After drudging through an Andy Dufresne-type tunnel for the top 20 catchers for 2017 fantasy baseball, I find myself with a group that actually really hurt or helped your team depending on how you drafted.  If you went wrong with your 1st baseman, it could kill your season.  Hey, Miguel Cabrera, no hard feelings from me, because I didn’t own you.  You prolly got some splainin’ to do to your owners though.  If you went right, you might’ve won your league.  Two years ago, I said offense was making a comeback.  This year, I say, you prophetic son of a B, darn tootin’ offense is making a comeback.  How’d you get so handsome and wise, though not wise enough to answer a question posed by yourself?  Lots of guys on this list not only did well, but did better than their preseason projections.  Offense is in full swoon, like Our Commissioner Manfred is swooning with the guy who wrapped the baseballs a little bit tighter.  To recap, this final ranking is from our Fantasy Baseball Player Rater with my comments.  Anyway, here’s the top 20 1st basemen for 2017 fantasy baseball and how they compared to where I originally ranked them:

Please, blog, may I have some more?

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See all of today’s starting lineups

# MLB Starting Lineups For Sun 8/3
ARI | ATH | BAL | BOS | CHC | CHW | CLE | COL | DET | HOU | KC | LAA | LAD | MIA | MIL | MIN | NYM | NYY | PHI | PIT | SD | SEA | SF | STL | TB | TEX | TOR | WSH | ATL | CIN | OAK

What a year! What a league! What can I say about the Razz30 that hasn’t already been said about the worst parts of Detroit? We’re a tire on fire rolling down that steep hill road in San Francisco that I’m too lazy to google the name of. The year with this bunch was so many things, electric, distracting, all consuming, infuriating, and eye-opening. Did you know that Tentacle Porn is a thing? Like pornography with women and (I’m hoping) phony octopus (octopi) and the like. My skin is crawling even thinking of this, but that’s what this band of ragtag misfits provides. Constant amazement. Stomach turning sharing aside, this group known as the Crabs are a family like no other. Mostly because it’s a bunch of 25-45 year old men on the internet talking about tentacle porn. Normal families don’t do that. But still we’re way more than a fantasy league. We’re a source of constant entertainment for one another. Each serves their place in the well balanced environment. But at the end of the day we’re one damn good fantasy league. That is, if you like super deep rosters, constant chatting, Game of Thrones, and highly technical gooch maintenance. In today’s post we’ll cover our usual shenanigans, and the exciting last two months of league play. We had an exciting stretch run (not really), and MLB style head to head playoffs, where the Cleveland Indians emerged victorious. Before we get started, CLAWS UP!!!

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Well, that’s a wrap on the Razzball Commenter Leagues everyone.  Twenty-six weeks down and now we have twenty-six more until the start of next year’s fantasy baseball season.  It’s perfect symmetry, because fantasy baseball is the perfect fantasy sport.  Speaking of perfect, Returning Champ went near perfect on us in route to an overall Championship.  This ties for the second highest finish in RCL history with Rank Railheads of 2012 Championship fame.  Returning Champ really rakes it in, winning themselves a $250 Best Buy gift card!  More importantly though, Returning Champ gets a Razzball T-Shirt and RCL glory.  Who can put a price on that?  Oh, it’s $25, well then, moving on.  I don’t believe Returning Champ has checked in via comments at all this year, but now would be the time.  It’s time to heap on the praise and accept your congratulations.  Personally, I’ve been curious all year where the Champ has returned from.  Is this a previous RCL winner or were they just lost at sea?  I have questions!  Either way, Returning Champ fended off some very tough competitors this year to claim the RCL crown.  Cram It gave it a run, Grey was pushing for a top spot for awhile there and an army of RCL robots invaded the standings as well.  This is Returning Champ’s moment though, so hopefully they show up, take a bow and soak it up, they earned it.  Here’s what else what happened this year and this final week of the RCLs:

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It feels like just the other day the baseball regular season started.  You wrote “I heart baseball” in permanent marker on your arm, then you met a girl who wrote “I heart guys who heart baseball” on her arm, then, during sex in July, you screamed out, “Give it to me, Giancarlo!” and now you don’t have baseball or a girlfriend.  C’mon, calendar, make like a soldier and turn to March.  The only cure for the post-baseball season blues — recapping the preseason top twenty lists and being hand-fed Doritos.  First up, Cool Ranch and our preseason Top 20 Catchers for 2017.  It’s important to look back before we look ahead to 2018.  To paraphrase the one and only B-Real, “How do you know where you’re at, if you don’t know where you’ve been? Understand where I’m coming from?”  (If you missed it, I interviewed B-Real last year on our podcast, though that might not have been as good as our Jose Canseco interview.)  It wouldn’t be fair for me to preseason rank the players, then rank them again in the postseason based on my opinion, so these postseason top 20 lists are ranked according to our Fantasy Baseball Player Rater.  It’s cold hard math, y’all!  Please, for the love that all is holy, don’t ask me if this is for next year.  Anyway, here’s the top 20 catchers for 2017 fantasy baseball and how they compared to where I originally ranked them:

