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Brent (@ExitVelo_BH), Jordan (@ExitVelo_JR), and Zach (@Braffz), breakdown the MLB 60 game schedule and what teams have the easiest path to the playoffs. The Twins, Padres, Indians, and White sox have a great chance to make the playoff and compete. The Angels, Athletics, and Rockies have some of the tougher schedules in the league. We discuss the underrated fantasy assets on teams that will compete. Can Wil Myers, Franmil Reyes, Luis Robert make impacts on their rosters? We discuss our award winners in a 60 game season. Can Josh Hader as a reliever get CY Young consideration? We all agree Josh Hader will be a very valuable asset in fantasy leagues. We talk about the future of the Exit Velocity Podcast and guests we will feature, highlighted by SP Streamer, Carter Capps, Adam Aizer, Chelsea Ladd, and Deegs. We also launched a new podcast store on Instagram (exitvelocitypc), which include shirts, mugs, koozies, wine glasses, and beer steins!

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See all of today’s starting lineups

# MLB Starting Lineups For Sun 5/18
ARI | ATH | ATL | BAL | BOS | CHC | CHW | CIN | CLE | COL | DET | HOU | KC | LAA | LAD | MIA | MIL | MIN | NYM | NYY | PHI | PIT | SD | SEA | SF | STL | TB | TEX | TOR | WSH | OAK
Dudes and five lady dudes, pitching is going to be a mess in 2020. Pitching is usually where I excel at pinpointing guys to draft and avoid, and right now I'm looking at an array of hot takes: "Top starters are more valuable! "Top middle relievers are more valuable!" "Tops are bottoms, and I'm not talking about baseball anymore!" I can't tell hot takes from shiitakes. Usually I'm able to say, "With 100% confidence, I would not draft a top starter." This year, if you're saying anything with 100% confidence, you're lying. Seriously, don't trust anyone who is confident in predicting anything in a 60-game season. We've never seen anything like this and may never again. Embrace it? Sure. But "Be Water" like Bruce Lee said, and adapt. With so few innings to prepare for the season in Summer Camp, will top starters even be ready to go? That alone should shut up the "You need top starters" people. With so few innings in the actual season, that should also shut up the "Don't pay for starters this year" people. Instead, let's just break down the categories, and see if we can't just win those. Laura also just gave you a solid look at possible ERA strategy. So, with a 60-game season, what is a fantasy baseball strategy for ERA & WHIP?
[places soapbox on ground, stands tall] Starting pitchers are more important this year. But you should still take hitters first. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. For most fantasy league formats, you are chasing wins in 2020. Thus, WAGNOF (Wins Ain't Got No Face). With starting pitchers, you're looking for #1/#2 starters on good teams, who will pitch a lot of innings and contribute to Wins, ERA, WHIP, and K. Relievers with great K/9--even middle relievers--will help immensely with ERA, WHIP, and K. But wins? Welcome to the Twilight Zone. Whereas wins used to the be the domain of starters (and Twins' middle relievers), we're already getting reports of top pitchers having inning limits and pitch counts. So, we'll be seeing a lot of wins going to middle relievers, which makes it much more difficult to predict that category (unless you're a lifelong Twins fan, holla!). If you don't believe me on this, then take the advice from three-time Trout Fishing Champion Grey Albright. If you're in a league that uses Quality Starts, the top three tiers of pitchers are even more valuable because you'll be relying on pitchers who stay in games AND who don't give up earned runs. The coronavirus and the style of play in 2020 placed a high scarcity on pitchers who meet these requirements. That said, crafty managers can combine mid-tier pitchers with relievers who provide elite ratios and make an effective pitching staff that will win leagues. So, let's teach you to be a crafty manager.
If MLB is actually able to pull off an abbreviated 2020, I'll have four or five drafts/auctions the week of July 23rd. Right now, even though I'm not planning on veering far from my normal draft plan, I do realize that some major adjustments in strategy may need to be made for what will certainly be a bizarre season, and I'm still pondering potential tweaks to my game plan in case I have any brainstorms about what might give me an edge in 2020.  One thing I have decided to do is to pay a little less attention to ratios and more to counting stats this year, assuming they'll be slightly more predictable with such a small sample size of a season. Speaking of ratio stats that may be harder to control than ever this year, a while back I saw a suggestion somewhere on Fangraphs or a similar website mentioning the notion of punting ERA as a strategy for this season.  There was no follow up in terms of how one might go about doing so, and it seemed like a crazy idea to me, since punting ERA without destroying WHIP seemed impossible even from an on-paper standpoint.  But in an effort to at least consider out of the box ideas this year, I decided to follow up the thought by trying to put together a pitching staff that I felt had a solid chance to be relatively successful once I didn't take ERA into account at all, largely using last year's performance as a guide.  Even though prior year's performance isn't necessarily an indicator of what will happen in the present even in normal times, looking at things through this lens has, if nothing else, revealed some numbers that surprised me a bit. The bottom line is, if I've decided that I'm not going to put as much stock as usual into ratio categories like ERA -- and I think I have -- then I may have discovered a few starting pitchers that I'll be more interested in drafting for 2020 than I would have guessed.
