Where Do You Stand?
It’s been nearly a month, your teams have acquired some stats and the standings are starting to gain a little weight. They are beginning to matter, but more important than where you are is how good your team is. That’s because there are still five months to go, and the future will tell the tale much more than the past. Still, you want to gauge how you’re doing, and if the present standings are only a very partial picture, how do you evaluate?
It’s obvious certain players have panned out: Elly De La Cruz looks every bit the first rounder people pegged him as by Main Event draft day. (I was way out on him and thrilled when he went ahead of me which meant I could land Trea Turner.) Now De La Cruz would be top-five overall and possibly the second overall pick. Mike Trout is hitting and stealing bases — he looks like a Round 2 pick at a minimum and maybe Round 1. Anyone can get hurt, but these look like big wins early on.
Similarly Wyatt Langford, who has yet to homer or steal a base, looks reachy at the 5-6 turn. The teams that waited on pitching look like they did the right thing with only a few exceptions. Closers like Robert Suarez and Mason Miller look like values. The obvious wins and losses are easy to see even though we know baseball is streaky, and things will likely change dramatically.
But what about my Main Event Trea Turner/Yordan Alvarez 1-2 turn? Both are doing fine, well within the fat-part of the expected-outcome range. Most players are still there, whether on the good or bad side of that. Their production thus far doesn’t say much one way or another about whether they were good picks where you took them. (Maybe Turner is a slight positive after last year’s slow start, but I suspect he’d still go around where he went — for stats going forward only — if we were to re-draft again today.)
There are edge cases like 34-YO Freddie Freeman with one homer and one steal. Is he an 18-10 guy this year or will he get hot and start raking (and running) at something close to last year’s pace. (There’s nothing wrong with his on-base skills.) We don’t know, first off, because we *never* really know, but also because unlike in March, there is no market-based ADP to guide us.
We don’t know exactly how much of a discount Freeman would fetch based on his lack of power or steals. Would he go behind Trout? We have only our individual opinions. (FWIW, I’d still go Freeman because of the runs/RBI guaranteed in the lineup, as well as his likely advantage in batting average and lesser injury risk. But Trout could go 45-20 if he plays 140 games. Maybe that’s still an obvious call, but I would at least think about it.)
That there is no ADP market once the season starts means we’re updating our priors based on the accumulated information all alone. There’s no easy sanity check, no quasi-objective gauge against which to measure. Go ahead and tell yourself Freeman or Corbin Carroll (who might go in the second round today) will be fine. Or panic about Aaron Judge. It’s up to you. But you’re in no man’s land, and that’s always the case once the season starts.
In my experience, the best course is to read whatever you like into it, but to embrace to the greatest extent practicable your ignorance of whether your reading is accurate. You don’t know if your Judge/Freeman team isn’t on the cusp of going off, and you should manage it like it’s your De La Cruz/Trout one. It’s natural to give more attention to your winners and mail-in your losers, but I’ve had teams that were bad in June catch fire in August and come to regret not being a little more aggressive in scouring the waiver wire two months earlier for them.
One last thought — the advanced stats won’t help you that much with this. If you have a guy with one home run, but great exit velo and launch angle, maybe he’s been unlucky, but typically bad stats go with bad under-the-hood metrics too. Uncovering the unlucky via advanced metrics is the low-hanging fruit.
The real mystery, where the rubber meets the road, is where someone who has been bad (both under the hood and in the surface stats we count) starts being good and vice-versa. A mechanical adjustment, a health problem going away, a player who does better as the weather warms or needs 30 games of reps to get going. There will be many such cases this year, and we probably won’t see them coming.