Fantasy Focus: Relief From Relief Pitchers

Most fantasy baseball leagues have a single category of Saves which SP's cannot help you with and the vast majority of points in the category are tied up at any given time in just 30 RP's who are designated as Closers by the respective MLB manager.  This creates, by far, the biggest headache and deepest intrigue in managing a fantasy baseball team.  Those 30 RP's come to have way more value than is warranted in real-life baseball and when you factor in the sometimes irrational exuberance over acquiring closers by fantasy managers, well, you really have an extremely skewed value allocation in the sport.

My own experience with RP's and Saves is very checkered, so don't look at me as being an expert by any means.  My experiences have pretty much run the gamut of options for dealing with the category, so I'll start with telling my story and then try to finish up with some comments.  Maybe some of the readers here will find it all helpful.

My first year in Fantasy baseball, I inherited a team with 5 very bad Keepers, so I tried to draft mostly young players with a lot of upside hoping to upgrade my Keepers.  I was able to accomplish this nicely.  My league expanded their Keepers to 6 players divided between 3 position players and 3 pitchers.  I was drafting #9 in a 10 team league.  When I got to the 3'rd and 4'th rounds, I decided I already had 3 pretty good SP's and now had 5 pretty good position players.  There were a few guys who had kept closers but none had been taken in the draft.  I got the jump on everybody by drafting 2 closers in rounds 3 and 4.  I ended up with a couple more a bit later in the draft.  I was very competitive in the Saves category and won my league championship in my second season of managing.  Now, with 6 Keepers and 2 additional draft rounds, that meant I was really drafting my closers in rounds 9 and 10, so I don't look at it as taking those closers early.  Everybody else got started too late!

The next season, I got out of sync in my draft and ended up with a weak team that finished 8'th in the 10 team league. The next season, I found myself with just 1 decent closer early in the season and opted to trade him and punt the Saves category entirely.  I put SP's with dual eligibility in the RP slots and tried to win as many W's and K's as I could and letting ERA and WHIP take care of themselves.  That strategy worked well enough for a 4'th place finish, but I found that punting one category completely forces you to go 6-3 in the remaining 9 categories just to salvage a 6-4 win and that can be very tough to do, especially in the playoff H2H's against good teams.

Last year, our league dropped the Keepers and went to an auction draft.  I drafted Brian Wilson, Joe Nathan, Grant Balfour, Kyle Farnsworth and Vinnie Pestano.  We all know what happened to Wilson.  Nathan had a good season, but Balfour lost and re-won his closer job with the A's at least 3 or 4 times.  Farnsworth took too long coming back from an injury and lost his job to Fernando Rodney and Pestano was never able to wrest the closer job away from Chris Perez in Cleveland.  I tried to pick up closers off the FA/Waiver Wire, but just couldn't get any traction.  By the time the playoffs rolled around, I was essentially punting the Saves category.  On the other hand, my friend came out of the draft without any closers at all, worked very hard at picking them up as the season went along, and ended up with 5 good ones.  I ended up beating him 6-4 in the championship H2H.

It's pretty easy to calculate how many closers you need to carry to be competitive in your league.  Just divide the number of closers at any given time, which is always 30, by the number of teams in the league.  For most leagues, you are going to need 3.  When you factor in that there are always 1 or 2 teams going with closer-by-committee, coupled with 3-4 really bad closers who will destroy your ERA and WHIP in any given week, add in the probability that at least 2-3 managers in your league will try to horde closers and it can be very tough to roster even 2, let alone 3.

So, what is a thoroughly frustrated manager to do?  Here are the realistic options I can think of:

1.  Accept the fact that you are going to overpay for Closers and make sure you get at least 3 in your draft.  Your job in this case is to not grossly overpay, such as paying $20 for Craig Kimbrel in an auction draft.  I would say it's reasonable to look for your first 2 closers somewhere in rounds 7-10 in a snake draft.  By that time you should have 5-6 position players drafted and 1-2 SP's.  Remember, you don't have to get Kimbrel as the first RP taken.  The #5-15 Closers are all almost as good as #1-4, but you also don't want to get buried by a run.  In Auction drafts, it's a good idea to budget $15-20 out of your $260 for your RP's.  You aren't going to get any for $1 in most real auctions.

2.  Punt the category in the draft, but try to acquire RP's off the FA/Waiver Wire as the season goes along.  Last year was a particularly volatile year for Closers, but in most years, you can count on a turnover at the position of about 1 in 3.  There will be opportunities to add Closers, but you have to remember that other managers will be scouring the same waiver wire looking for the same thing.  Be prepared to spend an inordinate amount of your time bird-dogging Closers and it still might not be enough!  A reasonable compromise strategy would be to try to get 1 or 2 Closers in the draft and add on from the FA/Waiver Wire after the season starts.

3.  Punt the category and fill your RP and 1 or 2 or your swing slots with good setup men.  These guys often log more innings than the closer on their team and often have exceptionally good ERA's WHIP's and K/9's.  If you get 3-5 of them on your team, they will get you as many K's as 2 good starters and will help your ERA and WHIP and not by a small amount.  They will even get you a Save here and there which might win you the category against another team that is also Save challenged.  They just won't help you build up very many W's.

4.  Punt the category and load up on SP's who have dual RP eligibility.  This enables you to potentially dominate the W and K categories and if you choose carefully, you can do quite well in ERA and WHIP too.  This probably only works in H2H leagues where you can use your bench as an extended rotation.  Many rotisserie leagues have innings limits which prevent you from running up K's and W's by piling up IP from a stockpile of starters.

I hope these thoughts are helpful to you fantasy baseball players out there.  I will write another post about specific RP's another time.