As the season quickly winds down, I thought we’d do something a little different this week. Even with a handful of still-competitive leagues that will come down to the wire this year, it’s been hard for me to stop thinking ahead to 2024. It’s never to soon to look at what went right and wrong as a learning tool for the future, so I’m going to take a little dive into one of the more competitive leagues around, Razzball’s own long-standing Night of the Living Zombinos RCL league. As will happen in a daily change league, the standings are still shifting around and lots could change over the next 10 days including my position at the top of the standings, but my team had a great first half and, after a little mid-season lag, a nice late run as well. This squad was still in the RCL Master Standings Top 10 in Truss’ update this week, so I’m equating that alone with an excellent season regardless of how the final standings shake out, and I’m already anxious to see what I did correctly (and/or how much dumb luck was involved) in some ultra-early prep for next year.
One of the things I love about the RCL leagues is the wonderful yet demanding combination of shallow league and deep league strategy one needs to employ to do well. You more or less need to nail your top draft picks, when the world is your oyster and you have almost every player in major league baseball available to choose from. Plus, you’ve got to excel at the day-to-day streams, identifying and rostering the correct rookies that seem to come out of nowhere/veterans that return from oblivion. There’s also the fragile balance of trying to figure out when to drop an underperforming stud/top pick, and how long to hold an overperforming free agent pick up who you were initially only planning on rostering for a day or two.
Okay, getting back to my team in the Zombinos league: it doesn’t take a fantasy analyst or even a seasoned player to quickly draw the logical conclusion that once I, a) was lucky enough to get the second pick of the draft, and b) was lucky enough to draft a fellow by the name of Ronald Acuña Jr. with that pick, I would have almost needed to actively try to tank this team for it not to be successful on some level. This brings us to another question to perhaps think about more deeply another day: has Acuna become a cheat code for 2024? Next year, will having the first pick of a snake draft give you such an advantage over your opponents that every one of them will be faced with a nearly-impossible-to-overcome handicap before the season even starts? Time will tell, I suppose, but I certainly know that having him on my NOLTZ team (my only share this year) gave me a fantasy head start unlike any I remember having in recent memory.
Okay, let’s look at my top five picks: Acuña, Semien, Arozarena, deGrom, Schwarber. That looks like 4 for 5 on the surface, but as ridiculous an overpay 4th round was for 36 innings of deGrom, in a league this shallow it’s not the worst of fates. The innings he actually pitched were stellar, for one thing, and then once he was hurt there were all kinds of options available to replace his spot on my roster. Meanwhile, Schwarber’s insanely bad .197 average as of this week (so much for my preseason theory that he’d benefit from the shift ban with a bunch more hits) normally would have been a major albatross even with his outstanding power production. But between Acuña’s otherworldly average and #2 pick Semien looking like he’ll end this year about 30 points higher than last, I lucked out in terms of his average drain not being much of an issue (also, one other player helped on that front as much as anyone; more on that in a bit). One other surprise in the top 5 that could have been problematic but wasn’t thanks to Mr. Acuña’s ridiculous base running this year: Semien’s relative lack of steals (14 so far this year after 25 last year; once again not what I’d predicted given the new rules).
Rounds 6 through 10 were hit and miss for me. Starling Marte in the 6th sounds bad now, but the 24 bases he stole when he was (sort of ) healthy ended up being pretty important. Zach Wheeler in round 7 was in my opinion one of the most timely picks of my draft; with (at least) 12 wins, over 200 Ks, and beyond solid ratios he truly functioned as my ace after deGrom evaporated. 8th round was Julio Urias: definitely a mistake in retrospect, but looking at his numbers he didn’t pitch as badly as I remembered when he was in my lineup at least. Christian Walker was pick 9, which feels like another grade A value; even with his recent extended slump he’ll end up with 30 homers, a not-horrific average, and a sneaky 10 steals. Round 10: epic bust, in the name of Carlos Rodon.
Next, we cover players from rounds 11-20 who are still on my roster. Bryce Harper, round 14, Tyler Glasgow, round 16. That’s the list. Needless to say, they’ve both been a huge part of this team doing well, but this also points out how much can go wrong in the middle of a draft like this that can be overcome relatively easily thanks to an abundant free agent pool. Or, looking at it a different way, that you can still have a successful team even knowing that a ton of guys you’re drafting are only keeping their seats warm for a fresh body as soon as they have a mini slump, or even an off-day. It also shows how much easier it is to draft and roster an injured player in a league where he can be replaced with a decent substitute up until he returns; in a very deep league, it would have been difficult to impossible to make up even a fraction of the production I missed out from those two roster spots in the early months of the season. (It also would have been hard to drop Rodon, that injury stash that did not work out, as quickly as I did, if I was desperate for his innings in a deep league and didn’t have a multitude of short-term options to replace him).
