The Value of $1 Guys

Most fantasy talk during Spring Training revolves around the bigger names. How the stars are doing healthwise, how the mid-level guys are doing performancewise, who might break out, all that biz. There’s also sleeper talk, new prospects, guys entering their prime, or coming up from the farm team, and that’s good too.

But there’s another group of guys who aren’t really stars and aren’t really possible breakout stars, but are just normal players who may or may not post some decent numbers this year. These guys are the $1 Guys. They may not cost exactly $1, maybe three or four, but they’re frequently the cheap journeymen who make up the fat base of fantasy baseball talent.

So how do you use these types on your fantasy team to help you win? There are several important ways, let’s look at them…

SPEND YOUR LIONSHARE ON STARS

If you’re playing a standard fantasy baseball league, you might have 25 roster spots and $260 to purchase them. That’s a little over $10 a player, but you wouldn’t really want a team made up of $10 guys. Guys priced $5 to $10 are often nothing but solid average performers, maybe with the most widely known upside. Not as likely to bust as a $2 guy, but not really exceeding the league mean like all-stars do.

It’s hard to build a winning team on these guys, especially in a game like fantasy baseball. Especially in mixed leagues. You see in ten team, mixed league fantasy baseball, every team needs around 15 or 16 batters for all his roster spots and his bench. That’s around 155 players in total. But there are thirty baseball teams sixteen with eight starting batters, 14 with nine starting batters, totaling 254 guys. You’re league is only using up 2/3s of them; the worst players in your league probably aren’t that devastatingly bad. Assuming they aren’t a catcher.

So playing a strategy of using average talent and avoiding below-average talent just doesn’t work very well in this format. So instead, winners typically throw a lot of money at top players and leave a small amount for the remainder of their offensive roster. How you want to throw that money at top players has a lot of strategy and variation, but after that you need to be able to then rely on quite a few cheap guys to create a base for your stars to jump off from.

That’s why you need to pay attention to cheapies and pick the ones you want before draft day. Even if you’re in a snake draft, when you get to those late teen rounds and it’s just a vast wasteland of names casual fans don’t know, you want to know.

SCRUBS ARE EMOTIONALLY EXPENDABLE

People like to say, don’t touch your roster till May. Fine if you’re in 1985 and your league is tracked by newspaper. But you’re likely on the internet, playing against a bunch of people who didn’t start playing fantasy in the 80s. And those people aren’t waiting till May. They may not be waiting till the end of the first week. Maybe they’re playing a little foolishly, a little reactionary, but they’re also scooping up every player showing potential coming out of camp.

So don’t get too proud. You want to be working the waiver wire for success even during the first month. But the thing is, to pick up a guy you need to cut a guy. And that’s waste. You spent money or a draft pick to get that guy. You aren’t sure how good that guy is going to do this year. You can’t cut him yet.

Forget all that noise. This is what scrubs are for. You pick them up, they didn’t blow anybody away in preseason, they aren’t blowing anybody away in the first couple weeks, put them out front and let them take that bullet. Cut them and pick the new hot guy up off the waiver wire. If you keep an eye on him it’s not likely anybody will steal him even if he does start to show signs of improvement.

So remember, scrubs are expendable, after you draft them and the season starts some of them are going to be a steal and others are going to just play sucky. The sucky ones, you don’t owe anything, let them go and pick up that guy off waivers you have a good hunch about. Do it as soon as you want. Don’t wait till May.

VALUE THAT CAN WIN YOUR LEAGUE

Perhaps the most important thing about $1 Guys is that they can win you your league. You throw down the money on six or seven stars and let them put up the big numbers. But you paid big money to get them. And you’ve got a lot more roster spots to fill. Getting cheap guys who go off are how leagues are won.

Everybody has access to top players, but not everybody has access to top players who only cost them a couple of auction dollars. If you spend most of your money getting seven stars, and then two of your cheap guys put up low-level star numbers, it’s like you got nine stars without having to pay for two of them. The separation those two extra scrubs turned stars give you against other teams give you the unfair advantage it takes to beat every other owner.

The thing is, nobody knows what cheap guys are going to overperform. If we did know, they wouldn’t be cheap guys. I can’t help you know which guys to take. But I can make some recommendations. The first thing is, do your homework on sleepers and cheapies. Read about them, learn names, read real baseball reporting and find out who has been impressing reporters in preseason games. Get names, write down names, and track the names.

The second thing is, don’t focus entirely on breakout players and “new” sleepers. Players fresh to the league with high upside are exciting, and they are the ones most people talk about. But solid performers in the middle of their career are probably going to put up better numbers than those rookies. We all get used to being burned by taking hyped up rookies who may be great players some season, but not this season. Be realistic, are the numbers this high upside rookie will put up really going to be better than the numbers of this boring journeyman vet will put up? It’s a trap many fantasy owners fall into, taking the sexy pick even though that pick’s numbers will be weak. Aubrey Huff and Paul Konerko come to mind as last year’s examples of this.

Another type of player to consider are post-hype sleepers. Breakout rookies who are taking too long to become good and everybody has forgot about them. These guys are favorites of fantasy analysts, so you’re likely to be able to find good information about which ones look promising. But they still aren’t that sexy, so you’ll likely be able to get them cheaper than current-hype players.

PITCHING $1 GUYS

Cheap guys are also valuable on the other side of the game. If you play your pitching staff like you play your batters and spend the money to pick up several all-star aces, you’ll have a few roster spots left over that need to be filled. Cheap pitchers can help you win your league too.

To find the right ones for your roster, check the sleeper lists and the breakout lists, sure, but also check the actual pitching depth charts for teams. A lot of decent pitchers are overlooked by the wider fantasy media, but they’re well known in their own local market as the staff ace or the up and coming young guy who will take over as the teams pitching star. But they aren’t sexy for whatever reason and are just ignored. It’s amazing how many guys are ignored when their numbers say they shouldn’t be. Pay attention to what the teams are saying and who they are putting all the weight on.

Also cheap closers are a must have. Spending big money on two sleepers, or three relief pitchers? It’s a waste. Pay attention to who the depth charts again for team closers, look through the cheap ones and look at the deeper stats. Look at the WHIP, look at their strikes and walks. You just want saves from these guys, without them screwing up your ERA and WHIP categories by giving up two runs while pitching one inning. Cheap closers who end up giving you just as many saves as expensive closers are the best, and you can take that money you would be wasting, and reapply it to purchasing another ace starter.

IN CONCLUSION

Fantasy baseball is a game about value, everybody gets the same amount of money or picks, but those who make the most of them are the ones with the advantage. Don’t pay attention just to which stars you want or what rookies will break out this year, pay attention to the bottom of the draft rankings too. Even the boring guys. Look for the ones who post solid numbers, look for the ones who might be about to have a career year. You’re hardly going to win on every scrub you guess might do well, but if you’re right about just two of them, that might be what it takes to win over the next best team and get the season title.

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