Lance

Deep Targets, A Weekend of Drafts

March 27, 2018 | 2023 Fantasy Baseball | 31 Comments

by:

The big draft weekend is over. We made it.

Completing multiple NFBCs has left me broken and tattered; my spirit longing for the season to start and early panic to set in signaling my investment in certain players was clearly too high or low (stupid!).

I was planning on doing a deep sleepers post for my own site, but in an effort to consolidate, I’ve decided to move that to the pantheon that is Razzball.

First, however, I’d like to leave two general thoughts and impressions regarding draft season. I’m particularly interested in whether I’m alone in these observations, whether anybody disagrees, or whether you noticed anything worth mentioning. Comment below, I’d be happy to hear your thoughts.

Please, blog, may I have some more?

Learn more about our 2025 Fantasy Baseball Subscriptions!

The best daily/weekly player rankings/projections (hitters, starters, and relievers) for each of the next 7-10 days + next calendar week starting Friday. Kick-ass DFS lineup optimizer and projections for DraftKings, FanDuel, and Yahoo!.

I don’t have enough spam, give me the Razzball email newsletter!

Weekly Razzball news delivered straight to your inbox.

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

See all of today’s starting lineups

# MLB Starting Lineups For Mon 8/11
ARI | ATH | BOS | CHW | CIN | COL | DET | HOU | KC | LAA | LAD | MIL | MIN | NYY | PHI | PIT | SD | SF | STL | TB | TEX | WSH | ATL | BAL | CHC | CLE | MIA | NYM | OAK | SEA | TOR
MattTruss

RCL Update: At League’s End

March 27, 2018 | Our Leagues, Razzball Commenters League | 16 Comments

by:

We’re really winding down on draft season now, with official games starting on Thursday.  This is the last Tuesday without baseball for some time and I’m giddy about it. We’re sitting at 61 Razzball Commenter Leagues right now and 59 of those have drafted.  Only two of our legacy leagues remain undrafted with Cougs R Us drafting late last night and ECFBL drafting this evening. We’re down a little bit from the past few seasons, but with a major change in the mix I’d say it’s not too shabby.  A lot of people were likely nervous of making a switch and adding yet another fantasy site to the daily check-in routine. I get it, I was that way with the four letter website before I took the plunge. Hopefully, the move to FanTrax won’t keep people away for long, especially when they see how much fun we’re all having!  Speaking of fun, I had fun going over the new and improved ADP data by taking a look at the ADPs of all Grey’s Sleepers. Even though the ADP Sheet is Razzball-centric it can still give you some interesting tidbits of information.  So, let’s do some last minute cramming for those final drafts and see what we can see.

Please, blog, may I have some more?
VictoriaB

Razzball DFS HQ: What’s On DRAFT

March 27, 2018 | DFS, Draft, DraftKings, Fanduel, FantasyDraft |

by:

In a week where I’ve had 4 roto drafts (so far! I may yet get roped into more!), I don’t want to stop. I have momentum. I have spreadsheets of such intricate detail it would make a mandala-making monk cry. If only there were a way to keep drafting every single damn day. Even after the season has started. And to win money doing it.

…But wait! There is! It’s called DRAFT.com and I’m going to tell you about it!

Please, blog, may I have some more?
Grey

NFBC, 15 Team, Draft Recap: You Can’t Not Draft Giancarlo, Double Negatives Be Damned!

March 27, 2018 | Our Leagues | 389 Comments

by:

This draft is a crock pot vs. a microwave.  A love sesh vs. a ‘hold the moan.’  A nature hike vs. “I’m gonna sit in the car as we drive past some mountains.”  Guys and five girl readers, it’s a slow draft.  This slow draft took about fifteen days, 18 hours, four minutes and–okay, only a lunatic counts seconds.  Not almost 15 days of straight drafting, mind you.  I don’t need to ice my clicky finger.  It’s five minutes of drafting, twelve hours of waiting.  It does allow you to second-guess your picks.  Actually, more like triple-guess.  (Who are we kidding, you quadruple-guess, fiveruple-guess, sextruple-guess, ochocinco-guess your picks.) For those not in the know, it’s a weekly, 15-team, two-catcher league that lasts for 50 rounds and there’s no waivers.  Anyway, here’s my NFBC draft recap:

Please, blog, may I have some more?
Jay

The Official 2018 Razzball Picks

March 26, 2018 | Y to Z | 48 Comments

by:

Welcome to another season of Razz-matazz Fantasy Baseball. For those of you wondering, that actually was Grey’s second choice for naming this site, but as you can see, Razzball won out, much to the chagrin of jazz fingers around the world. And just one ball. No multiple balls I guess. Kinda like the opposite of how Hilton didn’t want just one tree. Double that sh*t! But here we are with another year of staff picks. So what’s the goal with this? Hashtag content, baby. (That’s the technical term.) There’s another goal though, one less self-fulfilling, unlike your mother. Despite the modern advancement of technology and science, we still have no way to have every writer provide their extended (or in Tehol’s case, I always hope abbreviated) take on every single player in the MLB. We try though! And so we have this quick-and-easy (I regret burning my “yo momma” joke now…) presentation that provides you, the Razzmatazzball community a viewer-friendly and succinct breakdown of how we feel about the upcoming season.