The last fifth of my draft turned out, from my perspective, to be by far the most interesting. First of all, I remember last year in this league, we all had a little thread via the league’s chat where we looked at our rosters around August to see how many OG members of our team were left. I didn’t have a single player outside the top 10 rounds still on my team. While this isn’t really surprising, I suppose, given my stream-happy nature in these leagues, this year’s team made me realize that end-of-draft sleepers aren’t just for deep leagues. My rounds 20-25: Sonny Gray, James Karinchak, Yandy Diaz, Ha-Seong Kim, and Zach Eflin. All five I drafted because they had great opening day/week matchups, and I’m not sure I planned to leave any of them on my team much longer than that. (Not sure why I thought I needed to draft Karinchak ahead of the other three even if I was looking at them all as short-term plays, but I’m guessing there might have been wine involved). Gray, Diaz (who is the other main reason I’m somehow likely to finish in the top two teams in the batting average category even with a season’s worth of Schwarber), and Eflin never left, and turns out I should have just kept Kim the entire time as well. I’ll likely never have four such lucky picks in the last five rounds again, but looking over this draft and seeing what huge contributions I received this late has already changed how I’ll approach things in 2024 to some degree.
I think the thing that this draft impacted the most for me, is my future strategy for RCL starting pitching, which I think to some extent will carry over to some other formats as well. I’ve gotten by in RCLs before with literally just one or two starters (including an unquestioned ace) over very long stretches and filling in everything else with streams and relievers, and I basically went into the season with this as my general plan for 2023. This year, it took four SP picks in the top ten to get that ace in Wheeler, and I’ll probably do something similar next year since it worked out well even with only one of those four picks (plus some bonus production from deGrom) coming through for me. But seeing Eflin and Gray (and later Glasnow) being so solid so often, has me thinking that I may start drafting starting pitching a little later, but draft it more often. It felt like a wonderful luxury to have four good starters, so why not try to do it on purpose next year? Who knows, maybe I’ll even go nuts and aim for five. Like I said, I know I probably won’t get as lucky again with two great starters at the end of a draft, but I’m going to be willing to take more SP chances throughout, in the hopes of actually building a solid little rotation.
While things may be completely different in terms of pitching strategy in my deepest/NL and AL only leagues, I think I’ll also be in this mindset in my 15-team set ups. In a few of my 50-round draft and hold leagues this year, I was too worried about getting an ace early which led to some unnecessary over-drafting, and too confident about my end-of-draft fliers (that Drew Smyly thing looked like a good decision for about a minute!) Next year, I’m going to concentrate much more on pitcher stock-up between rounds 6 and 25 or so, in the hopes that I’ll have a solid base of stud hitters in the top 5, and enough hitting sleepers outside the top 20 rounds to fill out a winning roster. There’s nothing necessarily groundbreaking about such a plan; it’s largely Razzball 101. But seeing how pitching played out across my different leagues this year, in what was a super funky year for pitching, really hit home both just how unnecessary (and even ill-advised) taking a starter in the first 3 rounds is even when it goes well, and how important it is to amortize your risk and spread your chances for SP rewards in the middle rounds of a draft. I rostered AL Cy Young frontrunner Gerrit Cole in one league, and Corbin Burnes in two this year; I wasn’t planning on drafting either but couldn’t resist them mid to late in the second round when they fell in drafts. Both made major contributions to my teams, and yet I still think I made a mistake drafting them where I did.
Even on a successful team, I think it just makes more sense to go for the stud hitter in round 2 and try to find your ace in round 4 or 5 or 7 (or 23, see below), rather than the other way around. The trick is making sure that ace turns out to be Luis Castillo or Kevin Gausman, not Alex Manoah, Shane Bieber or Robbie Ray, to go back to our 2023 NOLTZ draft again — all five were taken in rounds 6 or 7. (And, of course, to make sure you get a Matt Olson/Freddy Freeman-in-2023 level hitting stud with that all-important second pick). Looking over our draft board, the starting pitching bargains were even more pronounced than I remembered for the other teams as well; starters comprised many if not most of the very best picks of the draft. And not just stellar picks, Cy Young candidates — Team milothecat with Logan Webb and Blake Snell in the 10th and 11th… delicious! Backdoor Cutters nabbed Zac Gallen with the last pick of round 9, while DZ1979 grabbed his ace Logan Gilbert in the 10th (and added comeback player of the year candidate Jose Berrios at the end of the 21st for good measure), DFresh got Kodai Senga in round 18, and Creative Chaos took a rather successful flier, I’d say, on Justin Steele in round 23. Those gems will be there; now we just have to take the next few months to try to figure out who they’ll be in 2024.
Since this is already stretching way longer than I’d planned but there are several other things I want to cover, I think we’ll put up a “To Be Continued” card like we’re in a very special episode of an 80’s sitcom, and add on to these thoughts next week. I still want to chat a bit about why my Perts League team was basically a disaster this season despite an incredibly solid start to my draft, and to touch upon my “play against Laura Holt” RCL #18, which my fellow owners have made excruciatingly difficult and competitive (and of course extremely fun) all season long. I also need to think about whether or not I need to Just Say Yes to trades more often, especially in the RCL leagues. Also, I’d like to try to figure out if it’s a coincidence that this NOLTZ team — one of my worst in terms of drafting closers — is also one of my most successful, and take a little more time to figure out which elements of an RCL are the most similar to deeper leagues, and where they are the most different and therefore require the largest discrepancies in strategy. And that doesn’t even get us to the best hitter picks of this draft or my MVPUs (most valuable free agent pick ups).
I hope everyone out there is enjoying these last lovely days of baseball; good luck to those still competing for fantasy titles and as always if anyone’s read this far, feel free to drop a question or comment about deep leagues, my RCL teams, or whatever other basebally thing is on your mind!
