s on the DL. I recently heard Eno Sarris say the very same thing and it’s always good to have someone reassure you. Cueto went for $6 and he’s the same injury gamble. Great when healthy and when he’s hurt you DL him.

209 Marco Estrada, Mil SP $3 I really like the Strike out upside and I didn’t want to overpay for him in a room of experts. $3 was perfect for me as I had him rated as a $6 SP.

213 Brian Dozier, Min 2B $5 Bit of an overpay here, but I needed him because I had missed out out Gyorko to TraderX for $16. I couldn’t go that high and now Dozier was my position punt. Not that bad a punt though with his ability to go 20/15.

222 Adam Eaton, CWS OF $3 This late in the auction strategy came to the forefront. I knew some of my other friends in the league wanted Eaton and their max bid left was $3, so I threw out an opening bid of $3 dollars on an outfielder that people want and they were stuck letting him go to me. If he doesn’t end up in my starters maybe I can package him for a new 2B option.

256 Taijuan Walker*, Sea SP $2 I had $2 left and I had a DL spot to use so Taijuan Walker was a nice lottery ticket to get this late. I would much rather have him sitting on my DL then spend $2 on Danny Haren or any other former decent fantasy pitcher.

The Worst Over Pays

Ben Zobrist for $25 – that was just crazy because his number have been declining for the last few years and you can’t pay a premium just on flexibility.

Yu Darvish for $36 – It’s never a good strategy to over pay for a stud Starting Pitcher and this case was no different. His neck issues aside this was at least $8 too much for me.

Billy Hamilton for $21 – I know the hype train is in full effect, but this is still a ONE-Category guy that should not be going in the same price range as Matt Holiday or Alex Rios.

Bryce Harper and Steven Strasburg for a combine $72 – I don’t mean to pick on my good buddy Ricky Sanders here, but these were two overpays for me. Sometimes you get caught up in the auction with your eyes focused on your targets and you blow your budget because of it. It caught up to him at the end of the draft as his depth took a hit.

The Best Buys

Nolan Arenado for $1 – One dollar price tag was a little soul crushing for me as I paid a combined $17 for Panda and Moustakas. I really like Arenado this year and I would have been a lot happier if I went Panda and Arenado and saved the Moustakas money to get Gyorko at 2B.

Austin Jackson for $4 – This guy score a ton of runs and he will steal bases. His OB% is not ideal for an OB% league, but he is still worth at least 4x the cost. I won’t even count the Upton buy because there was a lot of chatter in the message box when that was going on. Distracted everyone.

Hisashi Iwakuma for $8 – Renee Miller picked up a nice injury steal here by getting the excellent Iwakuma for below market value. I have Iwakuma as a $15 pitcher and would have loved to get him, but Renee made a great buy.

Aroldis Chapman for $5 – This was a really smart buy considering he will still pitch for at least 17 weeks of the season. He cost the same as Booby Parnell who could lose his job the first month of the season.

Waiver Wire Pick Ups: Trade Pieces or Trash?

When going through a long season of fantasy baseball you inevitably will receive bad trade offers. Some trade offers are more offensive than others. None more so than when someone offers you a recent waiver wire pickup as a key piece in a trade. There are exceptions to this rule (big time prospects like Yasiel Puig and Wil Myers, or guys who were prematurely dropped such as Jason Heyward or Josh Hamilton), but most of the time you will be offered names like Jedd Lowrie and James Loney. (Sigh!)

I feel like sites should have built-in controls where GMs can’t offer waiver pick ups with out a two week waiting period. Maybe a little disclaimer next to the players name that says he was picked up on this date. Like a freshness label on a bottle of beer. It would be like a little scarlet letter that would eventually wear off after certain amount of time. This would relieve a lot of aggravation as well as help inexperienced GMs save a little face.

While two weeks might be a nice start, the real waiting period for seeing if a waiver pick up is truly a trade asset is right around six weeks. The six week sample size is enough to weed out the occasional hot stretch for a veteran hitter and soft schedule for a pitcher. For example Vernon Wells started out on fire (.300 6 HR and .910 OPS in April) and was widely picked up in 12 and 14 team leagues after week 2. He has since gone back to his late career ways (hitting around .230 and popping out constantly) and can be seen on your local waiver wires. While experienced fantasy baseball players knew this was just a streaking player other GMs actually tried to capitalize on his hot start and offer him in trades around their leagues.