So without further ado, here are our Official 2018 Razzball Picks!

Please, blog, may I have some more?
Smokey

SAGNOF Report: Never Too Early For Advantages

March 26, 2018 | SAGNOF | 9 Comments

by:

The Spring has sprung and real baseball is here!  That fake stuff and all its glorious research has come to a head and later this week, that team that you built will go to battle.  Don’t go into battle with a little extra ammo in your tool belt though.  We all know who the steals candidates are and where to draft them by now.  The names are familiar, and if you drafted them, you are hoping the results that they have promised with our expectations.  My post this week is instead taking a look at the reflexive of the actual base stealers, and since the end of this week we’ll actually have counting stats, why not look at the pitchers and catchers that have the propensity to give up the most frequent of thievery?  It is often a very overlooked facet of the game.  We always see the counting stats of the perennial stolen base leaders, but never hear a peep about the pitchers who give up the most, or the catchers that are god awful at throwing them out.  I get that other forces of baseball nature encompass both of those factors of caught stealing and pitchers tendencies for base thefts, but if numbers don’t lie, let’s take a look at them and see who has the “better”chance for giving up the stat.  So here is this week’s SAGNOF report, basically picking on guys who do nothing but aid us in the stolen base category.  Cheers!

Please, blog, may I have some more?
Grey

Bumgarner Breaks His Engine Throttle Hand

March 26, 2018 | Fantasy Baseball Daily Notes | 425 Comments

by:

I only wish Madison Bumgarner fractured his hand after every single person drafted, because I knew I was never drafting him.  Terrible thing to say?  Perhaps, but I’m not the poor schnook who was still drafting him after I said for the last three months to not draft him.  I even put him in a tier originally in the top 20 starters that said, DO NOT DRAFT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.  Okay, not in that tall of a font, but the sentiment was all over that tier.  I said specifically, “This is just like the above tier, and I will be avoiding it, but rather than the above guys who I actually like, just won’t draft, I do not like the guys in this tier, and would never draft them at their price.  So, while I wouldn’t draft the above guys, I really wouldn’t draft these guys.  Got it?  Cool.”  And that’s me quoting me!  Of course, I can’t claim prescience that I knew he’d be hit by a comebacker, but will I anyway?  Hmm…  Why not?!  Prescience ain’t just a word on my Word of the Day calendar that I got in a Secret Santa!  So, I’ve dropped Bumgarner in the rankings, and adjusted his projections accordingly.  My Fantasy Baseball War Room gets updated on the reg, as well.

Anyway, here’s what else I saw in spring training for 2018 fantasy baseball:

Please, blog, may I have some more?
MattTruss

RCL Update: 2018 Writers League Draft Recap

March 25, 2018 | Our Leagues, Razzball Commenters League | 5 Comments

by:

Twelve fantasy writers in one league and you thought we weren’t going to take this opportunity to hear ourselves talk (type)?  Well, then you thought wrong! We’re all loaded with hot fiyah taeks! This isn’t the ‘Perts League that Grey hosts, this is just anyone that writes for Razzball and wanted to join an RCL.  Way back on Saturday, March 3rd at 9:30pm EST, we all (well, most) settled in for an early season draft. You can check out all the draft results HERE to follow along.  This season’s participants in RCL draft order are:

Dokken – Writer of Team Previews and FanTrax Tips

Jimothy – Writing all about the sleepers you need to know

Yost – The H2H guru

Kerry Klug – The local ambulance chaser

MattTruss – DFS and RCLs are my game

Victoria B – DFS Writer/Editor extraordinaire

MB – Two sport star covering NFL and MLB like a boss

Viz – Our resident Hockey enthusiast

SON – Another two sport star, running the basketball side of Razzball and writing Team Previews for MLB

Laura Holt – Deep and Only leagues are her jam

Smokey – Our soccer wizard and baseball SAGNOF expert

Phil B. – OPS is his bag

Now you know who is in the league, next we’ll hear what they had to say about it.  I interviewed each writer with some questions; some personal and some generic and here’s what they had to say:

