Checking Chunks: A High Level View of Early Drafts
I look into chunks of 50 players by ADP to find where the stats are located, what you can wait for, what you can't, and much more!
I want first to bring everybody’s attention to my NFBC ADP Dashboard. It’s a great tool, and I use it a ton during draft season. Check it out, and let me know if you have any questions about it.
This post is not for player analysis. My team preview series is for player analysis, and it’s probably the most extensive player analysis series on the Internet if I do say so myself!
This will be a high-level view of the draft, namely early NFBC drafts. This won’t be as useful for your home league drafts, but a lot of home league draft ADP does come from these early high-stakes daddies, so it’s useful for any type of fantasy player (besides auction guys, I guess).
ADP matters. Even if you’re the smartest fantasy baseball player in the world and know perfectly well which players are mispriced by ADP, it still matters to you to know where guys usually go. If you knew 100% certain that some guy outside of the top 200 ADP would have a breakout season and be in the top 50 next year, you still wouldn’t take that guy in the top 100 this year. You’d wait until they get a round or two away from their ADP and then jump at them.
But even that is a lower level than what I’m trying to do here. Let’s get into it. I’ve taken the ADP (1-500) and then did a little left join to get my projections tagged on with those players. After that, we can group by chunk and generate this very helpful data table.
Projected Stats by Chunk
You can see the obvious with the coloring. The players get worse as you get deeper into the draft. Wow!
Using this table, let’s derive what insights we can.
Insight #1: Hitters Early
Hitters dominate the early rounds. 68% of the players in the top 50 are hitters, and you can see how many more of those juicy hitter stats are concentrated in the top 50. The five-category hitters fly up draft boards. I project just ten players for 25 homers and 25 steals, and they all find themselves in the top 30 by ADP:
The great thing about category-based fantasy baseball is that there are a ton of different ways to build a winning team. You do not have to have the 40-40 player to win your league. You can do almost anything with your first few picks and put the rest of the puzzle together correctly as you go. But yeah, those 40-40 players help quite a bit.
I am once again focused on starting my draft with three hitters. These early hitters tend to separate themselves from the pack more than the early pitchers do. A lot of that has to do with pitchers getting injured more often, but it’s also true that the breakout pitcher is more common than the breakout hitter. There is a lot more waiver wire gold to be had on the pitching side than the hitter side when games begin being played.
Insight #2: The Large Secondary SP Tier
The SPs are pretty evenly distributed between chunks 2-8. There are 16, 17, or 18 SPs in each chunk of 50. My favorite place to attack SP is in chunks 2 and 3. If you wait until that point, you have a very solid offensive base, and you can catch up in a hurry with some of these “very good but not quite elite SPs”. Here’s a list:
There aren’t a ton of great bets for a Cy Young Award here, but you have 27 very strong fantasy pitchers. I like getting my hands on three of them to start off my pitching staff.
If you’re asking me who my favorites are relative to ADP:
Blake Snell
Yoshinobu Yamamoto
I think we’re seeing a little discount on these guys because of the rumors about a six-man rotation from the Dodgers. They’re crazy deep, as you know, but injuries are so common that I think the sharp bet is to ignore that noise. There will surely be times when they are running a six-man, but it’s unlikely (in my view, at least) that it’s something that will happen for most of the year. With wins being one of the four categories that SPs contribute to (25%!), I like to lean into guys on teams that can win 95+ games. Anyways, more names:
Gerrit Cole
Michael King
Grayson Rodriguez
Spencer Schwellenbach
Shane McClanahan
Sonny Gray
Zac Gallen
Insight #3: Know The Position Distribution
If you cannot add players from waivers, you need to be sure you don’t get stuck not having a player to fill in for injured players. You want several backup options at each position. Here’s where all of those positions are located, broken down by chunks of 50 picks:
Some things that stick out to me:
If you want a good catcher (highly recommended in a two-catcher draft-and-hold), you’re going to want to get one in the top 150 picks.
Everybody seems to panic at second base between picks 200 and 250. You can avoid that by getting one of the top 14 guys and then filling up at other positions when the rest of the league is grabbing 2Bs.
Shortstop is top-heavy. Some of the best fantasy players in the fantasy game are shortstops. It makes sense not to wait too long there.
Outfield is much the same. Some of these leagues are 15-team leagues with five starting outfielders. That means that 75 outfielders are being started each week. I would like to get two or three of the outfielders going inside the top 200.
For more insights and access to the full data, along with everything else I offer here, become a paid subscriber for $9/month or $80/year.