This is my first fantasy baseball blog, it comes in the second half of the 2019 baseball season. This will be expert advice from a guy who has been playing fantasy sports for about 20 years. I don’t win all my leagues, but I do finish in the top few spots on a very consistent basis.
This blog, and the advice I give, will be coming from a little bit of a different angle than you may be used to. These days, there is so much information at our fingertips, but the analytics has gotten out of control. I believe advanced stats (wOBA, BABIP,xFIP, SIERA) can be very useful and they can give you some insight for what may happen in the future. The true insight that I want to find is the trends that will continue with statistical references (first half vs. second half etc.) along with WATCHING the players play. It really comes down to watching baseball. The more you watch, see what the players are doing, the more you will notice what a player is like. Duh! I have been able to do this more than ever this year since I have MLB.tv. The eye test is the most important test out there. I can watch one of my pitchers pitch in a game, and if I am not bias to that particular pitcher, just because they are on my team and I spent a draft pick on them, then I can watch and evaluate if they look good. One good example of this, in this years draft, was Nick Pivetta. Now I was not sold on Pivetta, and was not targeting him in my drafts, but I did end up with him in a league. He was on all of the sleeper and breakout lists because of his Sabermetric stats from 2018. He got off to a poor start in 2019 so I wanted to make sure I watched him pitch. He stinks! What happened was, it was hard for me to watch. I wanted him to do well because he was on my team but as he was pitching I was thinking to myself he is going to get shelled. And he did. So what I came away with from that game was, if it is hard to watch your pitcher pitch and you are just hoping for him to make it through 5 innings with less than 5 earned runs he isn’t worth owning. Now you can’t do that with every player, and every start, sometimes guys just have bad starts. But if you are not sure about a guy, and he is struggling, watching him pitch or hit will tell you the story. I know everyone isn’t able to watch a ton of baseball and see all of their guys play. Heck in the past I have probably had a pitching staff on my team where I never saw half of them throw a single pitch in a season. If it wasn’t a local broadcast or a nationally televised game I didn’t see it. If you can watch it will help tremendously. If you can’t, I can!
This year I have also discovered a scenario for breakout players. It is an equation that will predict breakout players every year. (I’ll give you a hint- Josh Bell was one of my top breakout contenders) In some coming up blogs I will reveal the players that fit this model for the 2019 season and how they are performing along with the players that fit this model going into the 2020 season.
I will also share some insight on who will finish the 2019 season strong and help you win your league. Things like Brian Dozier is one of the best second half fantasy players over the last four years.