Please, blog, may I have some more?
Dokken

2018 Fantasy Baseball Team Previews: Tampa Bay Rays

March 25, 2018 | Fantasy Baseball Team Previews | 7 Comments

by:

Welcome to Razzball’s 2018 team previews. As we’ve been doing the last few months, we’ll be previewing all of the teams and talking to writers who represent those teams around the web. We want to provide the best and most in-depth fantasy projections to go along with the asking the most useful questions to those who know their teams best. We want to talk about the players in the first half of your draft and also the deep sleepers that make you log into google and start watching Midwest Single-A ball for hours. Just kidding, don’t do that, hopefully we don’t go that far…

Well, it’s been an offseason, hasn’t it Rays fans? It’s hard enough to compete with the likes of the Yankees and Red Sox in general, but the Rays also have to do it with one of the lowest payrolls in MLB. They have shipped off the likes of Evan Longoria, Jake Odorizzi, and Steven Souza. They even went so far as to DFA Corey Dickerson, who was eventually dealt to Pittsburgh. They lost Lucas Duda and Logan Morrison in free agency, who hit a combined 68 home runs in 2017. They lost Brent Honeywell and Jose De Leon to Tommy John surgery already this spring. Sounds like they should just put the Trop up for sale and pack it in, right? Well, you’d think this season would look like a total dumpster fire, but they did bring in CJ Cron, Carlos Gomez, and (I guess he bears mentioning) Denard Span. In fact, PECOTA actually has the Rays winning 83 games, which would put them in the Wild Card game according to their projections. The Rays will be a very interesting team to watch this year, but for fantasy purposes we turn to Adam Sanford of DRays Bay to illuminate us on some of the most interesting situations in Tampa.

Please, blog, may I have some more?
Geoff

Top 150 Fantasy Baseball Prospects

March 25, 2018 | Fantasy Baseball Prospects | 60 Comments

by:

We’re moving slower than expected, so instead of the next 100 prospects, I’m cutting it into two posts of 50 prospects. Disappointing? Possibly, but you still got 6500 words to read, ponder, debate. It’s all there for the taking. What am I talking about? Honestly I’m not sure, I’m writing this at 3 AM, delirious from the research, coffee, and myrcene rich leaves. It’s the next bunch of blokes with big dreams and lots of upside for your fantasy roster. I’ve tried to get a little more “groupie”. Wait, what? I tried to group similar types together here. There’s an insane amount of upside guys in this post. So if that’s your jammy jam, you’re going to be pleased. Or maybe not, possibly you’re always grumpy, but that’s not my problem. Editing these posts is my problem! AHHHHHHH PROSPECTS. For the Top 100 Fantasy Baseball Prospects. Here’s the Top 150 Prospects for 2018 Fantasy Baseball:

Please, blog, may I have some more?
Ricky Olshansky

Top Ten Strike Out Pitchers for 2018

March 24, 2018 | 2023 Fantasy Baseball | 15 Comments

by:

Hen (Hen) Ry (Ry) Row (Row) En (En) Gart (Gart) Ner (Ner).  No, Henry Rowengartner is not on this list, but I imagine he would have been if his arm was still broken and his tendons were still too tight.  I could picture the 100 mph fastballs working fairly consistently, but the famous floater pitch that hasn’t been seen since Scuffy McGee wouldn’t last long, even in a 12’’ softball league.  “Ffffunky butt-loving!’ ‘Did he just say funky butt-loving?” Enough about one of my favorite baseball movies from the ‘90s. We’re going to take a look at the top ten pitchers to lead the league in strikeouts for the 2018 season.  Let me know who you like, who I missed, who deserves an honorable mention, etc. Do you want “Big Sexy” Bartolo Colon on the list, because he mesmerizes you with his athletic figure? He would make a great figure skater or rhythmic gymnast, right?  I can’t place him on this list, but he deserves to be on some sort of list somewhere. Maybe I’ll make a list of the ten most entertaining MLB players, I’m sure he’ll make that list. All opinions are welcomed, and encouraged so let’s dive right in and see what happens!  For the purpose of this post, we will be using Grey’s 2018 Pre-Season Projections and FantasyPros ADP.

Please, blog, may I have some more?
Jimothy

Post Draft Pickups: Finding Nimmo

March 24, 2018 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

by:

The season is now just days away… We all have either drafted or are just about to and Spring training positional battles are in their death blows as expected starters have gone down with injuries throughout. Certain players we were excited about are now sitting in one of those DL spots, and we need to find those few players that everyone overlooked during the draft, some that could be nabbed off the waiver wire in a few weeks. I found a handful of players that fit the bill, all of which Grey ranked in the late 200’s or much later. Give these guys a look and consider adding them to fill up those new empty spots before the rest of your league catches on!

Please, blog, may I have some more?