The Deep Sleepers

Two years ago, after over five years of playing vanilla Yahoo fantasy baseball leagues, I was offered a vacant roster in a keeper league run by a friend. The format of the league was the typical mixed league 5x5, but with 20 teams and full 25 man rosters. The deep league format was a struggle at first, but it also provided a challenge and a competitiveness that the vanilla leagues were lacking. In these past two years, I've become a far more active fantasy baseball owner than I ever was in the past.

From my perspective, the whole point of playing fantasy baseball is to as accurately as possible emulate the experience of a real General Manager. The increase in player scarcity in my deep league (500 players drafted rather than the standard 240) gives that experience a fresh dose of authenticity. A much higher level of evaluative skills is required to fill every position with valuable contributors and to find the right mix of players to ensure multi-category competiveness. At the same time, the 20x25 format, still only covers two-thirds of the players in the majors, allowing you to not have to draft the absolute dregs of the league and providing a free agent pool that isn't entirely barren.

The deep league format also places a higher premium on an owner's ability to identify the players that are most crucial to the success of any fantasy baseball team: the break-out candidates. Scanning other fantasy baseball sites, I'm always amazed at how much time is dedicated to debating the virtues of early-round players: Hanley Ramirez vs. Jose Reyes or Ryan Howard vs. Mark Teixeira or Tim Lincecum vs. Johan Santana. The reasons these players are always selected so early is because a high-value return is an almost certainty, whomever you choose. You don't win a league by having your two best players outperform another owner's two best players; you win a league by having 90% of your roster outperform 50% of his roster.

In order to do that, you need to have the foresight to identify which players are likely to substantially improve their performance over the previous year. Not that there's anything remarkably profound or original in that statement, making that type of prediction is the bread and butter of every fantasy baseball writer out there, predictions which are easy to make and hard to get correct on a consistent basis. In fact, with all of the fantasy baseball sites out there today, hype inflation has made it increasingly difficult to get value for the elite level breakout candidates.

The difference with this blog is that it will focus on the fringes, the players that are on few people's radars yet, but who, in my humble opinion, have a good chance at providing significant value in the future. Obviously, the target audience is other deep-leaguers, but hopefully the analysis will be useful to those in the more generic fantasy leagues as well, if only to identify the players you should be keeping an eye on.

When I'm analyzing a player's potential, I tend to base it on a combination of three main factors:

1. The Stats
I'm not as slavishly committed to statistical analysis as other fantasy writers out there, but checking a player's stats is still always my first course of action. I rely largely on the same stats as everyone else, although I do tend to highly value plate discipline (low K/9) in a young hitter and control (high K/BB) in a pitcher. I also try whenever possible to account for park factors, minor league level, or other factors that can artificially inflate or reduce a player's statistical performance.

2. The Opportunity
This is something that should always be carefully considered when assessing a player's potential fantasy contribution, and is way too often overlooked by fantasy players. Even if a player has superb minor league stats and an intriguing package of skills, if he plays for a team that is unlikely to give him a long enough leash if he doesn't immediately reproduce his minor league performance at the major league level, he may not be worth the pick-up. I look at two things on this front: what the organizational depth chart is like (whether the player faces competition for playing time either at the majors or from an up-and-coming prospect) and what the expectations of the team are (i.e. a team like the Royals are much more likely to let a player overcome a few initial bumps than a team that is in the thick of a playoff hunt like the Yankees or the Red Sox).

3. The Intangibles
Sometimes, a player comes from completely out of nowhere to perform well on the major league level, and you have to determine whether that performance is something likely to continue, or whether it's some kind of statistical aberration. To do that, you have to look beyond the stats. For example, Denard Span, who had hit for a .689 OPS at AA in 2006 and a .678 OPS in AAA in 2007, suddenly hit for a .819 OPS in the majors in 2008. The fact that he got laser eye surgery in the offseason before 2008 goes a long way to explain this sudden improvement, and why r egression might not be in store for 2009.

I spend a lot of time watching games and reading about all aspects baseball, and in this blog I'll endeavour to share my insights with the rest of the fantasy baseball community. In the next week, I'll post my top 10 undervalued hitters and pitchers for 2009, and then throughout the season I'll try to post 3-5 deep sleepers each week. Then, at the end of the season, I'll evaluate the accuracy of my projections to determine how reliable my advice really was.