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“The waiting is the hardest part”

-Tom Petty

Tom Petty might not have been a fantasy baseball fan, but I think the above quote can accurately sum up the feelings of a majority us with the 2017 fantasy baseball season officially over. I’m already strategizing for my hometown dynasty auction draft that is six months away. I was going to open this write-up with another one of Petty’s famous lyrics, “It’s time to move on, time to get going,” but Razzball isn’t going anywhere over the off-season, starting with today’s podcast which recaps the 2017 fantasy baseball season. Grey Albright, Ralph Lifshitz, and myself discuss our fantasy MVP’s, LVP’s, and Cy Young’s. And of course, we talk about our love for Tom Petty. Finally, please make sure to support our sponsor by heading over to RotoWear.com and entering promo code “SAGNOF” for 15% off the highest quality t-shirts in the fantasy sports game. It’s the latest edition of the Razzball Fantasy Baseball Podcast:

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Welcome back for another star-studded event!  Assuming you hack into your favorite online dictionary and replace the definition of ‘star’ with “guy who lives in his mom’s basement and screams when someone finishes his Doritos,” and next to the definition of ‘stud’ you put a picture of yourself.  The Razzballies are the only award show where it’s totally fine to show up in sweatpants, and for your fingers to be orange from Cheetos.  We don’t judge.  We will occasionally mock.  Mock-judge, tomato-tomahto.  Get over it!  But don’t mock Judge, that’s not all right.  I hope you enjoyed the clip show where I inserted myself into various baseball clips from this year.  How about the clip where I was Jason Kipnis watching his team win every game he missed?  Hee-lar-e-us!  So, before I’m talking to no one but a room full of seat-fillers, here’s the year-end awards for the best and worst of fantasy baseball:

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Yesterday….yesterday….yesterday….
All my fantasy baseball championship titles seemed so far away.
Now it looks as though one is here to stay *sung in a very fast voice* oh, crap, nope, because I didn’t draft Daniel Murphy because he didn’t believe in the lifestyle of a gay,
Oh, why didn’t I believe in Murphy like he didn’t believe in a…gay…gay…gay.
Suddenly!  David Price’s arm is not half of what it used to be.
There’s a shadow hanging over me,
Oh, it’s Giancarlo’s groin that I made of plaster of Paris to admire and it just exploded in paste on me…Suddenly!
Why the season had to go, I don’t know, it wouldn’t say… because it can’t talk, it’s a baseball season that ended yesterday…yesterday…yesterday!
Fantasy Baseball was such an easy game to play,
Now I need a mother’s basement to hide away.
Oh, I believe in yesterday…day…day.

*sniffles*  Here, take a tissue.  You have to excuse me, I don’t have any clean ones.  What will we do for the next few months without an update on a Mets’ pitcher elbow?  Will Rougned Odor reveal he was accidentally batting while crossing his eyes and that’s why he barely hit .200?  What will we do without a James Paxton injury update?  WHAT?  WILL?  WE?  DO?  Prepare for next season, of course.  But, first, let’s bask in the last day of the season.  Today is the day when you realize you’ve spent 27,000 man hours this summer beating eleven other strangers to win a virtual trophy, and it feels great!  Anyway, here’s what else I saw this weekend in fantasy baseball:

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It’s the last day of fantasy baseball. Bummer… I know, I don’t want to talk about it either, but I’ve run out of ways to open posts at this point in the season. So, I’m going to just state the obvious, and awkwardly fumble into the purpose of this pointless, yet verbose opening. I have a surprise for you, a sneak peak if you will of my forthcoming memoir “Fights & Prospects: Life as a Crab & The Top 100 Prospect List”. I’ve decided in an effort to market myself as a Rick Flair-esque persona, I’m going to write a tell all autobiography. Only I’m not going to talk about myself at all, but simply give you an updated Top 100 next Sunday. Today is the first ten from that list. So the Top 10 Prospects for 2018 Fantasy Baseball if you will. Titles are fun! It’s drawing heavily from my Positional ranks that we just finished, and bridges the gap to the Top 100 and beyond. In closing, thanks for reading this season, and remember to check here for prospects rundowns for all 30 MLB systems throughout the off-season.

