2025 TGFBI Draft Recap: I’m Truss’ Favorite

It’s that time of year where the veteran writers talk about their teams and hopefully, you listen because draft strategy is 70% of the battle. Like player analysis is nice and all but it doesn’t matter if you think this is the year of Ozzie Albies if you don’t manage to draft him.

“But I posted all over social media and told my friends that Ozzie was due for a 40/40 season all while solving world hunger and one-upping Kendrick in the Drake dis-track game,” you say with 8 teams and that have zero Ozzie Albies and 14 instances of various Luis Garcia-ses.

Sit down, relax, and learn from Uncle EWB about how to best navigate your way through the draft room and get your guys.

TGFBI – What’s That?

It’s a free-to-play tournament built of a bunch of 15-team leagues of fantasy “analysts,” whatever that means. Put another way, I’m in Derek Van Riper’s league. Put another another way, DVR is like the third best player out there according to this highly scientific graph made by former Razzball writer and current “Huskman” Josiah Tindor. Not that Grey and Rudy are also very highly rated, and Grey’s even higher on the not-pictured “Fantasy Analysts Sex Factor” graph. That graph is too controversial to share.

Enough Already About Great Players, Talk About Your Team

Truss said it was his favorite, that’s all you need to know. A couple other Razzball insiders called it “marvelous” and “like a shark dipped in chocolate — full of teeth yet sweet.”

I was gifted the 2nd pick and the main part of the draft unfurled like so. There’s another 10 rounds to go but those’ll be mostly fliers:

How ’bout them first three rounds?

Starting Witt / Jazz / Acuna was nothing more than a gift. Ohtani naturally went 1.01, but his “cheat code” status is really nerfed in TGFBI format. In TGFBI, the lineups are set bi-weekly, and Ohtani can only be a hitter or a pitcher but not both during a given lineup. Ergo, he will almost never be used as a pitcher. As everybody in the world is discussing, Ohtani is undoubtedly running less this year (he’s literally wearing a manzierre to support his chesticles while running) and he’ll probably be getting fewer AB due to resting for his pitching roles. Which leads me to getting the true #1 for non-best ball leagues, Bobby Witt, Jr.

Second round came around — pick 29, mind you, because this is a 15-team league — and Razzball’s favorite son Jasrado Chisholm was still on the board. With a rare 3B/OF eligibility and a winning smile and a shot at 30/30 with 197 runs on the year, I figured, “that’s my kind of upside.”

And then the surprise of the third round, at pick 32 overall, is that I set the 2nd highest pick on Acuna in a 400-person tournament. At the time I made it, it was the highest pick, only to be surpassed shortly after by Truss’ league, where Acuna went 36th overall. Mind you, Acuna’s gonna miss like a month of the year. Mind you, Acuna can miss a month and still put up a 25/25 year baseline while batting .300. In tournament mode, we don’t care about April stats — we care about playoff stats. Nobody remembers your team that started out in first place in Week 1. They remember if you’re at the top of the charts in Week [waves hands around] 94. There are 94 weeks in a year, right? I mean, a metric baseball year. Let me know if the comments if I’m wrong.

Sasaki as SP2, eh?

I know. I literally started the year with a Sasaki anti-hype post. But it seems the rest of the world cooled on Sasaki as the early drafts gave way to the industry drafts, and Sasaki fell to the 7th round. In tournament mode, we can’t expect good things if we don’t extrapolate projections a bit. Will Sasaki top 130 IP? Probably not. But! What if he goes 160-170 IP with his crazy arsenal and the Dodgers lineup? That’s Cy Young-levels of performance, and I’ll take that upside. As the theme of this article goes — you gotta imagine the best possible outcome when trying to win a tournament. There’ll be 399 teams that don’t win, and you’ll mostl likely be one of those losers. But if you’re going to win, you’re not going to win by playing it safe.

What’s the War Room Think?

Obvs, my hitters are gorgeous. Light on pitching still, but I went with players that are more friendly to my system and Grey’s system than Rudy’s War Room. Also, we haven’t gotten to the point where Roleless Robs are drafted, so that’s where my ERA and WHIP will improve.

Teach Me, Obi-Wan

15-team drafts produce a lot of anxiety because player valuation is messed up. Pitchers are way more valuable, and the 2-catcher format creates artificial scarcity that drives the cost of backstops into the sky. Put another way, William Contreras went before Freddie Freeman and Bryce Harper. Rather than worry about missing out, we can use these behaviors of other drafters as leverage.

Lesson 1: When drafting on the turn, get your guy. I set the minimum pick on Naylor by like 40 spots or something. Fact #1: ADP is meaningless. Fact #2: At pick 2, I go 28 picks between my choices. I see upside, I take upside now, not later. There’ll be no later when others are taking 1.25 23-man teams in-between your picks. Jumping ADP on smart players will unsettle the room and put you in charge of the draft, while making other teams adjust their strategies in unexpected ways. An easy way to remember this is if you’re getting “sniped” on your guys, then you’re not being aggressive enough. Get your guys and make your build, not somebody else’s build.

Lesson 2: Unbalance then balance. If you remember my fantasy football draft advice, I was a huge fan of getting 2-3 running backs in the first 5 rounds. The fantasy baseball equivalent of this is drafting 3-4 hitters in the first five rounds. This over-drafting of one type of player leaves your team unbalanced. I corrected by taking Sasaki, Walker, Gray, and Diaz in the next five rounds, leaving me with a balanced team that was immune to positional runs.

Lesson 3: SAGNOF, to an extent. We all love a good surprise speed / saves guy. But sometimes people interpret SAGNOF to mean, “Don’t draft any steals or saves.” I see a lot of commenters — and industry insiders! — asking for advice on their team when they come up with non-best ball drafts that are like Soto / Vlad / Yordan / Ozuna starts. Like, great, you’re definitely not losing the HR category in your league, and I’m sorry, but there are literally no stolen bases left for you. Go get Brice Turang and hope for the best. You don’t need to overload on single categories in any format. When drafting, think about what type of team you’re drafting and whether your choices make your later draft easier or harder. This year, there are tons of good SP late in the draft. There are very few reliable closers. There are basically zero bonus AVG guys late in the draft. If you’re drafting a bunch of low-AVG, high-HR guys and top starters, you’ll get beat by teams that are collections of SAGNOFers with a bunch of Roleless Robs.

How are your drafts going? Hate my team? Like it? Want to arm wrestle me for it? Let me know down in the comments!