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Mmmmmm, look at dem sexy graphics!

The inaugural draft of the Team-Based Razzball Elite League concluded this Sunday, full of mystery, intrigue and MURDER! As in, I’m gonna murder the Phillies for sniping Amir Garrett at the end there, stupid rebuilding NL teams!

REL teams in the initial season began with keeping 17 players on their active roster, leaving 8 remaining spots to be filled with a $100 auction budget. Scrubs going for mad cash! It was a draft we’re likely never going to see anything quite like again, as every following season is a 3-round supplemental snake… I’m going to always cherish the inaugural REL auction draft!

As with the REL Hoops League, yearly winners will get their pennant retired on the footer graphic and is my new primary goal every fantasy baseball season. Get that Brewers ink up on the rafters! Unfortunately it’s going to take a season or two of rebuilding to even be in the conversation, but I’ve never done a full rebuild in a dynasty before! Should be fun…

We’ll be posting updates once a week during the regular season, giving the other 29 REL GMs and myself a chance to recap their past week and explain their decisions. We’ve already gotten some big trades in the NL! Here’s how the draft went down and what the REL owners think about their year one teams:

Please, blog, may I have some more?

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See all of today’s starting lineups

# MLB Starting Lineups For Tue 8/5
ARI | ATH | ATL | BAL | BOS | CHC | CHW | CIN | CLE | COL | DET | HOU | KC | LAA | LAD | MIA | MIL | MIN | NYM | NYY | PHI | PIT | SD | SEA | SF | STL | TB | TEX | TOR | WSH | OAK

Last week, we covered why you should join a RCL, so this week, let’s start covering what to do once you’re in there.  To be honest, most all of this has been covered somewhere on the site over the years, most often by Rudy.  If you haven’t been playing in RCLs though, I could see how some of this has been glossed over, so I’ll try to consolidate some info for the newbies.

I’d like to preface that I’m no expert in the matter.  I loved Ralph’s line from a couple weeks back when talking about dynasty leagues and I think the same applies to me here.  “See, here’s the thing, I’m not so much an expert as I am avid player.” Bingo.  I’ve finished in the top 20 of the master standings a couple times and won the ECFBL in a year when it had the highest league competitive index.  It’s not nothing, but far from expert.  With that out of the way, let’s jump right into the nitty gritty.

The first and most important item in competing for a top spot in these leagues is TIME.

Please, blog, may I have some more?

Astros announced that Lance McCullers would start the year on the DL.  Just like a Mick to skip out on work on St. Patty’s Day.  Keeping an eye on you, Andrew McCutchen!  At least we don’t have to start the year with tears for Fiers.  Everybody wants to rule the Astros rotation!  With it being announced that McCullers would start the year on the DL, I dropped him 15 spots in my starting pitcher ranks and lowered his projections.  He’s now in the top 60 starters vs. the top 40 starters.  He’s a young pitcher with a shoulder issue, so if you take my previous excitement and divide it by my current hesitation, you get the entire Angels team dancing on the head of a pin.  Okay, my math might be off there, but I’m trying to weigh my current cautious optimism with my realistic pessimism.  Anyway, here’s what else I saw in spring training for fantasy baseball:

Please, blog, may I have some more?

What a time to be alive! Baseball season is finally within reach! Not in reach, like your delusional mind is telling you about the girl you’ve been obsessed with since junior high and have been in the friend zone ever since waiting for your chance to strike (you’ve got to be realistic about these things), but actually happening! Jay(Wrong), the greatest editor in all of fantasy sports and the Weasley to my Harry Potter, has been up my a** like a 12-inch butt plug about me getting in my content, so here you have it! Ask and you shall receive my goodmen! Today, I tell the tale of the storied third base position. It seems the position has fallen on harder times than Nicolas Cage, as I didn’t respect any of the players outside the top-10 enough to even write about them in the disgrace section. NOT EVEN WORTHY OF DISGRACE? To attempt to put into words how insane that is; that would be beyond my comprehension and would take up my entire day. Or maybe if I had slept a wink last night instead of popping perks with this nice Chinese gal I met at the casino, I’d be able to properly explain. Such is life.

Please, blog, may I have some more?

