Ah, the age-old question: how important is it to chase playing time in deep fantasy baseball leagues? Okay, perhaps it’s not a question that society has been pondering since the dawn of time, but it is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately as I’m in the thick of my drafting season. The word “platoon” and “time-share” are huge turn-offs to most owners when perusing a hitter’s profile — but when it comes to deep leagues, I don’t feel that having a hitter in a platoon situation is necessarily always a terrible thing.
In shallow leagues, playing time is crucial, since on a good fantasy team every player rostered will theoretically be somewhat of a stud, and you’ll want as many at bats from said studs as possible or else you’ll quickly lose ground in the counting stat categories. But in deeper leagues, I do believe there are times when less is more, and where chasing playing time will ultimately hurt you. More at bats (or innings if we are talking about pitchers) may lead to slightly raised counting stat numbers, but at the expense of taking a hit in ratio-based categories. Today let’s take a look at a few examples of the many players who may not even be draftable in certain shallow leagues, but could be a big help to deep-league teams. Some of these guys may also have the added benefit of being available at lower-than-they-should-probably-go price points in deep leagues, due to the fact that other owners may tend to overlook them based on a playing-time bias that may not even be a negative factor in NL-only, AL-only, or other deep leagues.
The 2020 Razzball Commenter Leagues are now open! Free to join!
Please, blog, may I have some more?