Gearing up for the season

The season is quickly approaching and my content has been...going down?!? I appologize but I have been very busy preparing myself for the season and haven't had a lot of time to post.

A couple of relevant notes:

- Roto Hog opened the market today. If you are playing Roto Hog, there has been a lot of fluctuation already so you should check it out.

- If you haven't bought Xtra Innings on Sports Blurb yet you should do so...otherwise you won't be able to read my weekly Head 2 Head article over there!

- Be sure to check out the Fantasy Man F.E.E.D over at Fantasy Baseball Express

- Subscribe to get MLB Front Office every night via email on the right hand side bar!

- Kenny Rogers had surgery and will be out for a long time. If you have him, drop him.

- Seth McClung was sent to the minor leagues, he was thought to be the front runner for saves in Tampa -- I guess not.

- Eric Gagne will start the season on the DL. Otsuka owners rejoice!

Thats all for now. Feel free to email me any and all fantasy or baseball related questions you have!

Quick Notes

A couple of quick notes:

- Mark Prior was sent to the minors today by the Cubs so he can attempt to regain the form that had him pitching in the playoffs in 2003. He apparently wasn't happy about it but then again who would be? He's worth giving a shot when he comes back up.

- Matt Garza was beat out for the last spot in the rotation by Carlos Silva. Silva has no fantasy value, however Garza will get that spot sometime this season and he has sleeper value then

- My Statistical Oddities Part 2 is up on Roto Hog. Check that out and tell them how much you like me! Joke.

- My weekly article on Sports Blurb will be up tomorrow. Make sure you buy the Xtra Innings package so you can read that. Its worth the money, trust me!

- For those of you in REALLY deep leagues, Tony Pena Jr. is the starting SS in KC beating out Angel Berroa who was demoted to the minors. Again, unless you're in a 20+ person league you shouldn't care about that. AL only leagues shouldn't really even care unless your 14-16 person leagues.

- Jorge Julio is closing for the Marlins as I'm sure you've all heard. If no one has picked him up yet in your league, Jump on That!

- Wade Miller officially won the 5th spot in the Cubs rotation. In 16 or 20 person mixed leagues he may be worth a look. He's also worth a look in NL only.

Calling All New Yorkers

When I see stories that talk about New York sports Hero's I feel compelled to spread the word. The Boogey Blog this week has a great story about one of the best man that ever played in a Yankee uniform, Bernie Williams. Williams hasn't shown up to Spring Training this year, but that hasn't discouraged the Yankee Nation. Boogey Blog details in their story how they Yankees should really send Williams off into the sunset.

Ok -- So I really have no connection to NY Sports but I thought this was a cool idea anyway. Go ahead and check it out.

AL Only Sleepers

I recently got an email from a reader about AL Only Saves. He Asked:

Hey Brad,Love the tiered tankings.Do you have a feel for deep AL prospects / sleepers?

Here are a couple of guys I recomended to him:

Thanks. Not sure how deep your league is but a couple guys to take a look at:


Alexi Casilla - Twins 2B/SS of the future, in a full season he could steal 50. Think Castillo in his prime.
Gavin Floyd - White Sox starter doesn't have the best stuff and may eventually find himself in the pen but he should make the rotation this year.
John Danks - The Brandon McCarthy trade is going to look great for the White Sox.
Brandon McCarthy - 4.50 ERA is expectable.
Gustavo Chacin - Starter was gold a couple of seasons ago -- was injured last year but should bounce back.
Josh Towers - Think one year farther down the line than Chacin and one heck of a bad season but they are paying him a lot to play in the minors and if he can make it back into some teams rotation he could be a decent last round AL only pick.

Obviously there are always the guys like:

Phil Hughes - Stud Yankees SP, Best SP in the minors and should be up by years end
Alex Gordon - Stud 3B
Mark Teahan - Moved to OF for Gordon but still has OF elig.
Delmon Young - Future STAR. He's the kind of guy you imagine 50/50 things about. Ok not really but you get the point.
Akinori Iwamura - Talked of working on speed. Should get lots of playing time for D-Rays

Hope this helps.

Matt Garza, SP, MIN

In a shocking twist, Carlos Silva allowed 11 hits and 9 earned runs in 3 1/3 inning on Saturday. Carlos Silva is certainly not fantasy worthy but someone else whos is is impacted significantly from it. Matt Garza could replace Silva in the rotation even after all of the Fantasy Players had lowered him a bit because he was going to be starting in AAA. Garza has a 1.00 ERA in nine innings out of the pen this spring. He is a valuable late round pick and has a lot more value than Silva. Silva was scheduled to start the Twins second game of the season but Garza would likely bump everyone else up and pitch the 5th.

Sports Blurb

Well, my Sports Blurb article was put up on Thursday as promised however it is behind their Xtra Innings subscriber wall so you will have to pay a small fee to read it. There is a lot of great content behind the wall so its well worth it. Don't worry, everything else I do here will still be free! Just one article every week will be for cost a one time payment and its not even to me! What a bumer.

Anyway, I have been sick recently and that is why I have had very little new content posted and that will continue until I feel better which will hopefully be tomorrow or monday. Thanks for understanding.

