One of the most important things to watch in Spring Training every year are position battles. Watching the box scores daily and even monitoring statistically insignificant cumulative stats can help you pick a winner that will get the lion's share of at bats during the season. Even though it doesn't normally impact fantasy baseball values, be sure to watch how players perform in the field. In 'reality' baseball fielding matters and a good glove can earn more plate appearances.
It's still early in the fantasy baseball season but here are 10 interesting position battles to watch as Spring Training gets underway.
With pitchers and catchers reporting this week for Spring Training we can be sure that our prays have been answered with the promise of sweet, sweet exhibition baseball coming soon. Sadly, few things mess with a fantasy baseball owner's head than Spring Training results. Here are some Do's and Don'ts for fantasy baseball beginners to keep in mind while watching Spring Training games in 2010.
Every fantasy baseball season has its share of busts - players drafted with high expectations that fall flat on their face and cripple your fantasy baseball team. This is an article about what should go wrong in 2010. Below are 10 players to stay the hell away from.
Sleeper picks, broadly defined, are players that may be significantly undervalued on draft day. As such, they can greatly help your fantasy baseball team because their performance has a chance to far surpass their actually cost - be it the round selected or dollar amount in an auction draft. Sleepers can also be a relative term based on the depth and player pool of your league. For 10 team leagues and deeper 15 team or AL/NL-only leagues here are 10 sleepers to watch for on draft day.
Sabermetrics is a series of statistics and analysis that attempts to look at a fantasy baseball player's performance in an objective and therefore accurate manner. The key advantage that Sabermetrics provide over traditional baseball stats is that to a greater extent they isolates an individual player's performance. A starting pitcher's ability to earn a win is highly dependent on the performance of the offense, defense and bullpen and therefore not an accurate measure of the pitchers skills. Here are six basic Sabermetrics that can help isolate flukes from valid trends when you evaluate fantasy baseball players for the 2010 season.
There are three factors that affect the player pool in your fantasy baseball leagues. First, the player pool can be made up of all MLB teams, AL-only or NL-only players. The second is the number of total players on your league's rosters, which is dependent on the number of teams and roster sizes. Thirdly, whether you play in a daily or weekly transaction league is a big factor. It's important to understand the relative size of the player pool because differing fantasy baseball advice and competing projections need to be calibrated to your baseball league's format.
If you are a beginner in fantasy baseball there can be confusion between the differences between head-to-head fantasy baseball leagues and rotisserie baseball. Both fantasy baseball formats have their pros and cons so it's a matter of picking a format that sounds most fun to you - or trying one of each.
The most common fantasy baseball scoring system is made up of five hitting and five pitching categories. 5x5 leagues, as they are commonly referred to, are ideal for fantasy baseball beginners. This is because most fantasy baseball coverage is presented in the context of 5x5 scoring systems.
The five hitting categories are BA (batting average), HR (home runs), R (runs), RBI (runs batted in), and SB (stolen bases). Pitching categories are W (wins), ERA (earned run average), WHIP (walks + hits divided by innings pitched), K (strikeouts), and S (saves).
As we wrap up the calendar year and fantasy football comes to an end it's natural to turn an eye to the upcoming fantasy baseball season. If this is your first year in fantasy baseball, you're switching league formats or are an experienced player looking for some tips we'll have something for you in our weekly Fantasy Baseball for Beginners column. I've broken the fantasy baseball season down into several phases and will post multi-part columns for each phase throughout the baseball season.
Before the season started, I talked with many fantasy owners about why hitters go higher than pitchers in fantasy drafts, and it’s not too hard to figure out. I’ve decided that now is a good time to take a look at some examples of pitchers that have fallen off of the table this year.
The most common fantasy baseball scoring system is made up of five hitting and five pitching categories. 5x5 leagues, as they are commonly referred to, are ideal for fantasy baseball beginners. This is because most fantasy baseball coverage is presented in the context of 5x5 scoring systems.