KingFish Tales

Last Minute Preparation!

Well, here we are less than one week before opening day. The long cold winter is quickly becoming a forgotten nightmare of little or no baseball. I hope you were all busy over the off-season. You should have been. In keeper leagues that allow off-season trading you certainly should have been very busy. In all league types you should have been keeping a sharp eye on ML trades/moves, injuries, recoveries, the fall league, the international leagues and much, much more. If not, well you are behind the eight ball now but all is not lost. You can still do a lot of work between now and opening day and more importantly, draft day. Being structured about your approach now is critical though especially if for whatever reason you were unable to concentrate on the job at hand during the winter months. Just what needs to be done?

The first thing you need to get a hold of is the current rosters. ESPN provides only one of many, many sources for getting them. Here’s the address, http://baseball.espn.go.com/mlb/index . With all the trades and moves that team you used to know so well may just be dramatically changed. The Mets are a fine example of a team that has undergone a major overhaul. Without knowing the rosters it would be very difficult to discern just who is on first? Another source for rosters is @ http://theinsidepitch.com/Rosters.html which lists projected 25 man rosters and current 40 man rosters.

Next you should get some ideas of current injury status of players and Rototimes has an index that is kept current with both Injury Reports and Player Notes. They are updated quite frequently @ http://www.rototimes.com/baseball1/index.html No sense in drafting a guy that has the potential for a lot of missed time without you knowing about it. In some Keeper league situations drafting an injured guy is one way of getting a good talent for the future at bargain price now.

Projected batting orders are needed. You need to know just what stats last years hitters now may be getting from any change in the batting order or personnel. Back to the Mets, as an example. Last season the Mets lacked a true leadoff, high on base percentage guy at the top of the order. Between adding both Alomar and Cedeno that should change and the big boppers like Piazza should net higher rbi’s and see some fatter pitches. A change in the batting order can change the approach a player has to take and thus could effect their individual statistics. Ortiz in Colorado is and example of that. The Rockies plan on moving him down in the order to take advantage of his power. The Marlins on the other hand are swearing that Preston Wilson will be penciled into the two hole to take advantage of his speed. Either of these moves can change the overall output in the hitting categories. Ortiz’s power numbers should rise and Wilson’s may fall a bit but his SB’s should certainly be kicked up a couple of notches to plus 30 or so. ESPN is but one of numerous sources for projected lineups @ http://games.espn.go.com/content/flb/2002/story?page=lineups .

Of course the same logic holds true for knowing the rotations and bull-pens of each team. You can check these out at either http://www.drafthelp.com/NL_Proj_Lineups.htm or http://www.drafthelp.com/AL_Proj_Lineups.htm . It’s far harder to read into rotation changes what effect they may have unless a SP suddenly becomes a Closer ala Smoltz last season. Moving up or down a spot in the rotation means very little from what I can discern.

Since you are most likely short on time if you have read this far then Cheat Sheets are a must have. I’d avoid those found in the written publications as by the time they are made up, published, distributed and hit you between the eyes there is a very good chance that they may be dated more than a bit. There are again, many, many sources for these and CBS Sportsline is just one of them @,
http://baseball101.fantasy.sportsline.com/mp/statistics-cheat-sheet?league=zero&owner=&random=1741&

You’ll probably also need to know what positions the players are eligible to play at. This will vary dependent upon your league rules but @ http://www.stallvalue.com/ you can select either AL, NL or combined and the number of games required to be played to be eligible at a position. With the way players tend to get injured it is always good to know those handful of talents that are eligible at multiple positions. This way when that injury bug bites and it will believe me, you may have many more waiver wire or trade options by having at least one utility guy that you can plug into several positions.

If you’re playing in an auction or fantasy style leagues you will need to have players rankings. Rototimes has a good one that lets you customize by your specific league setup @ http://www.rototimes.com/baseball1/projections/page1.pl . Word of caution here, for those of you in keeper auction leagues. You have to remember to take into account kept players and their salaries. Kept players reduce the available supply and most often increases the money available to get talent from the draft pool because they are often much cheaper. This artificial supply and demand condition creates what is referred to as “inflation” or “inflation dollars”. You will need to adjust the projected dollar values either up or down dependent upon the dollars available at the draft for your league versus the projected dollar value of those in the draft pool. Since it is so late in the game you will have to take these projections at there face value. It’s doubtful at this point that you have time to go in and tweak individual performance for all of the players. I would suggest that you avoid the written projections from the monthly or quarterly publications as there is just no way that they can be current. You can bet that the guy that shows up at your draft with an armful of magazines is behind the curve and you may have an advantage that you can exploit.

We’ve covered a lot already but if you have the time it is always nice to know the ML contract status of a player. It doesn’t always work out that a guy has a career year in the last year of his major league contract but it happens often enough that you may want to keep tabs on it. It may be the one thing that let’s you make an intelligent decision on two players of equal value. You can find this info @ http://www.bluemanc.demon.co.uk/baseball/mlbcontracts.htm . I wouldn’t spend a lot of time here if you are pressed but it is good to know.

Spring numbers can often be very misleading and you can waste a lot of precious time looking them over but if you just have to have them then ESPN to the rescue again @ http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/statistics . Now you have to remember that the stats are all whacked by the park conditions, batting orders, split squad games and so forth. That starter with the spring 6.79 ERA may well be just trying out a new pitch or windup and stride to the plate. The batters may be experimenting with new stances. Whatever, just do not try to directly correlate spring numbers into regular season projections. That’s a loosing proposition if there ever was one. More important it the number of AB’s and IP’s as without a goodly amount of either the player you’re watching may or may not be as ready for opening day as you are. The best I can make out of spring numbers are looking at prospect lists such as http://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/20020206prospects.html and seeing just how they performed in spring. Even if they did not win a job like Everett in HOU or Izturis in LA or Blalock for TEX you should be able to discern whether the other prospects have a shot later down the road. If you can draft farm players that may be very important in 10 to 12 team single leagues or 20+ team combined leagues. You might be far better off having that farm kid take a spot on your roster than to have some .220 hitting full time player. At least they can’t kill your team if they are not playing.

Now I want you to remember one thing while your scrambling in the final hours before opening day. You could have avoided all this. You only have yourself to blame. Putting off till tomorrow what needs to be done today will bite you every time. Those long winter months could have been much more productive and you could be going into draft day with much more of a comfort zone.

Enough of the KingFish preaching, for now. You have a lot to do in a very short time so get on it ASAP and the season ahead may yet reap you bountiful returns!

So Sayeth the Fish!