Ever get an invitation to a party you shouldn’t have been invited to? You know, like that IQ party you got invited to junior year of college, because you dated way outside your social circle, and spent 6 months with the hot girl from the rockets and brain surgery school. You had no idea how you got there, but there you were, with the future rocket scientists and Ben Carsons of America. Hopefully you wore your largest belt buckle to protect you from the brain surgeon’s steely knives, and also steered clear of any conversations involving jet propulsion, or other “rocketry”. So why am I asking you to dig through the painful cobwebbed recesses of your brain? Because I found myself in a similar position just a few short weeks ago, and was hoping to draw upon your ability to feel empathy. I know, look at me treating you like a fully developed well rounded adult. What can I say? I think highly of you. But why this long diatribe, begging for empathy? Because I somehow weaseled my way into the Couch Managers Expert Mock with some rather reputable names. People like Adam Ronis, Mike Gianella, and you know yada, yada, yada, I’m in the draft. Me!….Ralph, the Prospector, or whatever I am, so here’s my team..

Please, blog, may I have some more?

With another week of Spring Training behind us, teams are starting to ramp up efforts to decide who wins positional battles, spots in the starting rotation, seats on the bench, and roles in the bullpen. There were no huge injuries this week, but as always, a few nicks and cuts here and there which could end up costing a guy a starting job or a key spot on a team.

Please, blog, may I have some more?

Yo, yo, yo, it’s Money Makin’ Manhattan back again, or as the ladies call me Mmm… I just made the milkshake of Googling “mmm meaning.”  I made that milkshake even though I know what it means.  I also will be using milkshake instead of mistake as a subtle protest to Apple’s autocorrect.  Siri, you made the milkshake of messing with me!  I thought mmm just meant a sound when you’re enjoying something.  Only Google told me, “MMM means Expression of pleasure or contentment, My Main Men, Marjories and Maureens Meanderings, Manual Mind Melt, Mad Minute Monday.”  That then sent me on a two-hour journey around the internet trying to figure out what everything after ‘contentment’ means in that definition.  Are Marjories and Maureens Meanderings nomadic feminist thoughts like, “I could use directions, but Waze’s development team was 100% men and I’m not using it?”  I have a theory that at some point in the future, likely when we’re all dead and gone, people will no longer speak in words, but will only talk in acronyms.  Yes, essentially, everyone will be like the little girl in Sleepless in Seattle that grew up to not shave her armpits on Transparent and Girls.  Potatoes to chips, I’m gonna keep this Head-to-Head fantasy baseball draft strategy so succinct that it could be written on the back of a CVS receipt and still have room for a grocery list for a family of five.  Assuming the family of five has shopped in the previous two months.  If said family was in Breckenridge for a skication, and are just getting home before Rascal, Tommy and Clarafeen have to go back to school, then their shopping list might be too long to fit.  Now if they’re just getting back from Breckenridge and are bringing food with them in coolers that they accumulated over the skication, then there might still be enough room.  More or less contingent on accumulated food and their level of hunger.  Fangraphs has a formula to figure this out.  It converts a CSV table into a CVS receipt.  Quite revolutionary.  I’m surprised Carson Cistulli didn’t mention it in his 250,000 word Wikipedia entry.  Whose Wikipedia page is longer Cistulli or Rosa Parks?  I mean, all she did was refuse to switch seats, Carson hosts a podcast!  Head-to-Head, or H2H, doesn’t change a lot for our 2016 fantasy baseball rankings.  There are 300 billion suns in the Milky Way galaxy.  There are 100s of billions of galaxies in the universe.  There are at least 256,000 planets exactly like Earth.  Yet, there’s only one Mike Trout.  (Though Trike Mout on Planet Spoonerism is pretty good too.  Not a first rounder though.)  H2H doesn’t change that.  The strategy for playing in the middle of the season in H2H leagues changes.  You aren’t hoping Eric Hosmer hits 20 homers by October, but whether or not he’ll hit a homer on Sunday or if you should sit him for Jarrod Dyson to try to win steals.  It’s all about the matchups, y’all!  So you want to build a team that can match up well with any other team.  (FYI, I’ve gone over this stuff before, but some of you might need a pine tree refresher hung from your rear view.)  Anyway, here’s my head-to-head draft strategy:

Please, blog, may I have some more?

