If you’re reading this, you’ve made it. You’ve successfully navigated the offseason — the player analysis, the spring training highs and lows, the draft process. You’ve done everything to ensure you had the best draft imaginable. Now is the time to unleash that beast of a team and manage it in the best way possible during the season.
- Fantasy Baseball Waiver Wire Assistant
- Fantasy Baseball Trade Tools
- Weekly Fantasy Baseball Content
- MLB Prop Bet Cheat Sheet
Honestly, much of the draft analysis and offseason player evaluation is the easy stuff. You have months to dive into rosters, players, stats, analytics, pitch data and more. You then take all that info and the opinions you’ve gathered from it and put that energy into drafting. Once the regular season rolls around, you need to start doing an entire other set of player analysis and evaluation.
Managing your team in-season is both simple and time-consuming if you’re doing it right. With the season almost six months long, you have tons of time to do your due diligence. Whether that be on the waiver wire, FAAB or something else. With that in mind, let’s break down the most important in-season management tips.
Top In-Season Fantasy Baseball Management Tips
Understand The FAAB Process
If you’re in a FAAB league you know every dollar you have counts. If you’re going to spend those precious dollars on a player they need to be spent wisely. That’s why understanding the FAAB process is key.
For those that don’t know, FAAB stands for “Free Agent Acquisition Budget” and everyone is allotted a certain amount to spend in free agency for the year. Instead of submitting a waiver claim, you bid on free agents and that player goes to the highest bidder.
To make the best use of those dollars, you need to do your due diligence. You’re never going to know the exact dollar amount needed to beat everyone else but there are a few factors to know just how much of your budget to use:
- Short- vs. long-term addition
- Position scarcity
- Current player performance
- Good vs. bad upcoming matchups
- Team needs of other managers
The better the player and the longer you plan on them on the squad, the more they’re worth. More highly touted prospects ready to be called up should go for more as well. Short-term additions typically go for just a few dollars depending on their position and the league you’re in.
The IL Is Your Friend
One of the most overlooked in-season strategies is how to use the injured list (IL) to your advantage. You need to make sure your league has IL spots (most should) and check how many you have. As long as they’re an option, they need to be utilized.
Keeping one open is a must in a daily league. You want that security blanket in case one of your more valuable guys goes down. Being able to swap them for someone who can produce without wasting a bench spot is a must. In weekly leagues, it’s much less of a necessity.
Outside of keeping one open in a daily league, you should utilize your IL spots to stash injured stars not set to return for a while. Don’t use them on guys like DJ LeMahieu and Vaughn Grissom. At the moment guys like Gerrit Cole, Jacob deGrom, Josh Lowe and Max Scherzer are worth stashing. This becomes a cheap, easy way to get high-level guys on your roster without paying up closer to their return.
Don’t Overreact
I understand in a perfect world you want every guy you drafted to produce every night. The harsh reality is many will fail to produce in even a third of the games this year. With that being said, just because a player goes, say, 0-for-16 doesn’t mean they should be dropped.
It depends on the player but baseball is a streaky sport. Guys go on hot and cold streaks all the time so seeing someone go cold shouldn’t worry you. The only time it should is when it’s a fringe roster guy you don’t need.
You don’t want to overreact too much the other way either. Your best way to nail the waiver wire is to pinpoint guys set to put together a nice run. Grabbing guys who just hit their fourth home run in five games and aren’t known for their power likely just hit their peak for the season. The chances of them replicating that again once you burn a roster move to pick them up are slim.
Research Research Research
Fantasy baseball success, more than any other sport, is predicated on how much time you are willing to put in. Especially when it comes to research. Whether you’re researching for your draft or in-season management it all goes a long way towards bringing home a title. Knowing what to research is key.
Some of the most important things to research for upcoming matchups would be the projected starting pitchers, ballpark factors and home/road splits. For hitters, it’s also good to look into how much contact they’ve been making, what their quality of contact looks like and how their plate discipline has been trending.
On the pitching side of things, looking at things like projected starting lineups, current K-BB%, ballpark factors, opponent K% and what type of quality contact they’ve been giving up can be good indicators for future success. It’s very important when researching starting pitching options, especially off the waiver wire, that you try and find guys with quality start potential. Chasing wins almost always goes poorly. Quality starts will ensure your ratios aren’t going to get destroyed and when a pitcher can throw a quality outing it puts them in a position for wins.
There are plenty of other in-season management strategies to find success. These just so happen to be my favorites and the ones I use the most year after year. The fantasy baseball season is a grind. Anything you can do to help keep your team competitive over the next six months will be worth it. Remember, strategize to make the playoffs, then dominate your way to a championship.
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