Baseball Season
FYI — I launched a new sports-only Twitter account here if any of you are interested.
I still have my NFBKC team with Sasha which is 14th overall as I post this, my NFFC postseason contest (which has Lamar Jackson and Patrick Mahomes at 3x in the AFC this week, and Christian McCaffrey and Amon-Ra St. Brown at 3x in the NFC) and I will surely bet on the Super Bowl.
But it’s time to focus on baseball again, and to that end I’ve already gone through all the depth charts on RotoWire twice this year, added Mike Kurland’s simple but very useful projected lineup tool and built a preliminary NFBC-position-eligibility cheat sheet. I plan to set up my first Beat Chris Liss league soon, and I plan to draft it without having once looked at ADP or anyone’s projections. In other words, my cheat sheet is built solely based on information I gathered from RotoWire, past performance, projected lineups and my interpretation thereof, i.e., I am totally unaware of what anyone else thinks.
I decide to do this because the more I thought about it, the more I realized early ADP is at least partially derived from popular projections systems, and subsequent ADP is largely derived from early ADP plus news. In other words, what passes for the wisdom of the market is in large part groupthink.
Not knowing ADP is tough though because it’s like going to a neighborhood and shopping for houses without knowing the asking-price comps in the area. This might seem foolish, but keep in mind I’m a professional real estate agent who knows generally what places sell for in this market, and I know generally what makes a good house. So not knowing the specifics is a bit of a handicap, but it’s outweighed in my opinion by allowing me to make the informed leaps I want to make without being deterred by what players get drafted where on average.
The hardest aspect is probably closers where after the first dozen, we don’t really know that much, but the truth is even the market gets those wrong all the time — it’s the most unpredictable position because it involves small samples and managerial whims no algorithm, market or set of projections can master. I’ll stick with my heuristic which is to doubt the expensive one-year phenoms in favor of cheaper old warhorses to whom managers often default.
I’m also going to outsource management of the teams again. NBA and NFL are still doable by me, but MLB will slip as the year goes on, so I want that off my plate. The question is who will step up and take the first team — the one I draft before knowing anything about what other people think.