Category Archives: General

So What Is This Whole #streameroftheday Thing About?

by The Dynasty Guru

If you follow me on Twitter (at @dynastyguru), you’ve probably seen me run my #streameroftheday before. It’s something which I started in the first half of 2012 and kept up throughout the whole season – and honestly, I was pretty successful with it, given the parameters. Over 130 starts last season, my streamers had a 3.79 ERA, 1.26 WHIP and 590 K in 748 2/3 IP, compiling 54 wins in 130 starts (for a 42% win percentage). It looks something like this:

So about those parameters..

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Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is

by The Dynasty Guru

We’ve been over this before – I play in WAY too many leagues. In fact, this year, that number is officially 14. And they run the gamut in terms of formats. There are seven dynasty leagues, three pure redraft leagues, six head-to-head leagues, and two points leagues. I have leagues on four different host sites – though half of them are run through Yahoo! I have OBP leagues, I have 6×6 leagues and even one 7×7 format.

But through it all, I have a good number of overlapping players. Of course, that’s a given when you own 288 different players across 14 teams – but what I’m going to go through today are the players that I own in more than three leagues to show you how much I actually believe the advice that I’m doling out. More than half of these leagues are either for jellybeans or they are expert formats, so no messing around. Not surprisingly, these names should not shock you if you’re pretty familiar with my writing.

So here they are, the players I own most in 2013, kicked off by the only player who I own on more than half of my teams:

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Age Ain’t Nothin’ But a Number

by The Dynasty Guru

The biggest misconception out there about a dynasty league format is that you need to go young to win. This is absolutely not true. Age certainly comes into play with how you value players both on your roster and not, but once you’ve established the value, continuing to hold how long a player has been on the Earth against him is a feeble exercise. Derek Jeter is old. Derek Jeter has real value in a dynasty league. Those two statements are not mutually exclusive.

Even if you are an owner who is going through a rebuilding stretch, taking chances on cheap veterans with high levels of past performance can be a great way to build value for your team. Picking up the next Xander Bogaerts is fantastic (and is probably going to be more helpful in the long run), but if you can pick up a Kelly Johnson or a Lance Berkman with a spare roster spot, they can potentially bring a decent return from a contending team if they pan out. And this ties in perfectly with one of the areas of focus here at The Dynasty Guru over the next month and a half. The “Bouncing Back” series will cover players who are being overlooked due to age, injury or recent poor performance. Players who could reasonably rebound to a high level of performance.

And this isn’t just a trend among less experienced dynasty leaguers either. I was listening to a podcast earlier this week, which shall remain nameless, that delved into dynasty league drafts and strategies there-in. All of a sudden I heard a person who I respect on the subject say that when he’s doing an initial dynasty league draft, he wipes all players over the age of 30 off his draft board entirely. I understand that everyone has different strategies, but to throw out a blanket statement like that about thirty-something major leaguers is just bonkers. Are we really supposed to believe that there’s no spot reasonable enough to take both Albert Pujols and Adrian Beltre (both 33 years old), among others?

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The Rankings Are Over. Now What?

by The Dynasty Guru

Well, that was intense.

Now that the rankings are over and I’ve had a long weekend to detox, it’s time to look forward. As many of you know, a couple of weeks ago I was proudly able to announce that I am the newest Senior Fantasy Writer at Baseball Prospectus (fellow BP newbie Mike Gianella beat me to Twitter with the news). This is extremely exciting for me, as I have been a Baseball Prospectus reader forever and am excited to work with a fantastic team there. Unfortunately, do to so, I had to leave another fantastic team behind. My work at Fake Teams (and the still-defunct Roto Hardball before that) is something that I’m extremely proud of. I don’t feel quite so bad about leaving though, since they have no shortage of excellent writers over there and will certainly be fine without me.

But the question I’ve gotten most often in the wake of the BP news is what the future holds for The Dynasty Guru. So I’m very happy to announce that things will continue on here as you have come to expect. And for those of you who are new readers since the rankings started, I’m going to fill you in on what type of content you can find here in the short-term:

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My Twitter Hall of Fame Ballot for Dynasty Leaguers

by The Dynasty Guru

With all of the Hall of Fame discussions going on, I wanted to take a few minutes and focus on something which has more of an effect on a day-to-day basis for me than the plaques sitting up in Cooperstown. There are a ton of ways to get information about what’s going on in baseball these days, and one of the most helpful ways for myself is Twitter. I will admit, I was skeptical at first, but if you take it for what it is (a fun, and sometimes informative, ongoing discussion), it’s a great thing.

Since almost certainly no one would care about who I would have on a hypothetical Hall of Fame ballot, I’m going to turn in a different type of ballot. If I were starting a Twitter Hall of Fame for fellow dynasty league players from scratch, who would be the first ten handles I would induct? The concept is as simple as it is ridiculous. In keeping with the spirit of the "actual" Hall of Fame, I will limit the ballot to a completely arbitrary ten names. Also, there will need to be a mix of people who cover prospects and ones who cover your standard major league fantasy analysis. Maybe I’ll do this each year when the real Hall of Fame list comes out, or maybe this was just a stupid idea and I’ll ignore that I ever did it.

Regardless, if you use Twitter and you play in a dynasty league (or really, even if you don’t), here are ten folks you really should be following (in no particular order):

Jason Parks (@ProfessorParks): The Burt Reynolds of Baseball Prospectus prospect coverage, Jason continues to bring the incredibly important elements of scouting to the masses. He’s not only full of great information, but he also responds to questions and posts both fully clothed and semi-nude pictures of masculine 80′s stars.

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A Blind Taste Test of Two Starting Pitchers

by The Dynasty Guru

Hope everyone out there had a great holiday season. I know I did. And as of yesterday it is now 2013, which means we’re that much closer to a lot of fun things. Another 12 days and the Dynasty Prospect Rankings start. Another 41 days and pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training. Another 89 days until Opening Day. So thanks for coming back for another year at the Dynasty Guru, and I plan to make it worth your while to stick around.

This is a fun little exercise that does get to a point — however, what that point is, is up to you. As you can guess from the headline, the concept is simple. I’m going to run through a whole bunch of reasons why Pitcher A and Pitcher B are similar, and if the premise of the exercise is correct, you’ll be a little surprised at the end. Although it’s a little early to start taking ADP information super seriously, one of these pitchers is being taken in the 50′s among SP (and my guess is that will go up as Opening Day approaches). The other isn’t even being drafted.

With that said, let’s get down to business. I’ve broken the comparison into five parts, starting with their impressive performances in the last three months of the season:

The Hot Streak

From June 30th to the end of the 2012 season, both of these pitchers were instrumental in their team’s playoff berths:

Player A – 9 wins, 4 losses, 2.46 ERA, 0.92 WHIP and a 6.8 K/9 in 98 2/3 IP
Player B – 9 wins, 3 losses, 2.93 ERA, 1.05 WHIP and a 6.9 K/9 in 86 IP

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Ten Things That I’m Thankful For This Thanksgiving

by The Dynasty Guru

It’s been ingrained in our heads ever since we were little kids: on Thanksgiving, you take a step back and do a little reflecting upon what you’re thankful for. We all do it, and as much as it’s overdone, it’s also important. So, while I didn’t get to finish this post in time to actually post it yesterday, I still wanted to finish and post it, since it’s the concept that’s much more vital than the timeliness. The Dynasty Guru’s regularly scheduled programming will continue tomorrow, but for today, here are ten things that I am thankful for this year – in absolutely no particular order.

MLB Extra Innings and MLB At Bat: I’ll start off with a no brainer. I don’t want to sound like a commercial, but I can watch almost every game of the season for less than dollar per day. I can listen to Vin Scully from my couch in New Jersey. I can flip from game to game to check out players who I want to get a closer look at for either a post or my own research. The stats are great, but actually watching the games is where you can draw the most information from. On top of that, the At Bat app allows me to follow along pitch-by-pitch no matter where I am, listen to any game on the radio and watch highlights which get uploaded so quickly it feels like it’s in real-time. If you love baseball like I do, this stuff is mandatory.

PSE&G: There’s been no shortage of bad publicity about power companies over the past month here on the east coast, but yesterday something pretty amazing happened. I have a furnace that is legally old enough to drink, and awoke on Thanksgiving morning to find that it had mysteriously stopped. Because it’s so old, we have the worry free guarantee on it – so we called at 8am to see what they’d be able to do (not expecting much since it’s Thanksgiving). They scheduled us from 12-4pm that day, the repairman came at 1pm, the busted motor on our furnace was replaced by 2:15pm and we were on our way out the door to our regularly scheduled holiday activities at 2:30pm. It’s things like this which don’t get attention, but PSE&G saved our Thanksgiving.

