A lot of pitcher fantasy analysis centers around pitcher quality: Velocity, stuff, BABIP, Statcast, recent performance…balancing out all of the available metrics to determine cost (draft slot, $ value) is the name of the game. Today we’re going to look at a metric I rarely see discussed in the pre-season: strength of schedule (SoS).

In-season, starting pitcher matchups are gold, whether you’re playing the streaming game or DFS. But pre-season, I rarely see analysis go any deeper than AL-vs.-NL comparisons. At the individual-SP level, this makes sense: projecting out specific full-season matchups for an SP is impossible.

At the team level, however, we can get get a pretty good handle on who may have advantageous matchups and who has a tough road. More specifically, we’re interested in the extremes: How frequently will each team face really tough matchups, or really easy ones? The middle 60% will be mostly based on pitcher quality; at the margins, we have actionable start/sit decisions.

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See all of today’s starting lineups

# MLB Starting Lineups For Thu 8/7
ATH | ATL | CHW | CIN | MIA | PIT | SEA | WSH | ARI | BAL | BOS | CHC | CLE | COL | DET | HOU | KC | LAA | LAD | MIL | MIN | NYM | NYY | OAK | PHI | SD | SF | STL | TB | TEX | TOR

Do you want to do better in the 2021 RazzSlam? I finished ranked in the 80s last year in the main even, and 40s in the qualifier. I certainly want to do better! I did a similar study to this after a dismal finish in the 2019 RazzBowl fantasy football tournament, improving my RazzBowl finish by nearly 200% and ultimately winning the DataForce Charity League against 12 of the best fantasy football minds in the business. I wrote up my findings in the 2020 RazzBowl Guidebook and my article How to Win an Industry Fantasy Football League. Last week, I showed you my methodology and findings on How to Draft Starting Pitchers in an Industry Fantasy Baseball League. This week, let’s take a look at the hitting landscape, and the strategies that succeeded for the best RazzSlam teams.

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Razzball Patreon members receive our weekly podcast where Grey cackles about the funniest news stories we’ve found over the past week, plus you get that warm fuzzy feeling of supporting your favorite fantasy sports site in all the land.

ANNOUNCEMENT!!

Ten (10) Razzball Patreon members will randomly be selected to compete against Grey, Rudy and a slew all the biggest names in the fantasy baseball industry in this years RazzSlam. Note your Patreon membership at the bottom of your RazzSlam Signup Form.

Now, without further ado, it’s your favorite hour of the week! I Can’t Believe It’s Not Not News is back again with all the Billy Hurley jokes and Grey Albright cackles you can handle. First we report on the sexy snowmen who are haunting a Canadian town and then Billy heads to Louisiana to cover Cajuns bathing their kids in seafood boilers. Later we get the scoop on Hello Fresh’s accidental urine delivery and an Alaska woman bitten in the butt by a bear.

Find all of this week’s stories here:

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Hello, or hola, as I learned during my 13 years of Spanish. Welcome to my critique of Yahoo’s 2021 fantasy baseball rankings. Or as I sometimes call it, “I don’t know what they’re thinking, but the longer I think about it the more it hurts my brain, so let’s just shrug through this without acquiring a tumor.” Let’s not have my obit be, “Grey is survived by a much older wife, Cougs, and Yahoo’s fantasy baseball rankings.” We’re gonna bury them, they’re not gonna bury us! Uh, me! See, we’re putting things in perspective, my over-the-internet friend. I have my aggravation ratio down to 3:2. For every three rankings I don’t agree with, I’m only screaming twice. It’s very freeing. I feel light as a feather. A very toxic feather. Anyway, here’s a totally impartial look at Yahoo’s 2021 fantasy baseball rankings vs. my own 2021 fantasy baseball rankings:

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I added You ever get home from a trip to the grocery store, look at what you bought and then wonder if you forgot something? You haven’t? Well, then you either have a personal shopper or you are still living at home with the parents. But for us old timers, it happens more than we like to admit. Doesn’t matter if we have our list and checked it twice, there is always something that we forget after hearing some nagging voice from the other room asking if you got the toothpaste, or enough food to cook well balanced meals for the week. Hey, I remembered to add extra cookies and ice cream, what more do you need?

Anyway, that is kind of how it feels when revisiting the Top 25 Second Baseman for 2021 Fantasy. Everything that was on the shopping list was added to the cart, especially the protein, vegetables and fruits. Knowing I had enough food to prepare some good meals, I paid for everything, got home and then heard that voice from the other room, “are you sure you remembered everything?” Hmmm, did I get enough dairy and grains? Do I like the dairy and grains that I got?

After coming home from the grocery store and putting everything up and feeling good about myself, that voice from the other room asked “Dylan Moore doesn’t make your top 25? Speed is real but hitting a fluke last year?” Crud, did I overlook that block of cheddar cheese at the store? In short, yes. I’m still not sold on Moore. But he is deserving of a spot in the Top 25. So let’s examine Moore a bit further.

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Unlike some lists, I don’t have some big introductory explanation here. I trust you grasp the premise and intend to skip this paragraph, but if I still have your eyes for the moment, I’ll say I imagine a start-up build for a 15-team, 2-catcher dynasty league when parsing through the lists and try to explain when a player’s value varies based on settings. If you’re in a contention window, your rankings should look a bit different than they’d look on the front end of a rebuild. I’ll flag some players along the way for whom the disparity in value can get especially large from build to build.