If you haven't signed up for the Razzball Patreon yet then you've been missing out. The 59 minutes I spend each week laughing about weird news stories with comedians Billy Hurley and Grey Albright, are easily 50 of the most entertaining minutes of my week (and 9 of the most confusing minutes when Grey gets off on a tangent about an imaginary Russian man named Ivan who wrestles sharks). Speaking of shark wrestling, we discuss this wild shark wrestling story on this week's show:
First Charlie Blackmon, now Freddie Freeman...Somebody check on Reggie Cleveland! Welp, this sucks. That's me cutting to the chase quicker than the editors of the Fast & Furious movies. "Um, Vin Diesel's been talking for like seven seconds, don't we have any tire spinning footage?" That's the editors cutting to the chase. There's also the Entourage editors, who tried to cut around Chase. Or Ruben Tejada who would like to cut Chase. Any hoo! Freddie Freeman tested positive for Covid and is battling a fever. Besides the fear for Freeman, if something serious happens to a player, baseball's not happening this year. Other players will walkout, and I wouldn't blame them. Sorry, I know that's no fun to hear, but you're not here to be lied to. As for fantasy, these Covid positive tests are super hard to predict for projections and rankings. Of course, if drafting right now; you can't draft Freddie Freeman in the top 20 overall. Not sure you can draft him in the top 50 overall, but that's about where I'd risk it, and have updated my top 20 1st basementop 100 and top 500. I did blow the dust off my landscape architect degree and hedge with my new ranking of Freeman by not updating his projections. It's just impossible to know if he'll be out for two-to-three weeks, and fine for near the start of the season, or miss the whole season. Unknown risk is baked into his new ranking, but I left projections. Putting aside "Let the kids play," MLB has adopted a new slogan for this season:  "Play!" "What? No, it's not safe." "I said, "Play!" Anyway, here's what else I saw for fantasy baseball:
Welcome to the re RE started 2020 Summer Camp preseason Top 100. It’s Corona’s world and we’re all just living in it. To wit: There is no specific time period for the Covid-19 IL. Two weeks? A month? Considering it takes two negative tests to come back, and even still medical science has more questions than answers, a positive test could turn the #1 pick into a non factor for your team. In an eight or nine week season, two weeks or more on the shelf is devastating. With that in mind, and Rudy’s alchemy, we’ve got some surprises. Keep in mind health and the Universal DH play a huge role, along with divisional changes. With that said, once again it's seamhead heaven, boys of summer katnip, and time to put away the hot stove. Of course we're picking up our junior health care specialist kits, but I digress. Summer camp baseball has just started. Beer is flowing from Fenway Park to Anaheim Stadium and lazy afternoons at your house, or if you're lucky your deck, are in vogue. Finally, let’s be honest, no one truly knows what’s going to happen. So here’s the new pre-season Top 100."Last" is tracking where the hitters were in the last Top 100 of March of 2020. "Change" is a change from that last 2020 ranking.
Much has already been pontificated (so many years I've waited to use the word 'pontificate'!) in terms of what lay before us as both baseball fans and fantasy baseball players. And all of this pontification (2-for-1!) can be culminated (or stirred) into one simple question: What can we expect in just 60 games? Now, I'd be remiss for not mentioning that we are in the midst of another spike of the first wave of the Miller Lite Corona virus, and the increasing dangers in both the Arizona and Florida areas is making this whole Manfred fantasy complicated, and then of course the player opt-outs, the chance we won't even be able to complete the season from a many number of factors... you could say that we are practicing folly by pushing forward. Like that one girl I dated in college. That being said, if baseball does become more reality than fantasy, it'll be one of the most unique moments contextually speaking. I mean, I don't think a 60-game season compares to sliced bread, but that's just me, a toast-lover. So while Joseph Gordon Levitt had 500 days to woo everyone's favorite manic pixie girl Zooey Summer, we're going to have only 60 days to un-woo COVID, all while trying to experience America's favorite pastime as safely and carefully as possible. What could go wrong?
I've got to be honest, I'm not even that excited for the 2020 fantasy baseball season. It almost feels dirty to actually say that. I started playing fantasy baseball back in 1990. For those not so quick with that math, this would be my 30th year playing this great game. So why am I not pumped for the start of the season. Well, I think it's mostly hesitation. I just do not believe that we will actually see a full season. And by "full season" I mean sixty games. How long is it going to be until a couple of players test positive and things get shut down? I wonder if a player would rather test positive for PEDs or Coronavirus? I asked my buddy if he'd rather have Coronavirus or Syphilis. Any guesses how he answered? He chose Coronavirus because it would be easier to explain to his wife. We are already facing an extremely shorted season, any interruptions would exponentially compound the problem. A shortened season is much less disruptive to the roto format, but when it comes to head-to-head points leagues, a nine week season practically cripples the season. In roto it's just less time to accrue stats, but in a 12-team head-to-head league, you'll play each team once, and some twice if you have two opponents each week. If you play one team each week you won't even play every team in the league over those nine weeks. And what about playoffs? Why does Jim Mora's reaction to the topic of playoffs immediately come to mind? For every week of playoffs that's one less week of regular season. Can playoffs even be afforded? Do you just award the championship to the team that finishes the regular season in first place? I can see it already, the team that finishes first will be the team that got to play the shitty team twice. Can you blame the second place team for feeling slighted?
What's up party people. We've been through some things, haven't we? Not sure how this year's July 4th BBQ will go down with social distancing, but could work out a bit in your favor. No one will be able to stand close enough to the grill to criticize your sear technique. That's gotta count for something! Back at the end of February in the before times of the long-long ago, I gave you my pre-Spring Training first look at the Top 75 Outfielders for 2020. The world has since been torn asunder and we weren't sure there was going to be any baseball season, let alone civilization. We screwed up the chocolate factory and the whole thing had to be washed and sterilized. Then so shines a good deed in a weary world. We had a wonderful debate between owners and players about how to fund this season, for those who took a nap (or 80 in between), allow me to recap it for you: