Beat Chris Liss 1

Sunday, Feb. 16, 4 PM ET

I signed up for my first Beat Chris Liss league yesterday. It takes place a week from Super Bowl Sunday at 4 pm ET.

I had been putting off getting in touch with Greg Ambrosius to set it up because I’m not up on baseball and didn’t feel like getting my hands dirty with the research. I even tried last week to feed the Steamer and The Bat projections into Chat GPT (I don’t trust them with my data, but overloading it with a bunch of baseball projection spread sheets is fine.) It did a so-so job of averaging them and spitting out an NFBC-based cheat sheet, but then I asked it for dollar values, and it totally fell apart, which made me lose trust in the entire project. AGI it is not.

Two of the best showings I’ve ever had in fantasy were one year when I was under-prepared for an early-March Yahoo Experts league, and I just picked the upside guys I liked (and knew about from memory 15 years ago) and in the fall of 2023 when I drafted an NFBKC basketball league with Sasha and just used ADP and winged it. In the Yahoo league I finished with 133 out of 140 possible points, and in the hoops league we were 16th overall out of 200-odd teams. (Had I overridden Sasha and taken Luka Doncic instead of Steph Curry at pick 6, we’d probably have been top five!)

So in that spirit I’m going to wing this one. I’ll set my cheat sheet via recent ADP and just pick ADP-compliant players I like each round from memory, which is what we did in that hoops draft. If there’s some prospect who’s getting more playing time I don’t know much about, I’ll just pass and take someone I do know about.

Now this will limit the pool of guys I might take, but it also avoids all the hype you absorb while researching. Even when just sticking with RotoWire for research, you inevitably get colored by the tone of the write-ups and latest news updates. Maybe I’ll check the last 48 hours to make sure no one is hurt (ADP will take care of the rest), but that’s it.

Greg also asked me to livestream it to earn the comp, so to speak, and while I don’t need the $350 that badly (I could obviously just buy into a regular league), I agreed without hesitation because I *like* livestreaming, and it’ll probably be amusing, given how out of touch I am with all the developments in MLB. I don’t even know where every free agent signed yet. But again, that’s all baked into ADP too.

The idea you need to *study* and *research* might actually be wrong. I still have knowledge of the vast majority of the player pool, still understand deeply how these contests work and what the various team builds are, still really enjoy drafting and putting together a team. I figure by the time I do the Main Event in late March, I’ll almost certainly be up to speed effortlessly just by drafting and following my own interests.

Looking back at it, it seems almost bizarre and insane I turned fantasy baseball into some kind of bizarre college course all these years, painstakingly scouring the organizational depth charts for every ounce of information like I was studying for an exam. I hated that shit while I was doing it growing up, and yet I turned something I enjoyed into a version of it. I think that’s why I was avoiding sending that email to Greg, but now I’m only looking forward to it.