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Look, I’m not going here and pretend that this love letter to Gleyber Torres is something you haven’t read before on any other site. It’s quite well known by now that Torres is the de facto “rebound” selection going into the 2021 season. I guess everyone knows that Torres had a pretty terrible 2020. What this post presupposes is… maybe he didn’t? Look, I’m not going to be that guy, since I’m not nearly brave enough to, and go full contrarian here, but I think it’s still worth looking a bit more on what makes Torress so primed for that breakout, if the analysis out there matches some basic litmus tests, and the idea that if this player truly is the rebound avatar that everyone loves to have, how much should you really pay for him? That and more after the jump!

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The utility hitting position in fantasy baseball can be used in two different ways:

The “Matt Stairs” – This approach is using the position the same way Matt Stairs used baseball teams, as a revolving door. Stairs played for 12 different teams during his career always finding a new way to be useful.  In this strategy, the Utility position in the lineup is used to plug in the most useful player for that particular day whether based on matchup, hot streak or just plain guessing.
The “Edgar Martinez” – This approach is all about set it and forget it. Just like Edgar Martinez for most of his career, this strategy looks to bring in the most impactful player for the position.  What this approach will lose in flexibility for the roster, it will look to gain in production.

There is not a right or wrong strategy and often the best strategy will not be known until the ebb and flow of draft day opens an opportunity to follow one of these strategies.  In today’s column we are going to focus on two players that fit into the latter of these strategies due to their positional inflexibility.

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Howdy, folks!

Thanks for tuning in for my next weekly project: tracking all them ding dang injuries. I’m transitioning from transactions to trauma. From moves to maladies. From signings to sickness. From business to band-aids. From…that’s all I got.

Don’t we all love injuries? What would fantasy sports be without all those cute lil’ red “DTD”s and “IL”s and “O”s and “Q”s sprinkled all over our lineup pages?

I jest, of course. F*** injuries. Nothing sours your fantasy GM mojo like freakin’ injuries. Last year was banonkers (bananas + bonkers = banonkers) with COVID, and we’re already getting some of that fun as Spring Training kicks off. I keep seeing stuff about this wild California strain, and if there’s any proof in that pudding, then we could very well be in for a lot more COVID fun in 2021. I mean, we will be anyway, but this could compound it further. Joy.

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I look out my window and see piles of snow, covered in a strange sheet of ice, and yet, I can smell it in the air – baseball. I’ll be here covering the rest of season rankings for third base this year. In order to get to the ROS part of the rankings, we have to establish our starting point. I’m not here to give you hOt TaEks just to generate outrage and clicks. My purpose is to help you win your league this year. If you have questions or comments, please feel free to reach out and we’ll get these trophies together. Without further chatter, let’s get to my initial rankings.

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Choosing fantasy baseball players is a little bit like choosing who to marry. In both cases, we’re making a commitment to somebody while trying to make our best prediction of the future using incomplete and sometimes unquantifiable data. I know, they’re not completely the same. Unless you’re the most polyamorous m’fer around, you’re probably not choosing 50 people to marry one year and then starting all over again a year later. But to each their own. Listen, the point is that we have to engage in some level of risk assessment in both of these situations. 

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The best 2021 fantasy baseball team is a misnomer. Thankfully, none of us know what misnomer means. Sounds to me like someone tentatively wants to date the Travelocity Gnome’s daughter, “Miss Gnome, er, you wanna grab some boba and chill?” Miss Gnome brushes back her hair and bats her eyelashes that are almost as long as her two-and-half foot body, “I’d love to,” but her voice is high-pitched, which is a turn-off, so you cancel plans with her repeatedly until she gets the hint. Sorry, Miss Gnome, I like my women’s voices low like their stature. Any hoo! So the title is a bit of a superlative. What was I gonna say, “The Mostly Kinda Good Fantasy Baseball Team?” You’ll get over your scoffing; I have faith in you. This is the best 2021 fantasy baseball team that I can put together when drafting from my top 100 for 2021 fantasy baseball and top 500 for 2021 fantasy baseball. Honestly, I could draft another 25 teams from those lists, and they’d all be different, but equally terrific… Well, one of the twenty-five would only be sorta terrific, but it would be really hard to tell which one that is. If I took Adalberto Mondesi in the 2nd round, everything after would change. If I took Trea Turner in the 1st round, everything after would change. I’ve previously gone over my 2021 fantasy baseball draft prep for the first few rounds and pitchers pairings.  For this exercise, I’m taking Cody Bellinger in the first, because, well, people complained previously I always did this post by taking the first pick, so I’m switching it up, like when you combover your hair right instead of left. Last year in my “Best Fantasy Baseball Team” post, I took Tatis with my 1st pick, when ESPN was telling you to draft him 43rd overall. Cust kayin’. Until pick 100, I’m taking one guy somewhere in every fifteen picks. It would be nice if I was in a league where someone drafted Gerrit Cole and deGrom in the first round and I was able to take Trevor Story in the 2nd round (which is likely in some leagues), but since Bellinger and him are in my first 12 picks, according to the rules I’ve set up for myself, I can’t take them both. Then, as we all know, once you get into the 100s, there’s wide gaps between ADP and where players are actually taken. People tend to look at team need over value. So for this exercise, once I get to pick #101, I’m going to pick two players every twenty picks. Finally, because there is so much latitude in the latter rounds, I gave myself free rein to fill up my team after pick 200. Throughout the draft, I also gave myself the ability to reach to a lower draft pick, but not reach forward. Or reach around, if you’re feeling frisky. It should still be my ideal team…or not. Let’s see, shall we? Bee tee dubya, this team is a 12-team, 5×5, one catcher, 5 OFs, MI, CI, 1 UT, 9 P, 3 bench, just like the Razzball Commenter Leagues (go sign up, you Big Chungus).  Anyway, here’s the best 2021 fantasy baseball team:

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