Posts Tagged ‘Nerd’

Yes, more boobies.

Yesterday, I went over the fantasy values of the Phillies’ position players. Today, a look at the pitching staff. To reiterate: For purposes of this exercise, I’m assuming 5×5 scoring, as well as standard auction budgets ($11-12 per roster spot). Adjust accordingly for your own league’s rules, and remember – it’s often more advantageous to let a homer reach or overbid for a Phillie.

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Speaking of fantasy...

Fantasy baseball veterans are all too familiar with the concept of homers. No, not home runs – the guy in your league who will massively overpay for a player on his favorite team. There’s always at least one. More likely than not, you’re in a league with people who are Phillies fans like yourself, which makes the question of how to value our beloved Fightins’ players a tricky one.

Of course, you can also use known homer tendencies to your advantage. For example, a league I’ve been in since 2003 with a bunch of people I went to high school with is chock-full of Phillies homers. Knowing that, during our auction draft last night, I purposely nominated as many Phillies as possible. J.A. Happ went for a ridiculous $26 (by comparison, I landed Clayton Kershaw for $25 and Ricky Nolasco for $18) while I watched and laughed maniacally. Utley, Howard, Werth, and Hamels were under keeper protection, but I have no doubt that they would have inspired similarly insane bidding.

In this two-part series, I’ll be telling you what kind of fantasy contribution to expect from our red-pinstriped heroes in 2010, as well as what you should be prepared to pay – and when to say “Enough is enough,” and let some homer have his prize. After the jump…

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You could make him a Phillie

As promised, today I’m going to be looking at trade opportunities to cut payroll in 2011.

For the purpose of this analysis, I’m going to assume the Phillies exercise buyouts on Juan Castro and JC Romero giving them 7 mil to play with over 6 roster spots.

When creating an unrealistic “let’s trade X, Y, and Z for all your base”-type discussion, it’s important to play the game with players who actually have value in trade.  This means moving them should provide us some payroll relief while their contracts shouldn’t be such that we can’t get anything in value back.  I will not condone Luis Castillo for Jason Heyward speculation.  If the following appears absolutely impossible then I didn’t do my job.

The 2011 roster has three players that fit the criteria: Cole Hamels (1 year, 9.5m with a final arb year), Shane Victorino (2 years, 17m), and Ryan Howard (1 year, 20m).

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