My Expectations

This post will be partly about my expectations for the performance of my picks during the season, and partly about how I think you should use those picks. One reader suggested that I may be overemphasizing the importance of middle relievers in fantasy baseball. In some leagues (for example a 10 team, mixed league, weekly transactions league) its true that middle relievers are generally worthless. However, the reader suggested that they're not useful in daily transaction leagues because you can just rotate starters in a number of roster spots. That's wrong. In fact, that's backwards. The reason you DO need middle relievers in a daily transaction league (and I'm mostly talking about roto leagues, although I assume the same holds in h2h) is that rotating starters in one or two roster slots will ensure that you easily win the Wins and Strikeouts categories. However, the starters you rotate aren't really going to excel in ERA and WHIP, so you'll want to use lots of middle relievers to help you win those categories too.

So what are my expectations for my picks? Well I'm thinking my starting pitcher picks should give me about 40 wins and 500 strikeouts. From one roster spot. Seriously. Real pitchers get 32 starts. My 162 headed monster will get 162 starts. Actually maybe more, since I will sometimes be able to find someone usable on Monday or Thursday when most teams have off. I would imagine that I can manage an ERA around 4.00 and a WHIP around 1.30 in those starts. My relievers should manage an ERA below 2.75 and a WHIP under 1.15. In a standard Yahoo public roto league I would probably aim to have about 3 middle relievers and 1 rotating starter slot along with 5 permanent starting pitchers and 3 closers.