Baseball Draft Kit: Overcoming Dynasty League Misconceptions

In dynasty leagues, like in life, we attempt to make our decisions based on a combined set of facts and assumptions that hold our views together. While redrafters have a more narrow focus, dynasty leagues provide the opportunity to challenge convention, get ahead on trends and build a winning team in many different ways. It's like going from two dimensions to three. But with the additional opportunities come additional challenges, and it can be difficult to reset your brain to keep up with every aspect of a changing game.

By letting go of these 10 misconceptions, you will increase your chance of success in long-term formats.

AGE MATTERS WHEN EVALUATING PITCHERS
CASE >>Luis Severino

I'll qualify this one a little by saying that it does matter, just not as much as you think. When laying out dynasty-league rankings of starting pitchers, you're going to come across a whole bunch of lists that put guys like Severino (or Walker Buehler or Jose Berrios) ahead of the very best pitchers on the planet. It's not that these guys are bums, but the shelf life of a high-end starting pitcher is notably shorter than the shelf life of a high-end hitter, and it hasn't shaken all the way out in valuations yet. Give me Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer and Corey Kluber over these guys and I'll take the bet that the difference in short-term performance will wash over any potential longevity risk. These are pitchers, after all.

"FOR A MIDDLE INFIELDER"
CASE >>Jurickson Profar
Positional adjustments have always been a part of fantasy baseball, and they've always been overstated. However, the explosion of offensive-minded middle infielders has stripped them out entirely in mixed leagues. Let's use a 15-team iteration as an example and test the depth. Before getting to your utility spot(s), a standard league will have 45 corner infielders, 45 middle infielders and 75 outfielders rostered. Here's who the last players in those starter groups were last year:

CORNER: Justin Smoak(.242, 67 R, 25 HR, 77 RBI, 0 SB)
MIDDLE: Niko Goodrum(.245, 55 R, 16 HR, 53 RBI, 12 SB)
OUTFIELD: Trey Mancini(.242, 69 R, 24 HR, 58 RBI, 0 SB)

Perhaps we should start calling Mancini not too bad for an outfielder? Profar is a great example of where the rubber meets the road, because on the surface his stats historically would have made him a top-20 middle infielder, yet with the explosion at the position, he barely cracked the top-30. So while he's still a good fantasy hitter, it's not the eligibility that gets him there.

ELITE OFFENSIVE PROSPECTS NEED TO BE WELL-ROUNDED
CASE >> Peter Alonso
We can all imagine the prototypical high-end prospect. He's super athletic and dripping with tools. He can steal 30 bases if he wants to and he's got the potential to tap into plus raw power. It's easier for us to imagine the different routes to fantasy stardom. When it comes to a prospect with 40-homer power and almost nothing else, it's easier to imagine the ways it can go wrong. Yet for a player like Alonso, who is right on the cusp of the majors and has crushed throughout the minors, we should have some confidence in the weight of his one thing. He may not have the hit tool of Eloy Jimenez or the stolen-base potential of Jo Adell — he'll certainly rank behind both of them in my prospect list — but Alonso can be a top-30 hitter without those things. Not every elite prospect needs to have first-round upside.

EXTREME VELOCITY MAKES FOR A FUTURE ACE
CASE >>Luis Castillo
In 2017, there were nine starting pitchers who averaged at least 96 mph with their fastball. Of those nine, only two (Gerrit Cole and Luis Severino) finished among the top-20 pitchers the following season. That number jumped to 16 in 2018. While velocity increases across the league, it becomes less of a separator and those who possess it need to augment it with something else in order to have the kind of success we want from our fantasy hurlers. The bet was on Castillo last year, and whether it's on Mike Foltynewicz, Walker Buehler, Zack Wheeler or a repeat for Blake Snell, fastball oomph in and of itself is not enough for these arms to jump into the stratosphere. Velocity is also proportional to injury risk, which makes for an even more daunting proposition in
dynasty leagues where it's a more permanent game of Russian Roulette.