The subsequent message board and social media ridicule after a bad trade is offered should be enough to discourage naive GMs, but some seem to be immune to these tactics. They plug away week after week picking up the Jhoulys Chacins and Ricky Nolascos of the fantasy baseball world and think they can turn them into Cole Hamels and Doug Fisters through trades. God bless their tiny little brains and their efforts, but something has to be done.

I try to chalk it up to naivete or ignorance, but stupidity shouldn’t be ruled out. The topper of these bad offers was recently brought up during a Twitter conversation with @fantasytrade411, when he was venting about a GM actually offering him someone he had just dropped! I can’t say this has ever happened to me, but if I did receive an offer for one of my cast offs a day after dropping him my eyebrows may jump clear off my forehead.

Even with prized prospects I don’t generally offer them in trades until they have played at least a few weeks in the bigs. I don’t want to burn any bridges with other GMs if the prospect doesn’t at least stay in the bigs for an extended showing. Plus I would rather know if I am in possession of a stud before I sell a player. With rookies the six week waiting period would be ideal. You need four to six weeks to see if the league makes adjustments to the player or if the player is able to make adjustments to the league. (Didi Gregorius a perfect example) Jackie Bradley Jr. had many GMs jumping the gun when he got off to a fast start with the Red Sox in April after he surprisingly made the big club out of spring training. If you were unlucky enough to trade for him, chalk it up to a lesson learned.

You can never sell too high for a recent call up, and Puig is a perfect example. His value couldn’t be higher right now and selling is a must. I recently made a trade that netted me Chris Davis, Desmond Jennings, Cole Hamels, and Chris Sale. My side of the trade was centered around Puig, and included Kyle Seager, Patrick Corbin, the versatile Todd Frazier, and Justin Masterson. While my haul may seem a little one sided, it is not the most I have seen traded for the Cuban phenom. I have seen dinged up stars such as Bryce Harper, Matt Kemp, and even Roto golden boy Ryan Braun sent packing for Puig. While all of these scenarios are slightly ludicrous and reactionary, you can see the value people see in Puig’s unique talents.

Veterans picked up off the waiver wire are a completely different story. Most GMs like myself will pick up and ride a streaking player, but never think about trading him because the value just wouldn’t be there. It takes a few months of a veteran playing well above his career numbers before he attains any trade value. James Loney, Jedd Lowrie, and Michael Young have all had some hot stretches, but you wouldn’t see me trying to trade for any of them. I might lose my mind completely if I get offered Matt Joyce for Jason Heyward again in my deep league.

(I need at least another month of Heyward struggles before I entertain that one.)

If I offered another GM the hot hitting Adam Lind in a trade right now, what would he be worth? He’s 29 and has hit 35 homers in a season before, but he has always been unable to consistently hit lefties. He most likely won’t be able to touch his 2009 numbers again in his career. Even though he is hitting .350 and will hit over 25 homers he would barely fetch me a light hitting Eric Hosmer in a trade right now.

The real swings in trade value come when former top prospects seem to turn a corner. They can go from waiver wire riders to trade untouchables in less than half a season. Carlos Gomez and Chris Davis flipped the switch last year, and Dominic Brown seems to have unleashed his full potential this year. Just a few weeks into the season Brown could be seen on the waiver wire, but with his unbelievable May you would be lucky to get him in a trade for Jay Bruce. Could you imagine those words being said on draft day? “I’ll trade you Jay Bruce for Dominic Brown.”

I can’t wait to see what Wil Myers will command in a trade if he goes deep in his first game with the Rays. Without even taking a swing I can already see GMs trading Rios or Cruz for him. If he gets off to a fast start it could be Beltran or Holiday. And if he even comes close to Puig’s start the sky is the limit.

Don’t Set It and Forget It

Fantasy baseball is not a “set it and forget it” endeavor. You don’t draft a team and send it out into the world without having to constantly tinker with it. You may have three different players play second base for you in any given month while also having a different frontline starter based on that particular week’s matchups. If we listed all the closers that will inevitably be jumping in and out of our rosters we could be here all day.

Setting your lineup is a lot like playing the stock market. You can only ignore the trends for so long until you miss the boat. Whether it be buying, selling, dropping or picking up players, you have to look at all the available information in a timely manner. Being aware of the vital statistics can make a stock or a free agent a must buy or a player on your roster an instant drop.

