The Big Fly-Hitting vs. Pitching

When I first played fantasy baseball on the internet back in 1997 on the late, great Grandstand game on AOL, I struggled to reach .500. I had watched baseball since I was a little boy, collected baseball cards and immersed myself in the statistics on the back, read the fascinating Baseball Abstracts by Bill James, and competed in leagues with my friends for years. How could I fail to win even with my pitching hand tied behind my back?

I discovered two reasons. First, you need to have access to an informative, constantly updated news source. The internet was fairly new at that time, especially to me, and reading the transaction listings in the back of the sports page did not cut it. By now, this is common knowledge and almost every participant who is even half serious can access sports news. Back then, I noticed that the winner of our league used the Roto News, later to become rotowire.com and I have been a loyal subscriber ever since for all sports.

My second discovery was much more important. As I pored over all the statistics available in Grandstand looking for anything that might help, I stumbled upon something relatively simple and surprising. Our league standings were seperated into total points by batting and pitching. The teams with the best pitching were all over the map, but the teams at the top of the standings were all at or near the top in hitting. Eureka!

Wait a minute, though, was that a fluke? What were the reasons? I thought about it for a while and realized there was something to it, actually quite a bit to it. For several reasons.

One, how many hitters come out of nowhere each year? Not too many. Sure, there are always surprises like Russell Martin last year. However, if you made a list of the top players at each hitting position, it's difficult for an unknown player to crack that lineup. For example, using Yahoo's pre-season rankings for first base eligible players, here are the top ten:

1.Pujols
2.Ortiz
3.Berkman
4.Derrek Lee
5.Morneau
6.Ryan Howard
7.Teixeira
8.Adrian Gonzalez
9.Fielder
10.Sheffield

If you then sort by 2007 performance, six of the top seven first basemen are included in that list, and nine of the ten are in the top 18. In fact, the only player who doesn't show up is Ryan Howard, who is currently on the DL. Here is the list:

1.Fielder
2.Ortiz
3.Morneau
4.Lee
5.Gonzalez
6.Helton
7.Sheffield
8.Youkilis
9.Shawn Green
10.Victor Martinez

I'm pretty sure Sir Albert will appear on that list before too long.

Now let's do the same with pitchers. Here are the pre-draft rankings:

1.Santana
2.Peavy
3.Oswalt
4.Hamels
5.Felix Hernandez
6.Webb
7.Rich Hill
8.Halladay
9.B.J. Ryan
10.Beckett

Only two of them make the top ten now:

1.Peavy
2.Hudson
3.Haren
4.Beckett
5.Francisco Cordero
6.Al Reyes
7.Lilly
8.Penny
9.Saito
10.Marquis

Granted, there are more pitchers than first basemen. I'll get to that in a moment. Still, the success of four of these pitchers is a surprise. Al Reyes was part of a closer committee at the start of the season, Marquis had been awful, Hudson had a horrible season last year, and Penny is good but not a top 20 pitcher by most measures.

Also notice how two of the pitchers on the pre-season list, Ryan and Halladay, are on the DL, and Hernandez has also missed some time. Ryan is actually out for the year. That raises another point-pitchers are more injury prone. The motion necessary to pitch a baseball is unnatural in most cases and leads to many injuries, often serous, while swinging a bat puts much less pressure on the body. In fact, some experts ranked Chris Carpenter as one of the best pitchers entering 2007 and he is also finished for the year.

There are 30 teams, each using a five man pitching rotation as well as a closer. That's 180 players to choose from just to begin the season. With so many injuries and, with such a high variance in performance, the player pool of 180 expands rapidly even during the opening weeks of the season.

In contrast, each team uses only one catcher, one shortstop, etc. for the most part. Some teams platoon players, further reducing the number of players you want on your team. Player turnover is much lower, with fewer injuries and players losing their grip on the starting job. In short, you will have significantly more trouble finding a suitable replacement for a hitter, so you need to make it a priority to draft good ones at each position. With pitchers, you can pick up free agents and have some who were drafted lower come through as pleasant surprises.

In 2004. I took over a last place team in a league where you can keep your six best players. I then lost my best player, Vlad Guerrero, before the season started because he went to the American League. I traded away a couple good pitchers for draft picks and went crazy drafting batters. I finished with a league record 61-13 mark and crushed the opposition in the post-season.

In short, the one most important secret to know in fantasy baseball is to DRAFT HITTERS OVER PITCHERS. It gives you a tremendous advantage. Most people are unaware of this fact and you can use this knowledge to win more than your share of championships!