We’ve refined this annual tradition — now there’s beer on the line, for instance — but there is actually a point to this (other than proving once and for all that I’ve got the better hair). By putting up the heralded prospects against those that come with less pedigree, we are trying to accomplish a veritable checklist of strategical things:

1) Collect all the most fantasy-relevant prospects for you in one place.
2) Discuss the chances that each of these prospects actually help in 2012.
3) Point out how hard it is to depend on a rookie-eligible player for steady production.
4) Link prospects to their cost in order to find the real values, heralded or not.
5) Beat Carson Cistulli handily (again) despite all efforts to make this matchup more fair.

Last year, my team featured Freddie Freeman, Danny Espinosa, Dustin Ackley, Desmond Jennings, Jeremy Hellickson, Michael Pineda, Chris Sale, and Jordan Walden. Call it a blowout, especially since I made a Christina Ricci / Buffalo 66 / David Mamet reference in the writeup.

Presented: your 18-man lineup of 2012’s top prospects — with some extra mentions for good measure. Here’s to another blowout, because Carson’s britches are getting a little big. As in, he’s losing weight and really should get those pants taken in.

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You probably aren’t surprised to find that the guy who’s charged with writing the Mining the Minors and Prospect Chatter columns at RotoGraphs has been tabbed to write about strategies for keeper leagues, where every owner is trying to land the next big thing before he becomes The Next Big Thing. What might be surprising, though, is that I’m recommending you alter that approach.

Let’s be clear here: I’m not against selecting nearly-ready prospects during your keeper league draft or auction. It’s just that I’d like to call attention to a slightly different — and lesser-utilized — strategy to obtaining youthful talent with loads of potential. A strategy that can be just as effective.

Sure, gambling on the few players who are gobbling up all the preseason Rookie of the Year hype in 2012, like Jesus Montero or Matt Moore, can pay off handsomely. But that also requires using up a mid-round draft pick or valuable auction dollars on players that remain, to a large extent, unknown or unproven quantities. The opportunity cost, then, is rather steep. And if you swing and miss? Well, then you’re just doubling up on your displeasure.

But rather than going all-in on that hot ROY candidate that everybody has to have, there’s another way to go about acquiring young baseball talent. One that is not only less risky, but also less costly. And better yet, I can prove it.

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It’s the great debate taking place in keeper leagues across the country: Who’s better, Bryce Harper or Mike Trout?

The two high schoolers took drastically different paths to top prospect status. Harper appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated at age 16, got his GED and went first overall to the Nationals in 2010. Trout, by contrast, was a New Jersey prep product who lasted until the Angels popped him 25th overall in 2009 — no SI cover for him. Their games are also a study in contrasts, with Harper possessing mammoth power befitting of a future home run king and Trout profiling as a Tim Raines-like leadoff hitter.

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Picture this: you see two players left on the board, and you decide that one of them will be your next acquisition. You think long and hard, and your brain says that both players will likely be worth $15, and you can get either of them for around that price. When it comes time to bid on a player, you decide to target the player with more upside, because there’s a better chance he beats your projection than the other.

But why? If you valued both players at $15, then they should be worth the same amount come draft day. The players’ upside should be factored into the value you place upon them. Simply put, a $15 player should be equal to another $15 player. Simple as that.

So how do we go about factoring upside into a players’ value? Well, there are two ways, and one is much simpler than the other.

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Around this time last year, FanGraphs announced a partnership with ottoneu, bringing a new fantasy baseball format to the masses: year-round auction dynasty without need for spreadsheets.

I am a member of the original ottoneu league, which launched in 2006 in response to frustration with the mainstream platforms. In year one of that league, most of us went through the auction and season as if it were a typical fantasy league, just one with really big rosters.

More than likely, most first-time ottoneu players did the same in 2011. Sure, there are some clear differences -– almost all leagues probably saw a few trades that would never happen in a typical keeper league, as cellar-dwelling owners tried to build for the future. And some prospects that wouldn’t deserve a second look in most leagues were probably owned.

But as I enter year seven of the original league, I’ve come to realize that, in terms of signing players at auction, setting lineups, etc., there are actually some strategies that are hard (or impossible) to pull off in most leagues that play quite well in ottoneu.

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Be a Scout with PITCHf/x Data

We all wish we were scouts — after all, they can, after watching baseball for a few hours, evaluate a player’s ability and future. But scouting is almost shrouded in mystery; with their special reports and terms, it is only something we learn about through online prospect mavens.

While this article won’t teach you to be a scout, it will teach you to be a PITCHf/x scout. Anyone can go to FanGraphs and stare at a player’s page, but not everyone can weave through the intricacies of PITCHf/x data. Having the tools to do so will give you an edge among your fantasy competitors.

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A while back, I had a little pet project to try and simplify the process of sniffing out the over- and under-performers relative to strikeout rates. More specifically, recognizing the sometimes wild fluctuations between strikeout rates year to year, I wanted a better idea if a particular pitcher earned their increase (or decrease) in the category. Was there a process — similar to the one we use on ERA with batting average on balls in play and strand rates — that we could go through for strikeout rates?

Obviously, a high swinging strike rate suggests an inherent ability to strike batters out. Makes sense –- you don’t miss many bats, you’re not likely to wind up registering many strikeouts. So using the swinging strike rate to potentially identify the pretenders from the contenders has merit as the season wears on. But I wanted to tighten that up a bit — add variables that would perhaps control for another part of a pitcher’s skill set to help us identify who should reasonably be expected to strike out more, or fewer, batters. And of course, this is with fantasy baseball in mind –- so the idea was that we can all outsmart the next guy relative to the strikeout column.

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We have come to accept over the past couple of years that for the most part, pitchers have the most control over their strikeout, walk and ground-ball rates. It is true that they do have some influence over a few of the metrics we lump into the luck category, but we can still be fairly accurate with our evaluations by just focusing on the three aforementioned core skills.

As fantasy players, we thrive on trying to find this season’s breakouts. Winning your league basically depends on it. The easiest way to identify these pitchers is to look at their peripherals and determine who has the ability to improve upon any of them. Better skills equal better results, assuming all else equal of course.

In my experience playing fantasy baseball and reading studies about the effect aging has on the various peripherals, it seemed pretty clear that pitchers improve their control more frequently than the other underlying skills. Luckily, we don’t have to guess anymore if this is actually the case, as Jeff Zimmerman, researcher extraordinaire, has done the work and the results can be found in this nifty graphic below.

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The basic fantasy baseball stats –- wins, ERA, WHIP and strikeouts -– may be ultimately flawed in themselves, but once the entire puzzle is put together the best pitchers find their ways to the top of the list. Roy Halladay, CC Sabathia, Clayton Kershaw, Felix Hernandez: these guys find themselves at the top of fantasy draft boards and the WAR leaderboards every season.

But oh, the save -– fantasy baseball’s great monkey wrench. The save is a monster in and of itself, as evidenced by the furious Closer Run. Players with little other value find themselves highly coveted simply on the basis of being the one tabbed with finishing out the ninth inning on a nightly basis. With just 30 such jobs available, identifying those prepared to move into that role can determine the balance of power in a league.

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Fantasy evaluations are based on the player’s statistical projections, no matter what type of league you are in. A key to winning fantasy drafts is to find which players will exceed their projections and then go get them as cheaply as possible. It also follows that hitters that played through injuries the year before could outperform their projections.

One problem with projections is that they take into account the player’s full season of production. If a player persevered through an injury during the season, their overall stats probably suffered. Projections don’t know if a player played through injuries, though. The player’s projections might have been better if the player had simply gone on the disabled list to recover instead of trying to play through pain.

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