Sometimes a player is just getting extremely lucky and his statistics are heading for a correction. I am trying to avoid stepping into these bear-traps, but it can be difficult to differentiate between luck and player turning a corner. You may get burned by not checking his BAPIP (batting average on balls in play) or his FB/GB statistics. Luckily, there are so many resources for today’s fantasy GM’s that weren’t available just a few years ago. I can go to a multitude of sites to see all the vital statistics and more while even the free apps from sites like Yahoo break down the basic statistics over time periods. I can notice a player is hot while watching a series on TV, check my phone and see he is hitting .350 this month and then go to any site to see if his power is coming as well.

Too many GM’s treat their lineups like they are mutual funds or pensions. They buy in and either through laziness or ineptitude let them twist in the wind. While they spend their nights catching up on Breaking Bad and old reruns of South Park (Editor’s Note: there is nothing wrong with watching either of these shows), their lineups go through ups and downs not seen since Enron. You offer them a trade and they literally have to check the site to see who is on their roster.

I, on the other hand, tend to be overly attentive, almost to the detriment of my free time (hmmm, maybe that is why I’m only on Season 2 of Breaking Bad). I tend to tinker constantly as I check my lineups key statistics and try and maximize every week in my head to head league. I read every article possible on would-be call-ups so that I can try to solve some of my team’s issues without trying to trade. If I am lagging early in the week in stolen bases I will put Starling Marte or Brett Gardner into my lineup. If I am behind in runs scored, then Matt Carpenter will start at almost any position. Power is tougher to find coming off the bench, but I may have just recently found a few gems.

The fact that my league is position specific for outfield has been a real challenge. Right field has been considerably shallow and I have been forced to play Carpenter or Adrian Gonzalez there while I have Corey Hart stashed on the DL. If I played Gonzalez in RF, then I suffer at first base, and vice-versa. Then along came a Cuban defector named Yasiel Puig. You may have heard of him. He has exploded on the scene and solidified my line-up with his power and speed.

I know what you’re saying – hold your horses buddy. It’s okay to get excited, but let’s not pretend he’s the second coming. But what if he is the next Mike Trout or Bryce Harper? It would be like adding a top 10 pick in the middle of the season for nothing. How can you not get over-excited? I know I am having trouble tempering my excitement and evaluating his current worth.

He could be a blip on the screen of my season or he could be guy to put me over the top. We will all have to wait and see. Many of my colleagues have been saying to sell high as we have all seen players do this before only to crash back down to earth, or worse, to the minors. I even polled a few fantasy gurus to see what Puig was being traded for and names like Bryce Harper and Giancarlo Stanton were mentioned. I would jump at the chance to acquire any of those guys, but that is not what is being offered to me at this point. On the other hand, I am playing the wait and see game. I am doing the old “I came with nothing and I’ll leave with nothing if God will’s it.” I just don’t know if I can live with trading him for a marginal player if he goes on to play at even half of what he is currently showing.

There is a ton of risk with what I am doing as the Dodgers looked to have a full outfield with Carl Crawford, Matt Kemp, and Andre Ethier when the year began. Crawford and Kemp are currently on the DL, and Ethier has struggled for most of the season including getting benched before Puig was called up. I am banking on Puig making it impossible to send him back down with his play on the field. He was signed to a huge free agent contract so he is not one of these rookies whose service time is an issue and he has been setting records with every base hit. He is electrifying a fan base that needed to wake up and probably hasn’t been this excited about a player since Fernandomania was running wild 30 years ago. He also has gone from batting leadoff to batting fourth after only a week. He has already arguably shown more potential in one week in the big leagues then Ethier has in seven years with the Dodgers.

Puig is not the only streaking player who has joined my team recently. Adam Lind’s current form couldn’t be ignored as he hit over .400 over the last month and is even forcing his way into the lineup against lefties. When the Blue Jays were forced to give up the DH in National League parks they decided to play Edwin Encarnacion at third base so that they could play Lind at first base to keep his hot bat in the lineup. I know he probably won’t stay hot for long, but if I can get a productive month out of him then I am ahead of the game. If there was a timeline for my lineup at first base it would read Gonzalez-Carpenter-Loney-and now Lind. It might not be as easy as drafting Prince Fielder and trotting him out week after week, but if I end up winning the title it will be that much sweeter with all the hard work I put in.

This article originally was featured at www.FantasyJudgment.com