Mound Talk

A fantasy baseball season is hard to predict. I have gone into drafts for the last ten years with the same mentality: Piece together players one round at a time. But this year I’ve got a new strategy. I have gone through over 600, twelve team, 5×5 roto leagues and compiled the raw statistics to find the “average roto league.”

My new strategy is going to be to draft my team to fill up an expected level of each statistic based on my projections. If I’m correct in my projections, I should be able to properly build my team so I am balanced and easily identify how a player will affect my overall team stats relative to the normal league.

It’s not always about winning a category but about looking at how much it will cost you to add a few more of a stat and what the benefit will be of that addition. For the next two weeks I’ll go through the categories and list out what you need to do in a theoretical league to score points.

What does it take to win stolen bases?
Speed tends to be overdrafted and results in a big spread. This happens in more leagues that you’d think. Nearly half the leagues sampled had the last place team at lower than 25% of the first place team representing the largest spread in average totals.

Rank  SB
1     181
2     169
3     164
4     161
5     160
6     156
7     150
8     137
9     130
10    109
11    86
12    69

Second through seventh is tight. The late season addition of Ryan Theriot last year could have made the difference between five points and nine points. The large clumping makes stolen bases the prime place to grab late season points. Drafting someone like Dave Roberts and stashing him away and starting to use him when you need a few stolen bases can help your team tremendously.

The other important thing to note here is that if you get average out the average stolen bases needed for a first place team in stolen bases, each position needs to get you 17 stolen bases. Since catchers generally do not steal, we’ll say you need 170 SB from 9 positions, or, 19 per player for the 12 points. To really compete for the points, and stay competitive in other categories, you’ll need to grab 2 solid SB guys and some average ones. Looking at last years statistics, there were 10 players who racked up over 38 stolen bases (what is essentially two players worth of stolen bases by our model). Of these ten players, only three had batting averages at .300 or better, only one had more than 20 home runs, four had more than 100 runs scored and none had more than 100 rbi. The players that stand out in this group are well known. Jose Reyes, Carl Crawford, Alfonso Soriano and Ichiro Suzuki are the only elite players in this group. The other six are helpful in stolen bases, but that’s about it.

The critical move in drafting for stolen bases is in finding players, like Crawford, Soriano and Reyes who will contribute at a near average level in three or possibly even four other categories. Guys in the 30-37 stolen base range can provide a big boost and help mitigate the negative effects of that big power hitter at first base when it comes to speed. Jimmy Rollins provides good pop, runs and rbi to compliment his stolen bases. Though Derek Jeter had an off year in power production last season, he is still able to carry his weight in all five categories. Bobby Abreu is in the same boat as Jeter.

To win the stolen base category, and be competitive in the others, likely requires you to draft one of the guys in the elite tier of stolen bases and two of the next grouping. Then compliment that with players like Grady Sizemore who will get their fair share of stolen bases yet also produce above the average in the other 5×5s. The key, when it comes to drafting your speed, is balance. If you take Jose Reyes and Hanley Ramirez in the first two rounds of your draft you will be in a good position to win stolen bases, but you will have cost yourself valuable power hitters and many of the guys that are left will either have major deficiencies somewhere (like Adam Dunn and Andruw Jones in average) or won’t produce at a high enough level to keep you competitive (like Mark Teixiera). All of those players are good as complimentary players but have their own deficiencies that are tough to overcome.
The best way to look at drafting your stolen bases is to find guys who have other attributes that are highly beneficial to a team. Though Ichiro won’t hit a lot of home runs, he will be able to compliment Andruw Jones. Combined, you will have slightly above average production in stolen bases, home runs, rbi and runs while maintaning a near average batting average. On the other hand, if you draft Ichiro when you already have a slew of .300 hitters, his only ‘real’ contribution will be in stolen bases.

Speed can be the difference between a first and third place finish and the player that could make the difference is no better than Ryan Theriot. Cheap sources of steals are huge and the value of stolen bases is easily demonstrated in the trade market. While too much speed can cost you if you don’t compliment it with some power, speed is usually the easiest commodity to trade. Because of the closeness in the distribution, and the variance in stolen base sources from year to year, the best you can hope for is to project (with relative accuracy) player totals and then draft accordingly to put yourself in the 160 range. Then hope you can pick up a cheap source of steals sometime during the year.