Fantasy Baseball 2015

[Locke Lamora]

/in for both again. Glad draft season is approaching!

[Locke Lamora]

What's a 'real' reliever? Is it possible for Yahoo to track whether the player in the RP slot actually pitched in relief? I like the idea of making it more difficult to punt but if a player who's a starter at the beginning of the year ends up being a great reliever, or they bounce back and forth, are they allowed to be used or not? If their eligibility changes, can we cover that on the site, or do we need to police it ourselves? In the latter case, I'm not sure it's worth it as it adds an extra level of complexity for everyone.

[Locke Lamora]

So is it then ok if that player with RP eligibility only is moved to the rotation? What if they're already a starter but haven't made enough starts to have SP eligibility? I'm aware that this might not come up very often but we don't want to be in a situation where people aren't sure if they can start players, or that they win/lose based on an accidental rule violation.

I'm not actually sure punting was clearly the better strategy last year either. I was definitely using a few real relievers down the stretch and it won me some close matchups. Statistically it might work out as the optimal strategy, but the more extreme it gets in the league, the easier it is to get a free point for yourself every week which often actually ends up counting.

[Locke Lamora]

I like K/9 as a stat so I'd be fine with swapping that in. I think that might sway the balance enough that it's not ideal to punt, with the number of relievers who just have a ludicrous strikeout rate.

[Locke Lamora]

I think that negates the point of adding K/9. If the problem is that people can punt too easily by ignoring saves/holds because relievers don't contribute enough in other categories, keeping regular strikeouts and adding another hitting category just waters down any impact K/9 might have.

[Locke Lamora]

It's not, no. Zoraster will have to change it. We normally end up doing mid-March or so but there'll be a poll.

[Locke Lamora]

Weird. I'll see if it lets me do anything when I get home.

[Locke Lamora]

Unfortunately I'm probably going to have to autodraft for the H2H. I'll sort out my keepers shortly.

[Locke Lamora]

That weekend was only easy on Friday and Saturday, unfortunately! I wasn't entirely sure about some plans and I honestly don't remember what I put on the Sunday night, but I found out a couple of days ago that I will now be driving then. If there is another time that's better for everyone else then don't worry about me - I only had those two nights that I could do late so I know it's almost impossible otherwise.

[Locke Lamora]

You can preset your player values just like you can pre-rank your players for a snake draft, so I'd recommend doing that to at least make sure it bids on guys you want. I'm not sure of the exact system as it has always seemed a little bit arbitrary when I've been in auctions with auto-drafters before, but although it can exceed the pre-set value by a little, it'll stop pretty quickly. I think the CPU will just nominate whoever you have as the highest value on your list at a position you need to fill, so for at least the first few rounds of nominations it'll just be any position. While there are ways to at least mitigate the effects for a snake draft (and perhaps more so in football than baseball), it's really very difficult to do it well for auction, especially in terms of getting the balance right, although knowing your keepers helps a bit. I guess you could just force everyone you don't really want to zero dollars but you'd have to be pretty thorough to make sure you don't just get drafted garbage if you run out of players. It's also super-annoying when you're there to deal with an auto-draft bidder so really everyone loses. I might test some things in a mock draft now as I'm curious.

Edit: I've just seen that you can exclude players now from auction drafts so that might help in some scenarios.

[Locke Lamora]

Bert: anyone not on the list was not drafted at the start of the season. I don't know whether zoraster would let you pick someone who wasn't on anyone's roster at the end of the season, as we weren't able to keep them either, but you wouldn't be able to see who was and who wasn't from there. You might be able to see it on the league history from last year. You're also not adding $3 on to the prices zoraster listed - those are already last year's prices plus 5. Take two off to get yours.

Agar: excluding players works fine in the mock drafts I've tested. Don't expect the system to pay any attention if you significantly bump up a player's price, though - I tried forcing it to buy Trout by putting his value at $100 and it didn't work. There seems to be some kind of cap around the projected value. It will, however, never exceed a max value, and often won't bid up even if a price is within one or two dollars of your max.

DGB not having keepers is intentional, correct?

I don't think it's a mistake on zoraster's part, if that's what you mean.

[Locke Lamora]

Unless there's something weird on Yahoo, the draft looks like it's at 3PM EST, not 2. I have it listed at 8PM GMT and the countdown timer definitely just went under 10 hours, so it's going to be 2 Central and 3 Eastern unless we change it.

[Locke Lamora]

Presumably, unless she forgot, but there were plenty of reminders.

[Locke Lamora]

Some of the math is wrong I think:

Lamora has $1 less than is listed
I have $22 less than is listed
Agar has $14 less than is listed

Have some of these been updated? Yours and mine match what I calculated but by my calculations, Agar should have 165 left, not 151. Is there some confusion over Gordon? It is Dee, right? And yes, Bert ought to have 237 too.