On Tuesday March 8th, I had the honor of taking part in the Tout Wars Mixed League Snake Draft for the second straight year. Last year, I finished in 2nd place after a brutal September (one spot above 3rd place Grey who will be taking part in Tout Wars NL-only this year!).

There’s no place to go except up, down, or finish in the same spot.

Before I break into the recap, here are two unique differences between this Tout Wars draft and the LABR mixed draft I recapped earlier this preseason:

  1. This is 5×5 OBP not standard 5×5 (w/ AVG). Otherwise it’s generally the same (NFBC roster format of C/C/1B/2B/SS/3B/OF/OF/OF/OF/OF/CI/MI/UTIL/9 P/6 bench)
  2. There was a requirement that we needed to draft a ‘starting 23’ before reserve rounds – e.g., you couldn’t wait until the last couple rounds to draft your 2nd catcher.

Here are the results of the 2016 Tout Wars Mixed League Draft. (If you hate reading, here’s a podcast with my pal Alan Harrison at The Fantasy Fix where I talk about Tout Wars and other things) I suggest opening it another tab while reading this post. Apologies it isn’t all pretty and color-coded but OnRoto.com doesn’t support that yet.

My team:

Please, blog, may I have some more?

Bringin’ in da star powah! Today on the Razzball Baseball Pod we discuss sleeper hitters who could vault into the second round by 2017, which Grey of course uses as yet another platform to talk about Delino DeShields. We get it already! This has become madness… (Speaking of madness, come and join the Razzball Basketball Tourney Pool!) We then interview Top Chef Season 1 Winner Harold Dieterle and get a behind-the-scenes look at the show and a more in-depth explanation of why you can’t make “faux gras” in 3 hours. Grey is so multi-lingual with his French! Then we wrap up with some news and notes since our last show, including some early standouts through the first few weeks of Spring Training. Here’s our latest edition of the Razzball Baseball Podcast:

Download from iTunes

Please, blog, may I have some more?

Like the 2nd basemen to target, this is necessary.  You want to take flyers on late middle infielders.  I like a few top shortstops this year:  Lindor, Seager and Correa, but if you don’t get them, don’t sweat it and definitely don’t ‘panic reach’ for another shortstop just because you feel like you need one.  This is a (legal-in-all-countries-except-Lichtenstein) supplement to the top 20 shortstops for 2016 fantasy baseball.  The players listed have a draft rank after 200 on other sites.  Click on the player’s name where applicable to read more and see their 2016 projections.  Anyway, here’s some shortstops to target for 2016 fantasy baseball:

Please, blog, may I have some more?

Something dawned on me the other day while partaking in the annual CBS Expert Auction League run by Scott White (which I’ll be recapping later in the week), and it’s this: Evan Longoria is readily available for the taking this year. This was also confirmed by the fact that I’ve netted him in several RCLs (you can still join a league here!) pretty late as well, and really, the only reason that I ran into him at all is because I was looking for Chase Headley for my eventual bottom-feeding phase of the draft. How Longoria has ruined everything that I know and love! I should admit, Fantasy Baseball has probably moved behind Fantasy Football when it comes to my priorities, and seeing as there is only so much real estate in my head, it could also be fair to say that I haven’t kept myself up to speed with a lot of the everyday minutiae of Major League Baseball. So in the drafts where I was able to net Longoria pretty late, each time I would glance at his stat page and try to figure out what was so wrong with him before selecting him. And, spoiler-alert! I couldn’t really find anything glaring. No injury, no erosion of skills, etc. Obviously, there isn’t much that can glare back at you in a window of a minute-and-a-half (in this case, with several drafts, multiple minute-and-a-halves, which, coincidentally, is how I also describe my love-making) from a player page, so I wanted to take this journey of discovery and figure out exactly why Evan Longoria has fallen out of favor, and quite possibly find some kind of redeeming quality that confirms my value-pick will actually bring some sort of “value”. Or I’ll just find out that I totally effed all of my teams by drafting a dud. What an adventure! (In other words, my Alka Seltzer is on standby…)

Please, blog, may I have some more?