Tyler Austin

Profile: The New York Yankees’ outfield prospect Tyler Austin deserves a top-100 ranking. Just how high is up for discussion, though, as Austin’s not the impact offensive talent he’s reported to be. This often happens to Yankees prospect who receive a turn in the hype machine. Austin projects as a .275/.330/.475 player in his prime. And while that level of production is good enough for deeper dynasty leagues, it’s also possible to acquire veterans who produce those totals now — and you could do so while spending less than Austin’s current prospect value. If I were an Austin owner, I’d be looking to sell high. (Mike Newman)

Quick Opinion: Austin should be rated highly when compared to the entire group of minor league prospects in baseball, but he might also be highly over-rated because he also belongs to the group of Yankee prospects.

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ZiPS. Marcel. Bill James. Cairo. PECOTA. Steamer. These are not the names of my pet hamsters. They are the names of some of the most well-known baseball player projection systems out there. All of them derive their forecasts by throwing various historical data into a blender and spitting out a projected performance line. These systems are pretty darn good, but for the most part, very little is shared about the formulas that make up their guts. So at some point, you might get that urge to begin projecting players yourself, rather than rely on these systems that are unaware of injury issues or changes in a pitcher’s repertoire, for example.

For over 10 years, I have projected players myself for use in my local fantasy leagues. As such, I have never projected any non-fantasy statistics such as hitters walks, doubles, triples, etc (which is why I don’t mention them below!). This is how I do it.
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Some clichés are unique to the hometown announcing team — The White Sox’s TV voice, Hawk Harrelson, has one for every possible occasion, though some announcing teams are a little more judicious with their use — but there are also truisms that are far more widely used throughout the game. Some have been around so long, they don’t even seem like clichés anymore, they’re just part of the vocabulary of baseball.

By and large, as long as the repetition doesn’t bother viewers too much, these common turns of phrase are relatively harmless, though many of them assert truths that may not be quite right. Routine groundballs are seldom exactly that and may give viewers an unkind view of fielders who have trouble corralling them even if the particular grounder in question was anything but routine, for example. That particular turn of phrase is virtually impossible to test on any sort of larger scale.

One phrase that a number of broadcast teams have used – likely all of them, though I cannot assert that with certainty – occurs when one of the team’s faster runners reaches on an error by one of the opposing infielders. “They know he’s so quick coming out of that box” the color man might quip. “His speed forced the defense into that error!”

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An auction is still an auction. No matter your settings or your belief system, an auction requires a number of fantasy managers to sit down and bid fake money to buy real players for their fake teams. And so there are aspects of preparation that are common to all auctions — thence the first part of the title.

And then, once you have the basics down, it’s time to start considering the nuance. How will you divvy the money between your position players and your pitchers? What sort of player talent distribution will you favor? When do you throw guys you like? And guys you don’t? That’s where the ‘strategies’ come in.

Either way, let’s get going. We’ll start with the stuff that every auction manager should do. And then we’ll give you the options you should consider once you have the basics down.

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We’re calling this lesson a 401 because it’s not going to be a “101” as in, “this is a snake draft and you should do your homework to prepare, fill in the bubble, and turn in your sheets,” but it’s also not a graduate level seminar where we can all sit around in the Socratic method and pontificate each individual inquiry. So a 401 it is.

Some quick ground rules before we dive in.

The target audience is primarily those of you that are in simple points or standard 4×4 or 5×5 rotisserie style fantasy baseball which use the love-it-or-hate-it snake draft to select players. The most common leagues are found on CBS, Yahoo!, and ESPN. And just for any of you 101’ers out there, a snake draft is where you have a draft slot, 1-12 and then it “snakes” back so that the person with the first pick also gets the 24^th and the last person gets the 12^th, but also the 13^th. Rinse, lather, repeat. There are a variety of opinions about what the best draft slot might be but we’re not going to worry about that right now.

I’m going to use my own personal approach from the 2012 draft, and as such, I’ll be referring to players where they were most commonly valued back in March of 2012, not for your 2013 draft. This is designed to serve as a model, not to tell you who to draft this season. There will be a thousand of those articles for you to pour over in the coming weeks. This is also very heavy on the draft preparation side, and not in the “be prepared” vein but in trying to give you some tools to set up in advance that will help you keep a straight head on draft day.

Off we go.

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You won’t find the next Fernando Rodney simply with statistics.

Perhaps Rodney’s first 10 innings or his first 100 pitches — or some other relatively early sample — contained something to suggest he’d be able to maintain his incredible quality throughout an entire season. But by that point it was too late: By making him closer, the Rays guaranteed Rodney would fly off the waiver wire.

Many — like me — tried to get a jump on the Rays’ closer situation following Kyle Farnsworth’s injury and picked up Joel Peralta. There were plenty of reasons to think Peralta would get the nod. He saved six games for the Rays in 2011. He struck out a batter per inning in 2010, and he was near that mark in the two surrounding seasons. His ERA- and FIP- were each less than 90 in both 2010 and 2011. He was a quality reliever and — at least looking at recent performance — he was Joe Maddon’s seemingly best choice after Farnsworth.

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Last season, Prince Fielder and Albert Pujols moved from the National League to the tougher American League. A drop in production was expected… and occurred. As the season went on, they began to hit better. With a sample size of two, it seems to take players a while to adjust to a new league and its pitchers.

By looking at players who changed leagues, let’s try to determine if there is an adjustment period to the new pitchers and parks. These transitioning hitters could then be bought at a discount during their adjustment time.

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Drafting prospects is a risky proposition in fantasy baseball. As Mike Trout and Bryce Harper showed last season, hitting on a prospect can single-handedly win your league, though.

Due to the success of those players, owners might be more willing to take a shot on a top prospect this year. But, as we know, the failure rate of prospects is high, and even the great ones need a year or two of seasoning in the majors before reaching their potential. That complicates things for fantasy owners, as players who offer such a high reward are the most unpredictable assets in fantasy drafts.

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In the 1991 edition of his Baseball Book — a sort of sequel to the earlier Abstracts — the very famous Bill James includes a long section called Basic Questions. Here’s how he introduces it:

What I’ve tried to do… is talk about, write about, as many of the things which are on the minds of the average baseball fan as I can. For each player, I tried to find the basic questions about each major league player. The basic questions about Darryl Strawberry: How’s he going to do in Los Angeles? How will he hit in Dodger Stadium? How much will his loss hurt the Mets? How much will he help LA? What are his career totals going to be? Is he going to hit 500 home runs in his career? 600? How many?

What James then does is proceed — for 180 giant, three-columned pages — to do that very thing.

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It’s not often that you have a rookie make an impact like Angels outfielder Mike Trout had on in the major leagues in 2012. Rookies can usually be counted on to help round out a fantasy roster, fill in temporarily during injuries and, at times, provide an unexpected above-replacement-level contribution that pushes your team into contention. Drafting prospects — or claiming them off the waiver wire at the appropriate times — can be one of the toughest things a fantasy manager has to face each year thanks to their volatility and the fact that their playing time often hinges on injuries and disappointing performances from veteran incumbents.

What this article attempts to do is rank rookies based on their potential impact on 2013 alone. It does not take into consideration their future potential or ceiling. Some mid-range prospects will be ranked higher than top prospects simply because they’re more advanced at this point or have a clearer path to regular playing time during the upcoming season.

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