Today's Fantasy Rx

As one of the only inter-site keeper leagues in existence, the Fantasy Baseball Review NL Challenge, a head-to-head auction league scored with points like fantasy football, offered us a unique opportunity, and we were pleased to join as one of the inaugural teams a year ago. Despite rostering Kevin Brown at $28 while price enforcing, we won five of the first six weeks and 10 of the final 13 weeks to finish with a 15-9 record, second best in the league and first in our division. Unfortunately our pitching failed us rather badly the last week of August, and we lost in the first round of the playoffs to finish third out of eight teams.

The points breakdown for the league is as follows. For batters, .32 for every Total Base, .5 for SB, .25 for every Run Produced (RBI+R-HR), .15 for each walk, -.1 for every Strikeout, and -.12 for every at-bat. For pitchers, 1 point for every save, .63 for every IP, .5 for every Win and Shutout, .32 for every Hold, .1 for each K, -.24 for each baserunner, and -.32 for every Earned Run. We did not incorporate projected shutouts or holds into our dollar values as we did not project those statistics. For each of the first 19 weeks, whichever team has more points in each head-to-head contest "wins" the week.

FBRNLC expanded by two teams this year, so the league conducted an expansion draft. Unlike standard keeper leagues, the rules for retaining players here are rather complicated. Each season after the draft you can sign up to five players to "contracts", where you can keep those players at the same salary for up to two additional years. Last year, lacking any overly inexpensive veterans, we gave three-year deals to a $1 Corey Patterson, $1 Bobby Hill, $1 Juan Uribe, $2 Juan Cruz, and $1 Nick Neugebauer, and during the season we swapped Neugebauer for a $1 Carlos Zambrano with the same contract.

At the end of the season we successfully rostered a couple of prospective closers, so guys like a $1 Scott Williamson filled our seven-man protected list for the expansion draft. We lost a $20 Scott Rolen, $9 Russ Ortiz, and $1 Steve Trachsel.

One of the quirks of the league is that, aside from players under contract, you can't keep anyone else on your team at their salaries from the previous season. You only can keep up to five players at an additional $5 each, and while we regret losing Rolen, we never intended to keep Ortiz at $14 or Trachsel at $6. Additionally, while Ortiz eventually was kept by his new owner, Trachsel was not.

Following the expansion draft, the league conducted both a restricted free agent (RFA) draft and an unrestricted free agent (UFA) draft to expand our keeper rosters. For the RFA, each team has the opportunity to call a player off someone's roster, and while no team could lose more than two players, you also couldn't protect anyone aside from your contract players. The only good news is that you held topper rights on all your players, and there was no limit to the number of players you could acquire in this method aside from normal in-draft rules. We then conducted an auction for each of these 10 players.

Austin Kearns went for $28, Odalis Perez for $22, Lance Berkman for $40, and Dave Roberts for $10. At this point we were beginning to hope we wouldn't lose anyone, but our hopes were soon quashed. Vlad went for $60 and Clement for $18. Then we called out Jeff Kent with our pull and eventually rostered him for $41. Unfortunately the last two teams, who finished 1st and 2nd in 2002, called off a $6 Kevin Millwood and a $20 John Smoltz from our roster. While we exercised our topper rights on Millwood at $24, paying $30 for Smoltz in this league made little sense.

We then submitted our additional five keepers, at +$5 so besides our five contracts, Kent, and Millwood, we kept a $14 Edgar Renteria, $12 Mike Lowell, $8 Hideo Nomo, $7 Damian Moss, and $6 Scott Williamson. The UFA was a simple, one-round straight draft of players not kept at the extra $5. While we were shocked at a couple of the players released by teams, we happily rostered Ben Sheets at $2, thus completing our keeper list for the draft.

FBRNLC drafted the Wednesday prior to Opening Day. We entered the draft with $140 to spend on 10 players, and to even a greater extent than last year, we intended to focus nearly all our cash on our offense. Our 2002 pitching strategy, which included rostering two closers and then a half-dozen excess starters in the reserve draft, deploying whichever pitchers were scheduled for double starts in a given week, helped us to a great finish, so we saw no reason to shift strategies this season.

We needed to acquire one catcher, one first baseman, one cornerman, four outfielders, one utility player, and two pitchers, including one reliever. Our only overly firm plans involved drafting a very inexpensive closer to pair with Williams, and then attempting to roster starters at every position on offense.

The beginning of the draft fairly shocked us as owners rostered Thome for $47, Helton for $43, Piazza for $35, and Sosa for $47. Subsequent bids of $29 for Ray Durham, $30 for Greg Maddux, $27 for Billy Wagner, $30 for Roberto Alomar, and $42 for Shawn Green left us equally surprised as only Durham cost the price at which we valued him. Everyone else went for roughly $10 over our projections, leaving us without the normal first-round bargains we expect to see.