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The Dynasty Guru’s Crystal Ball: 2017′s 5×5 Category Leaders

by The Dynasty Guru

This is a fun exercise I’ve wanted to do for a while now. Right now, Opening Day 2017 is four and a half years away, but there’s absolutely no reason I can’t start speculating about who will lead the standard 5×5 rotisserie categories that season. Who knows if the 5×5 format we use now will still be the most commonplace scoring system that far into the future anyway? Maybe a standard ESPN league will be using OBP and QS instead of AVG and W. For the purposes of this post, we’re going to assume that the categories are remaining the same.

Now, this isn’t an all-prospect list – although there are some prospects on here. And if you think I’m understating the impact of prospects in this exercise, here’s a fun fact for you. If we did this exercise after the 2007 season, looking at the 2012 category leaders, guess how many of the categories would be led by players who had not played a game in the majors at the time? The answer is 5 out of 10. And if you expand out to the top-3 in each category (including ties), you get 13 out of 33, which is 39%. Of those 13 top-3 category finishes, 7 were from players that debuted in 2008, 2 were from players that debuted in 2009, 2 were from players that debuted in 2010 and 2 were from Mike Trout, who was a junior in high school when the 2007 season ended. In fact, Trout and Buster Posey were the only two players who finished in the top-3 of any 5×5 fantasy category in 2012 to be drafted AFTER the 2007 season.

Anyway, that’s enough of an introduction – let’s go to the Future Dynasty Guru for the breakdown of what happened in 2017:

Batting Average: Miguel Cabrera (.341)

It feels like Miguel Cabrera’s been around forever, but he only turned 33 on Opening Day 2017. While his power has started to wind down (this was his first season with under 30 HR in over a decade), Cabrera continues to maintain a high batting average. The two main reasons for this are: 1) he’s still a fantastic hitter to all fields and 2) by the laws of physics, it’s been impossible for him to get any slower than he was back in 2012. Runners up: Oscar Taveras (.334), Starlin Castro (.328)

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My Plan For Off-Season Coverage (and Playoff Predictions)

by The Dynasty Guru

Since this will be the first off-season here at the Dynasty Guru, I wanted to talk a little bit about what to expect here during the lean months. First of all, I’m planning to continue to post a couple of times per week like I’ve been doing over the past couple of months – and the topics will be largely similar. There will be prospect coverage and individual player coverage (in the vein of the “What To Do With” series. I’ll also try to post on major transactions which will affect players’ dynasty league values going forward when they happen. There will also be more fun stuff which I hinted at in my mission statement back in August, but want to lay out in a little more detail now. So here goes:

I have gotten great feedback from readers about the Rebuilding a Dynasty League Roster series, of which I posted Part 6 this week – and for those of you who have enjoyed it, you will be glad to know that as of right now, there will be eight more parts to this series. This means that if I continue posting them on Monday evenings like I have so far, it will continue until after Thanksgiving. However, that’s not the only thing I’ll be doing with it. Even after that, I will be going back and revisiting it as I continue to rebuild the team that has been the center of the series. Obviously, the whole rebuilding process is much longer than the 3-4 months that the posts will take, so while I will talk about some of the final stages either in theory or in the context of other leagues I’ve done in the past, I will go back to them when appropriate for my experiment league.

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A Few Last Minute Pick-ups in Keeper/Dynasty Leagues, Part 2 (The Pitchers)

by The Dynasty Guru

Yesterday, I wrote about a hitter at each offensive position who you may want to think about plucking off of the waiver wire before the season ends and transactions close. Today, it’s time for the pitchers. Cutting right to the chase, let’s start with the starters.

Michael Pineda, Yankees

Even if your league doesn’t count DUIs, don’t forget about the big right-hander. He certainly comes with a ton of risk after undergoing surgery to replace a torn labrum, but he also carries significant upside. His 3.74 ERA doesn’t quite do justice to how good he was in his rookie season, but his 1.10 WHIP, 9.1 K/9 and 3.2 K/BB do. He’s no lock to start the season on the active roster, but why not give yourself the chance to own him if he is?

Mark Rogers, Brewers

The 5th overall pick in the 2004 draft, Rogers has had a hell of a journey just to get to the majors – as evidenced by his lengthy injury history. But he sure looked good in his brief stay in Milwaukee this year, putting up a 3.92 ERA, 1.28 WHIP and 41 K in 39 IP. He’s unlikely to strike out more than a batter an inning over the course of a full season, but the talent is there for him to post a sub-4.00 ERA and at least 7.0 K/9. Hopefully he’ll stay healthy long enough for that to matter.

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