[Locke Lamora]

AGar, I think you should send a complaint email to Yahoo and ask them to send you that $116 as compensation.

[Locke Lamora]

I should have José Quintana on my team as well.

Regarding this, I accidentally ended up with Quintana after just one of many temporary blips in the Yahoo system that dropped my connection. We can get him on your team if you decide who to drop and I'll replace him with someone else.

[Locke Lamora]

Ok, I've added Quintana to your team and Boxberger to my own to fill the empty spot.

[Locke Lamora]

Division draft sounds great. Are you doing a Hangout for tonight's? I should be able to join.

[Locke Lamora]

What do you want for him?

[Locke Lamora]

I would say 800 since that's 5 x 160. I assume 850 was a mistake.

[Locke Lamora]

Entirely up to you. I wouldn't pay attention to what other people are doing, just what the limits say. This league is a little unusual (for me) in that the limit is actually slightly fewer than the total games in a season, but hardly anyone plays 162 games anyway.

[Locke Lamora]

The question you really have to ask is whether that's any different from sitting out the first week of the season so you can have the opportunity to watch your counting stats move up from the bottom. Psychologically you might find it more distressing to watch yourself drop a couple of points over the last few days when you have a number of positions you can't use any more, but it's kind of irrelevant in practical terms unless you have a reason to think you should be saving those starts for certain days or players.

[Locke Lamora]

Yeah, that really shouldn't be possible. We definitely have it set to not include the players until they're called up because I remember the likes of Correa not being available when the announcement was made.

[Locke Lamora]

Yeah, in Auction it's just whenever they're added so that would happen. I've done some Googling and as far as I can gather, the setting means that they are put in the game if Yahoo is notified the player is on the active roster. This can mean that players are, for whatever reason, listed on the active roster before the season starts and then sent down, so they are never on the MLB team during the season but they still count. I think - and I could be wrong because I haven't gone through everyone, obviously - that there are players who somehow make their way onto the active roster during spring training in a purely procedural sense and then have to be optioned to the minors during the spring to make room for whoever's going to be on the Opening Day squad. Jorge Alfaro, who got optioned the day after Matz is also in the game, for example. Yahoo must just get these active roster lists and add the players that early regardless of whether they're actually going to be on the team on Opening Day.

[Locke Lamora]

A magician never reveals his secrets.

[Locke Lamora]

This week lasts until the end of next week. They never do a short week after the All-Star break as far as I can remember, it always extends to 10 days.

[Locke Lamora]

Yeah, the schedules can be a little unbalanced. It's hard with the length of the baseball season and this number of teams.

Nero, I have to ask - why do you always bench everyone who has a day off? Your lineups look so weird with all these empty slots.

[Locke Lamora]

You know you can still sweep, right?

[Locke Lamora]

Yeah, really close one, great matchup! Got lucky with a nice Sunday.

[Locke Lamora]

It's going to be such a shame when zoraster has to retire from fantasy baseball. I'll have to do all the organisation.

[Locke Lamora]

Yeah, he decreed that you have to retire if you lose to him in the playoffs. I'm not sure it's going to stand up in court, though.

[Locke Lamora]

That is pretty incredible. He had a bit of an out-of-division disaster down the stretch. Losing to Monkey is just bad luck when he hasn't set his lineup all year. A lot of weeks he hasn't even hit 30 IP so it's been virtually an auto-win.

[Locke Lamora]

I borrow it from Tally, then give it back for the rest of the NFL season.

[Locke Lamora]

I was actually kind of annoyed by Greinke. I need him in another league. Had some nice matchups and a bit of luck so far.

[Locke Lamora]

If you're a Greinke owner this year, you don't really get to use the word problem in the same sentence as his name. I just realised it sounded like I was talking about his matchups and luck, when I meant my H2H team (although Greinke obviously has had good luck too).

[Locke Lamora]

Yeah, good matchup. Lackey stopped it from being too nervy yesterday. A bad start would have made it very close.

And apparently so. We'll see if it holds another week against the Destroyer of Anix's Dreams.

[Locke Lamora]

Congrats Bert! Up until Seager homered it was a great night for me and then I think my team went 0-for-15 or so. There was a moment when it looked as though Familia and Hudson were going to explode your ERA but that was the last chance. Good call to go light on the pitching, worked nicely.

And yeah, roto was nice and relaxing for me in the end, which didn't look as though it would be the case a few weeks ago. I had another league in which I came into the day with a half-point lead and was a couple of runs or steals from losing that.

Hope to see you all again next year!