YOUTH EQUATES FUTURE GROWTH
CASE >>Nomar Mazara
This is one of the most common traps dynasty managers fall into, and it's due to a combination of attachment and confirmation bias. We all like our prospects too much — it's why we are rostering them, and not another manager in our league. However, when we hang onto ceiling despite a growing track record of performance, it blinds us to the reality of our roster. I'm as guilty of this as anyone when it comes to Mazara, who has been a league-average hitter throughout his age 21 to 23 seasons. The (theoretical) aging curve for hitters suggests he will still grow into his .280, 30-homer ceiling — the end result we envisioned while stashing him on our farm teams — but some 23-year-olds are as good as they are ever going to be, and that's okay. Listening to your own advice can also be difficult.

MINOR-LEAGUE STEAL TOTALS TRANSLATE EQUITABLY
CASE >>Bo Bichette
This is not meant as a takedown of Bichette's value as a high-end dynasty prospect, but it's a good lesson in the fallacy of relying on minor-league production to project a player's major-league performance. Remember, these players — especially the very best prospects — are practicing for what's next. They're working on taking better leads, getting better jumps. Bichette's stolen-base totals in the majors are going to be affected more by the manager he plays for and where he hits in the lineup than how many thefts he came away with in Double-A. Does he have the speed and instincts to approach 20 steals on occasion? Probably, but betting on it is likely to leave you disappointed.

ONE-CATEGORY PLAYERS HURT YOU MORE THAN THEY HELP YOU
CASE >>Billy Hamilton
In redraft leagues, it's easier to build a balanced team around an elite stolen-base threat you nab in the early rounds. Grab a speedster in Round 3 and then you can really focus on bats that help in the other categories the rest of the draft. As long as you fall within your category targets, it's easy. When you're already carrying a full, or near full, roster over from year to year, making adjustments is more challenging. But value is value, and while Hamilton was a consistent top-15 outfielder in the years leading up to 2018, he was still a top-50 outfielder in a really down year. Being down on players of his ilk in long-term formats means not wanting to make a decision when it comes to the efficacy of that one thing. I own Hamilton in a few dynasty leagues (shocker, I know) and they range from leagues where he's my only notable speed guy to the RotoWire Dynasty Invitational, where he's grouped with Adalberto Mondesi and Francisco Lindor to power a league-leading squad in the category. Being open-minded about players of all shapes of production, in conjunction with being an active trader, should remove the challenge and prove the point that you don't need to be well-rounded on a player-by-player basis, only in the aggregate over time.

NEVER PAY FOR CATCHERS
CASE >>Wilson Ramos
In the many years I've been playing fantasy baseball, the catcher landscape has never been more bleak. Last year's top fantasy catcher, J.T. Realmuto, was the 83rd best hitter overall. There were only four catchers among the top 150 hitters, which was down from six in 2017. As teams move to more timeshares and framing specialists, the 450-AB catcher is becoming an endangered species, which means finding a middling catcher off the waiver wire is a trickier proposition. In a 16-team, one-catcher league? The 17th to 20th best catchers in 2018 were Mitch Garver, Omar Narvaez, Manny Pina and Austin Hedges. Spend the extra capital and lock up the spot so you don't have to trifle with this nonsense — Ramos and his average/power combination makes for a great target.

BATTING AVERAGE IS BORING
CASE >>Jean Segura
This is just a simple game of arithmetic. With strikeouts and power up across the league, a .300 hitter adds as much SGP value to a fantasy team as a 35-homer bat. Think about that before discounting Segura in Philadelphia.

SAVES ARE SAVES
CASE >>Sam Dyson
When you enter your competitive window in a dynasty league, odds are you'll need to trade for a closer. The easy and cheap strategy is to target the bad closers, your Dysons, Shane Greenes and Wily Peraltas. While each save may technically be worth the same number of points in the category, both the ratio damage a bad closer can do and the gaps between saves can be gut punches as you try to push up the leaderboard in pitcher points. Instead, target top-half closers who are more likely to hang onto their jobs and provide better all-around performance. Of course, you should be backfilling with closer specs anyway — especially towards the end of the season for some offseason arbitrage. This article appears in the 2019 RotoWire Fantasy Baseball Guide. You can order a copy here.