Fantasy baseball managers tend to be persnickety in their player preferences.
In fantasy football, drafters are all chasing the same thing, more or less: yardage and touchdowns. We all have different angles on players, of course, and some people have positional biases. There isn’t much variation in the way people approach drafts — at least not compared with fantasy baseball.
In fantasy baseball, drafters have not only positional biases but also a variety of stat-category biases. Maybe you’re the type of fantasy manager who’s always chasing power or the type who’s really into stolen bases or saves. Some drafters wouldn’t think of drafting a career .230 hitter for fear of tanking their team’s batting average. Some fantasy baseball managers are prospect hounds; others avoid rookies and prefer veterans. Some managers are Statcast devotees obsessed with exit velocities, launch angles and spin rates; others pay little attention to advanced stats and focus on traditional metrics like K/BB ratio.
Like other managers, I have my own set of quirks. I tend to be a batting-average snob. I think K/BB ratios for both pitchers and hitters provide more actionable information than any Statcast metric. There are probably some other biases I’m not even aware of.
Allow me to share my player preferences with you. These are the hitters and pitchers I’m chasing in my 2023 fantasy baseball drafts and auctions. I’m including players at various price points, from the first round to the reserve rounds.
- Fitz’s Positional Primers
- Justin Mason’s Draft Day Cheat Sheet
- Players the Experts Draft
- Latest Fantasy Baseball Mock Draft