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It’s the second-last day of the regular season, and I feel like I’m back at Opening Day, there’s such a smorgasbord of pitchers to roll around in (so to speak): Kluber (vs. the White Sox, $12,000), Scherzer (vs. the Pirates, $10,800), Kershaw at—important couple of letters, those—the Rockies, $9,600), Archer (vs. the Orioles, $9,300). They’re all so famous we need use only their last names. Of the 4 listed here, Kluber will bankrupt you, and I’m leery of Kershaw in Colorado, and also of Archer, given his last outing versus the Orioles, so how about for our very last Saturday <sob> [Sidebar: Thanks for reading, all these weeks! It’s been a slice. Feel free to come hang with me on Twitter and we’ll get through the cold, dark hell of the off-season together], we go old-school with ol’ Blue-Green Eyes and run out Max Scherzer at home versus the Pirates? Let’s look at some more options for our final Fan(Duel)-tasy together.

New to FanDuel? Scared of feeling like a small fish in a big pond? Well, be sure to read our content and subscribe to the DFSBot  for your daily baseball plays. Just remember to sign up through us before jumping into the fray. It’s how we know you care!

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I would say the 2017 end-of-season first base prospect rankings are filled with underrated prospects, but to be a first base prospect is to be underrated. Ralph Lifshitz and I attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff in this very hard to separate group, debating Yordan Alvarez vs. Bobby Bradley, Brent Rooker vs. Peter Alonso, and how much power we expect Pavin Smith and Jake Bauers to develop. We both sour on Brendan McKay, and fawn over Nick Pratto. We discuss everyone from Chris Shaw, Ronald Guzman, and Dan Vogelbach, to Edwin Rios, Lewin Diaz, Evan White, Josh Naylor, Cristian Santana, and many more. Finally, please make sure to support our sponsor by heading over to RotoWear.com and entering promo code “SAGNOF” for 15% off the highest quality t-shirts in the fantasy sports game. It’s the latest edition of the Razzball Fantasy Baseball Prospect Podcast:

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Much like the famous Doors song that shares it’s name, bullpens are drawing near.  (Minus the Oedipus complex that the song explores.)  I mean, it may… but that is gross and I don’t wanna associate my bullpen goodies to that.  Moving on, shall we?  This year has been the SAGNOF-fest that we always come to expect.  Closers up, closers down.  Trades and attrition.  It happens every single year and it is the reason why the waiver wire is what it is: So we can get the new third closer for the Twins.  The chase for saves never ends, well, I mean it ends for season-long leagues, but for dynasty and keeper leagues, the times never change.  Saves are a category.  A deeply hated and often cursed at category that will always be debated about.  Whether or not to invest earlier picks then normal to get a stud, or just fill in with hope-so’s and also rans.  There unfortunately is no right or wrong answer because both strategies work as long as you are a waiver goblin.  So with the final post of the year, much like the other years that I have done this, we look to next year…  This year’s counting stats and information don’t matter, we want to know what lies on the horizon. So let’s find out!

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This is it! The last article of the year, the end of the baseball season. I want to thank you, loyal readers for taking time out of your day to read this article every week and hopefully helping you win some contests. There are going to be a lot of players who wind up sitting and there’s going to be a lot of value opening up throughout the day so you must pay attention to all the released lineups. Additionally, many teams, both those with nothing to play for, and those who playoff-bound but are entirely set in terms of playoff positioning, will look to pull their players (both pitchers and position players) at the earliest opportunity. In short, there will be a lot of randomness and it won’t be easy to predict. Although I’m going to try my best to recommend some players and teams that I like today, one general piece of advice I can give is to focus on the teams that still have something to play for – the Red Sox, Brewers, Rockies, and arguably the Indians and Astros. The first three are the only teams we can be fully sure will play their guys as normal. To be honest – if someone showed me a cash lineup today that featured mostly players from the Brewers and Rockies (the Red Sox have a marginally tougher matchup than the other three teams), with only a value or punt play here or there from other teams, I wouldn’t talk that person out of that lineup. I’m not saying for sure it will be the way to go, but both the Brewers and the Rockies have good enough matchups (the Rockies are in Coors too), and both have something to play for, something you can’t say about pretty much every other team.

On to the picks as soon as we start the playoffs…

New to FanDuel? Scared of feeling like a small fish in a big pond?  Well be sure to read our content and subscribe to the DFSBot for your daily baseball plays.  Just remember to sign up through us before jumping into the fray. It’s how we know you care!

Please, blog, may I have some more?