FBR only requires one catcher, and only Damian Miller was kept at $6, leaving us an excellent pool of candidates. While we thought about waiting for IRod, priced at $21, we grabbed Kendall at $15, only two bucks over our conservative projection, right after LoDuca went for $17. IRod only went for $20 about ten picks later, so perhaps we erred slightly, but we're pleased with Kendall.

The early nominations of Thome and Helton left Sean Casey and Fred McGriff as the only 1B on the board valued above $13, and we hoped to roster both for no more than $33. Casey cost us $19, but with a couple decent 3B available for corner, we didn't want to risk waiting on McGriff.

Our most significant investment occurred immediately after we acquired Casey. We valued Chipper Jones at $43, roughly $5 more than the next best player, and we were logically ecstatic to roster him at $41, which dropped us to $65 remaining for 7 players.

The majority of the next thirty picks all went above the values we predicted, so our next acquisitions occurred at the end of the fifth round of nominations. We still managed to grab McGriff for an acceptable $15, Moises Alou joined our team at $17, and then another ten picks passed before we grabbed Reggie Sanders for $10, roughly half the price we were prepared to pay.

We rostered Mantei at $8 to fill our second relief spot, and after another dozen players left the table, we grabbed Kenny Lofton at $9, who like Reggie Sanders, we also valued above $15.

The Lofton acquisition left us with 7 bucks left for any hitter and any pitcher, so we wanted to target the players with the most upside. We like Felipe Lopez a lot because of his versatility and power-speed upside in a great hitters' park, so we happily rostered him for $2. With Ainsworth going for $6 and Peavy at $8, we didn't object to grabbing John Patterson, who was the last available pitcher we priced at $5 or more, for a buck.

We weren't able to grab as much starting depth in the reserve draft as we managed last year because of the two new teams. Also, we needed a couple of decent position players to replace Hill and Uribe until their likely respective returns to the majors at the beginning of summer.

Mark Loretta and Morgan Ensberg offered the most upside among position players at the beginning of the draft, although we barely missed out on also rostering Ramon Vazquez. We grabbed Shane Reynolds in round 3, since he still looked like the Astros' #3 starter at the time, and followed that with Kevin Young to insure we could handle one injury on offense.

With our remaining four picks we simply selected the best available starter in each round. Our only concern was that they recently displayed one decent skill, mildly consistent overall effectiveness in 2002, or decent control or a good strikeout rate sometime in the last couple years. We completed our team by rostering Jason Simontacchi, Todd Ritchie, Brian Moehler, and Wayne Franklin.

Rotohelp's Drafted 2003 FBRNLC Roster
C: Jason Kendall, $15
CR: Sean Casey, $19, Mike Lowell, $12, and Fred McGriff, $15
MI: Jeff Kent, $41, Edgar Renteria, $14, and Felipe Lopez, $2
OF: Chipper Jones, $41, Moises Alou, $17, Reggie Sanders, $10, Kenny Lofton, $9, and Corey Patterson, $1
UT: Mark Loretta, $1, and Morgan Ensberg, $1
Bench: Kevin Young, $1, Bobby Hill, $1, and Juan Uribe, $1

Starters: Kevin Millwood, $24, Hideo Nomo, $8, Damian Moss, $7, Ben Sheets, $2, Carlos Zambrano, $1, John Patterson, $1, Shane Reynolds, $1, Jason Simontacchi, $1, Todd Ritchie, $1, Brian Moehler, $1, and Wayne Franklin, $1.

Relievers: Matt Mantei, $8, Scott Williamson, $6, and Juan Cruz, $2

FBRNLC let each team expand their reserve roster to a total of 12 players by the second week of the season, so we've added Jeriome Robertson, Matt Kinney, and Oscar Villarreal, and we recently picked up Chad Moeller since he offered the most upside of any available position player.

Given the great starts by players like Nomo, Sanders, and Renteria, we won the first two weeks and hopefully at least will match our success from 2003.

Today's Fantasy Rx: Over the last couple years I've repeatedly advised owners to rotate multiple starting pitchers each week based on match-ups and recent performance. Our recent draft experiences suggest to us that this strategy is most effective in leagues with extensive reserve rosters. Therefore if you participate either in a traditional Ultra league or any league with a reserve list of 10 or more players, we recommend targeting any available starting pitching regardless of skill. Even someone like Miguel Asencio could be useful this year under the right circumstances, and better to keep him rostered than any prospects below AA not normally ranked among the top dozen or so minor leaguers.