Papelbon to the Pen

In the biggest fantasy news of the spring, the Red Sox announced today that Jonathan Papelbon would be the closer again this year. He was being drafted as a starter in about every fantasy league so for those of you who tried to grab a potential Red Sox closer like Timlin or Pineiro, throw them back on the wire. If you haven't drafted yet, Papelbon is probably worth a look around the Wagner/Rivera area. If he can stay healthy he can certainly have value like Nathan and K-Rod but he has a very high chance of injury.

Baseball: Statistical Oddities Part 2

Part 2 of my look into statistics in baseball is finally here! If you missed Part 1 you should definately give it a look before you read Part 2. Part 1 focused on hitting and Part 2 focuses on pitching. The article will also be appearing on Lenny Melnick Fantasy Baseball and Roto Hog.

As always, I appreciate any comments, questions, critisism etc. that you have and would love to hear from you! You can shoot me an email or post a comment using the link below.

Finally, tomorrow will be my first weekly article on Sports Blurb. It's a good site and I will post up the link to that tomorrow. Also, don't forget to check out what the Fantasy Man has going on over at Fantasy Baseball Express. You should definately consider buying his Fantasy Man F.E.E.D. It's a lot of great information emailed straight to you for only 20$!

Speaking of which: You can now subscribe to recieve a nightly email from MLB Front Office with all of the articles from the previous day in it! It's easy to do and its FREE! Just enter your email in the bar on the right hand side.

Roto Hog, Myself and More!

If you haven't heard of Roto Hog yet WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?!? It's sweeping the Fantasy Baseball World and well...YOU NEED TO JOIN. My referal code is: MLBFRONTOFFICE.

Anyway, no more shameless plugs. My article Statistical Oddities is the featured article up there right now. I posted this article on here a little while ago and it was also featured on LennyMelnickFantasyBaseball.com but if you missed it, you can see it on Roto Hog right now. In addition, I will be releasing part 2 of the article tomorrow. It will appear on here, LennyMelnickFantasyBaseball.com and Roto Hog as well. Although it may not appear on Roto Hog or Lenny's Site tomorrow, it will be up there soon.

In addition, I'd like to thank those of you who have signed up for the nightly MLB Front Office email and for those of you who haven't yet its not too late! Just enter your email in the space on the right hand side bar and your ready to start recieving the email.

Also this Thursday will be my 1st weekly article at sportsblurb.com. The article is about Head 2 Head leagues which is a vastly underrepresented type of play in the expert world. I'm here to change that! I will post the link to that once the article is up.

Thanks for listening to all of my plugs, even though I promised I wouldn't.

Tiered Rankings

Positional Rankings are a great way to compile your rankings to decide when scarcity in a position is running short. However, in order to fully utilize these rankings, you must break them up into tiers. Here you can find my tiered positional rankings.

How did I come up with these ranks?

I first took my top 250 players list and sorted by position. I then broke the positions up into groups based on their numerical value only. Group A was players 1-20 (aka rounds 1 and 2 in a ten team league), Group B was players 21-40 (rounds 3 and 4), Group C was players 41-60 (rounds 5 and 6), Group D was players 61-100 (rounds 7-10), Group E was players 101-150 (rounds 11-15), Group F was players 151-200 (rounds 16-20) and Group G was players 201-250 (rounds 21-25). After dividing players up by numerical value, I went through and made any minor adjustments I thought were necessary to finalize the groups.

Why is this valuable?

Not only is it helpful on draft day to spot when a position is running dry, but it is a helpful tool to analyze your own player rankings. If two players that are considered to be fairly equal value have vastly different status in the groups then you know you need to fix something. In this exercise, I was using the rankings that I completed long enough ago that there has been a lot of movement since then. In this case, I did not make any changes to my list because this is just to demonstrate how valuable grouping your players can be. The only thing I did was to remove Taylor Tankersley because it does not appear he is the front runner for the closers job (he appeared at # 229 in my original rankings). Rankings will also help you not reach for players too early.

What do the groupings show?

These groups confirm many of the things I have been stressing all season long. The first thing that jumped out at me was the catcher scarcity. The whole year I have been stressing to not take your catcher too early. As you will see, that is backed up by the groups. The next is my 2B theory. Utley is the only player in Tier A, there is no one in Tier B, 2 2B in Tier C and then everyone else follows. It just goes to show that if you don’t draft Utley, you might as well wait as long as possible to get your 2B. The next note-able point is that the SS groupings are exactly as I would expect them to be. They are front heavy and then tail off significantly after group B. If you don’t get a SS from group C or higher, you are going to struggle from the SS position. Again, my waiting on 3B strategy was re-confirmed. There are 5 3B in group A and B combined, 0 in group C and then 10 in groups D and E. On the pitching side, Santana is the only Tier A starter and no RP appears before Tier C with a lot of value at the end of the draft in both the SP and RP groups.

I strongly suggest that you take your own rankings and break them up into tiers. It will not only help you on draft day but it will help you become a much more knowledgeable fantasy player. Grouping players is something that experts have been doing for a long time but many regular fantasy players don’t do because they don’t recognize its importance. It takes less than an hour and can help you get much more value out of your draft.

Again, the Groupings can be found here and as always, please post any questions or comments or feel free to email them to me.