Hello deep leaguers and other Razzball friends, hope September is treating you well. This week, I thought we’d do something a little different, partly because I’m traveling and off the baseball grid, and also because I’ve been reflecting a lot on my 2025 leagues lately, even with almost a month to go in the season. While my head is still in it, I’m really trying to figure out where things went right and others went wrong. I specifically wanted to take a look at one of my leagues that’s gone right, a 15-team, 50-round mixed NFBC draft and hold league where I’ve been in first place for a couple months. Since I usually take a very similar general approach to drafting teams like this, I’m trying to figure out why this one was so much more successful than several of my others. While some pretty decent luck avoiding injuries is a significant part of it, I did do one atypical in this league that I rarely do: draft a top closer. I took Edwin Diaz in round 3, as I was picking out of draft spot #13. Is this why my team is so good? All I know is it sure didn’t hurt in the long run, so I’m looking back over my draft to see if I can figure out if it’s something I might actually consider doing on purpose next year.
First, I’ll say that one thing examining this particular roster did was remind me that the importance of having a stable, if not elit,e closer might be one of the biggest differences between deep and shallow leagues. Even though this league is a mixed 15 teamer, I consider it deep in this sense since it’s the draft and hold format, where you can make roster moves all season, but nary a single free agent pick up. The 50 guys you leave the draft with are your team, and your entire team, all season long. This leads to very early closer runs, and the need to throw all kinds of bullpen darts in an attempt to keep your team competitive in saves.
One of the things that’s interesting to me about this so-far successful team is that my offense is, for lack of a better description, completely mid. I really only have one slam dunk hitter steal, which was Christian Yelich at pick 133. As I’m writing this, he checks in on CBS’s current player list of overall 5×5 roto value at #18. Beyond that, here are the other hitters I took in the first 12 rounds, and the picks I got them as compared to their current spot on that CBS list: Vlad (13/47), Jarren Duran (18/55), C.J. Abrams (48/41), Lawrence Butler (73/104), Luis Garcia (103/159), Luis Rengifo (163/309), and Colton Cowser (168/309). Not so pretty. And the only hitter I drafted that lands in the current top 100 is Yandy Diaz (who I took at 258, and was shocked to see is ranked #67… so along with Yelich, I guess that makes two pretty excellent hitter deals).
My starters are really good, but I only have four that have pitched most or all of the season: Imanaga (my pick #78/CBS rank #161), Joe Ryan (108/56), Bryan Woo (138/42), and Nate Eovaldi (198/40). The back of my rotation was supposed to be Reese Olson, Tobias Myers, and Cody Bradford, so… still not sure how I got away with this few starters. But it is a reminder that there are always going to be some great starting pitcher values even as you start to get deeper into a draft, if only you can find the ones that don’t get hurt (RIP to my multiple shares of Jared Jones this year). It’s also a reminder that it’s not only nice, but also important in my mind, to save some of your picks in the 100-200 range for starters. While I probably should have taken even more shots at SPs in this range, it could have been a lot worse. If I hadn’t drafted Diaz, I would likely have needed to use one of these picks on a closer, and my team would look a look uglier if that closer pick had been at the expense of Ryan, Woo, or Eovaldi.
Then we come to those bullpen dart throws I was talking about, from rounds 19 and beyond: Jason Foley (yikes!), Jose Lopez, Seth Halvorsen, Robert Garcia, Andrew Kittredge, Jose Ferrer, Keegan Akin, and finally Emilio Pagan in round 50, with pick 738. My team is second in saves, and I don’t really have a point to either gain or lose (which is probably a good thing, since after I started writing this, Pagan has had an ugly meltdown and his saves may be numbered to close out 2025). As of the close of August, Pagan had 25 saves and Diaz has 27. Since Pagan has been in my lineup since week 2 or 3, it would seem like he’s way more valuable than Diaz, given his cost. That made me wonder, does getting a solid closer in round 50 make taking Diaz — who I took with pick 43 but who’s currently ranked 97th on that CBS list — in round 3 seem like a waste of draft capital? But once I thought about it, I don’t think it does. Yes, I have a few other guys on my team I could have cobbled saves together from, like Robert Garcia, who has 9. But in order to get those 9 saves, I would have needed him in my lineup all year, which just wouldn’t have been sensible. In a league with weekly transactions, the number of saves your total roster accrues is just never going to be reflected in your active lineup stats. Which brings us back to Diaz. There is really something to be said about the set it and forget nature of having a stud closer in your lineup, especially for those of us who are exhausted by the deep-league closer predictions and search. I think his actual value to my team isn’t fully reflected in that #97 ranking.
Obviously, a big part of taking a closer early is taking the right one. I took Diaz after Mason Miller, Josh Hader, and Emmanuel Clase were off the board, so part of my decision was the luck of Diaz falling to me in the first place. But what I remembered when I went back over this draft was that I’d decided I might consider taking one of these top 5 closers in round three or four, depending on how the draft flow was going. This is mostly because (and I think I talked about this at one point over the off-season), I perceived a kind of dead zone of players at about this spot, where there was about a round and a half of guys I just wasn’t that interested in. I realized it made more sense to grab Diaz in round three plus whichever two hitters and one starter I had targeted in rounds four, five, and six, rather than reaching for a hitter or a starter I wasn’t excited about. It worked out, and my ultimate conclusion is that if I sense a similar dead zone next year, I’ll do it again. I’ll still have to get lucky with the right pick, but it’s really a matter of pairing. In this case, I knew I’d rather have Diaz than, say, Dylan Cease, Gerrit Cole, or Jacob deGrom, who were picked at around the same point, knowing that the several starters I was actually targeting would be around a round or more later.
So, all of this rambling, I guess, is really not just about how valuable Edwin Diaz was to my team specifically, but also about how important it is to map out multiple complete roster pathways with whatever information you have available to you. In my case with this draft, that was the knowledge that there were likely 20 or 25 players that I wasn’t particularly interested in targeting that would be going off the board in rounds three and four. That’s largely what led me to mix things up a bit from what had become my standard game plan, and this particular plan B worked out. If you’ve gotten this far, thanks for reading and following me on my little diversion from our regular programming, and best of luck to all who are still in the hunt for a fantasy pennant!
When I look back and analyze seasons, Laura, it always strikes me that few things factored into my success or failure more than how I handled RP/saves. Everything else you can usually gameplan out with some confidence and predictability, but saves are often just a wildcard.
In my retrospective analysis, I have tried to figure out what the secret to RP/saves is, so I can use that in future years. I have concluded that, as it turns out, the secret is: there is no secret. Nope. The key is, and this is going to sound incredibly stupid, the key is: end up picking the right guys, not the wrong ones. Stupid, right? Sometimes those “right” guys are early round picks, sometimes middle, sometimes late. You just gotta pick (or acquire some other way) the right ones, and not the wrong ones!
This year, you did — you picked a few very right ones (one quite early, but fortunately not too early, and one very late). Congrats on a great season.