Inside The Ranking of Fantasy Baseball Players

To some, it must seem like I sit behind a crystal ball every evening, muttering some strange incantations en route to delivering updated seasonal projections and rankings for each player throughout the year. To others, the process isn’t quite arcane, but the details are still somewhat blurry leaving you with many questions. While still keeping my really special trade secrets hidden, this post aims to unveil the inner workings of the Player Rankings tool to make sure you understand what you’re seeing, have an idea how it works, and most importantly, can use it to your fullest advantage

The Case For Drafting Mark Reynolds in 2011…

Before you start with the strikeout jokes and draw a Mendoza line above Reynolds’ name, hear me out. This is a guy coming off a 79/32/85/7/.198 season, and yet I think he will be a top 60 player in 2011. ESPN has him ranked at 151 (105th for hitters) and projected to put up a line of 86/29/88/10/.228—which would actually make him the 83rd best hitter according to FST rankings, but as we’ve already established, those ESPN guys don’t really know what they’re doing.

Thievin Fantasy Baseball Draft Strategies!

99% of the people who play fantasy sports, will follow the auction prices given by either Yahoo or ESPN. Don’t get me wrong, they might add a couple dollars here and there to gain a sense of ownership over their actions, but in the end they won’t stray far from the line. Interestingly enough, there’s a huge disparity between the auction values Yahoo provides and those ESPN provides, yet the format is largely the same. Let’s take a look at the different systems, and I’ll point out the places you should look the take advantage most in your upcoming draft.

The Best Fantasy Basketball Team in 14 Years…

Some fourteen years ago I graduated from high school. For some reason, my time spent watching the NBA seemed overly nostalgic yesterday so I decided to delve into the numbers and see how good of a fantasy season the top ranked players had that year, 1997. From there, I got carried away looking at the numbers of the top ranked players for every season since, finally settling on: The Best Fantasy Basketball Team in 14 Years. Check it out.

Do Not Base Your Fantasy Baseball Draft on Position Scarcity!!

It seems to be all the rage this season, everybody and their butthole brother keeps talking about position scarcity. I’m reading post after post about how shallow Shortstop is this season “so you better get one of the top two cause after that you’re hurtin”. Give me a break would ya? The fact of the matter is, just like player stats mean revert throughout the season, player positions mean revert from season to season. In other words, the risk isn’t that you’ll miss out on grabbing a good shortstop this season as much as it is that your stud player from a deep position will fall from grace. Here, I’ll prove it…

Take Control of Your Fantasy Baseball Rankings

You want to know who I can’t stand? The person who tells me Player So&So is going to have a great season and thus they are targeting him really high in this year’s draft. But then when asked: “why will they do better and how does that compare to others”, they draw a blank. They completely shut down and leave it with ‘I dunno, he’ll just be good’. A-n-y-o-n-e can make that statement, because it’s just a statement. Let’s talk about numbers, let’s talk about what sources you can use to help determine where you’d like to project a player. Then let’s talk about The Thief’s awesome player ranking system that let’s you enter this projection, and see how it compares against the rest of the league.

Fantasy Basketball Keeper Values

As we near towards the end of the season and particularly with the trade deadline ever closer, it’s time to start thinking about who are keepers will be. This decision shouldn’t focus on where a player is ranked relative to his peers per se, but more on how much the player will cost you to keep versus what he’ll fetch in next year’s draft. So, as usual, I created a tool to give us an idea of what each player will cost in next year’s draft based on where they sit right now.

Capitalizing On Their Mistakes Pt. 3: Auction Pricing

How much are you willing to pay for Albert Pujols in your upcoming fantasy baseball draft? More importantly, how much are your opponents willing to pay for him? And what of keepers, how can you know if the price you paid for a player makes him a valuable keeper or not? This post aims to point [...]

Capitalizing On Their Mistakes Pt. 2: Per Game Stats

In yesterday’s post I showed you how one of the most famous and followed fantasy sports columnists was willfully misleading his readers with regards to player ranks. Today, I’m going to go one step further and show you how the largest sports outfits in the galaxy are willfully misleading followers with respect to player ranks. Again, the goal here is to alert you to these mistakes so you can avoid them and at the same time capitalize on those who don’t.

Capitalizing On Their Mistakes Pt. 1: Position Scarcity

With the 2011 Fantasy Baseball season just around the corner, I thought this an opportune time to discuss some drafting pointers that are applicable to all fantasy sports. Specifically, I’m going to break down three of the most common mistakes perpetuated by other websites that give draft day advice. My goal is to get you to avoid making these errors, and instead capitalize on those who do.

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