Zen And The Art Of Fantasy Baseball: Anguish

What this article series is all about:

When my editor at Razzball approached me about my new writing assignment, he asked me to tell him what I was most interested in writing about. I gave him a few suggestions, thinking that he would take one of them and apply it to an area of the site where we needed some additional help covering a hole I could reasonably fill. Instead, his response to my varied points of focus was a version of, “OK, write about that!” The conversation that followed was not one I had expected (below, in paraphrased version):

Um, write about what? All of it? 

“Yes. Maybe look at under the radar players who could be good adds and also popular pick-ups that would soon go bust. This could be hitters or pitchers. What would you like to call it?”

You mean, I get to call it whatever I want?

“Yep. Think on it for a couple of days and let me know.”

In telling my wife about this, she suggested Zen and the Art of Fantasy Baseball – a suggestion I met with silence, not because I didn’t like it, but seriously, who’s going to let me call my weekly piece that?

The answer is Razzball. I’m grateful for the freedom they are offering me. But now I have to figure out what comes next.

The name for my weekly series is inspired by a number of changes I’ve made in my life since my sobriety date in July of 2021. While Zen isn’t a direction I’ve necessarily gone, I have moved wholeheartedly toward a number of Buddhist practices. They’ve helped me as a human, and frankly, they’ve helped me as a fantasy player. Kind of in the vein of Zen in the Art of Archery or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The books are kind of about archery and motorcycle maintenance, but mostly they’re about the practice of being so deeply in the moment that decisions can be made almost as though they are making themselves. So, the plan for this series is to work from a similar framework and see if some of the ideas can work for you as well.

This week: anguish.

The First Noble Truth of Buddhism is that suffering exists, and the Second Noble Truth teaches us it’s the desire to end the suffering by any means necessary that causes our suffering to be extended (and creates anguish).

How does this relate to fantasy baseball?: 

This game is an exercise in self-inflicted suffering. We make choices for our drafts or lineups, and when those choices don’t work, we suffer (maybe not relative to real life challenges, but still…). But baseball is stupid hard to predict, so we must come to terms with the fact that many of our choices in this game will be flat-out wrong. The job is to make more right ones than wrong ones. And sometimes that means going back and making the same decisions we made last year, this time with the hope of a different outcome.

A case in point comes when we’re on a player for a season, and he absolutely bombs. How many times have we faced such a scenario and decided, “You are dead to me!” and then refused ever to draft that player again? And often, the next season brings the predictable positive regression for the player who’s now dead to us, and we missed out. Thus, suffering is extended.

What’s the better decision? It’s to lean into the discomfort and be willing to examine that player without passion. Did we make a ridiculously bad call on the guy, or did the player just underperform due to injury, luck, or whatever? To avoid anguish on top of the suffering, the best thing is to do is not to overreact with rash decisions; we should do what the players’ skills tell us to do, even if that means sucking it up and drafting the guy again the following year.

Here’s that underperforming guy most on my radar for this season:

Brenton Doyle

For most of 2025, Brenton Doyle was downright awful. His first half stats came to a .202 AVG with 7 HR, 33 R, 30 RBI, and 9 SB in 331 PA. Not great. If you were in on Doyle’s 2025 preseason price of a RD 7 or 8 pick in 12-teamers, you got a rude awakening when he achieved a negative $ value in those first 82 games. But a closer look at his first half numbers may suggest an outlier level of bad luck. His K%, HH%, Barrel%, maxEV, EV, and contact rates were all in line with his 2024 season, which saw him amass a line of a .260 AVG, 23 HR, 82 R, 72 RBI, and 30 SB in 603 PA. His most obvious big dips from 2024 to the first half of 2025 came in his LD% (down nearly 4%) and his LA (down around 3.5°), which probably contributed to his lower BABIP (down more than 30 points from his career low to that point) and HR/FB% (down a monster 7% from 2024). For his first 82 games of 2025, he was striking the ball with similar quality to 2024, but his results just weren’t reflecting that.

For the second half of 2025, Doyle looked much more like himself: his .282 AVG, 8 HR, 24 R, 27 RBI, and 9 SB in 207 PA put him on a season-long pace of around 25 HR, 80-90 R&RBI, and 28-30 SB – exactly the type of numbers we were drafting him for. His LD% jumped 2.6% in the second half, an improvement which paled in comparison to his BABIP spike (nearly 90 points from the first half), as well as his HR/FB% jump (up almost 10% from the first half). By year’s end, his HH% had actually reached a level 3.5% over 2024’s number, his Barrel% was up .3%, his EV was up .8 mph, and his maxEV reached a career high of 111.3 mph. These aren’t the underlying stats of someone who forgot how to hit.

For the first couple of weeks in January 2026, my drafting focus has been for NFBC 50s. Based on my SGP calculations, an aggregate of several of the projection systems I trust the most shows Doyle’s expected value to be 50 picks higher than his current RD 14 ADP. If I refuse to draft him because of last year’s down year, it looks like I’m in line to miss a significant value. I think I’ll risk a little suffering based on what the data tells me – I’m all in on Doyle at his price.

Until next week. –ADHamley