Fantasy Baseball

The fantasy baseball season is just around the corner! In this article, we will examine what to expect from the 2018 campaign and how you should handle your draft. Whether you’re a newbie or an oldie at fantasy games, there are things that may surprise even veteran players in their drafts.

The “fantasy baseball yahoo ” is a fantasy baseball game that allows users to create teams and compete against other players.

Due to Patriots Day in Boston, fantasy baseball’s Week 2 gets off to a much earlier start than usual, as the Minnesota Twins at Boston Red Sox game has a planned first pitch of 11:10 a.m. ET, as highlighted in the newest edition of ESPN’s Forecaster. Make your lineups right now!

Managers in daily transaction leagues, which is usual in our game, have extra time to select the rest of their lineups since the second game of the day doesn’t start until 6:10 p.m. ET. Regardless of whether your league locks lineups weekly or daily, the three players described below may give you with lots of assistance.

Connor Joe, Colorado Rockies OF/1B: This is my top choice for the week, who is still available in 49.0 percent of ESPN leagues as of writing time, which is way too many. He’s emerged as the Rockies’ regular leadoff guy, thanks in large part to his disciplined approach at the bat, appearing in all nine of their games so far — including all but one inning — and leading off in each of the last seven. It wasn’t a lefty/righty issue, though, since four of those games, including two of their previous three, were against right-handed starts. Joe also started each of his last 23 games last season, when a hamstring injury terminated his season short in early September.

Joe’s 17.9% chase rate — the rate at which a hitter swings at pitches thrown outside of the rulebook strike zone — has ranked ninth best among 213 players since his July 20, 2021, recall by the Rockies (and among hitters with at least as many plate appearances as he has) since his July 20, 2021, recall by the Rockies (and among hitters with at least as many as the 191 plate appearances that he has). His walk rate was 12.0% at that period, which was in line with his minor-league numbers. Joe, on the other hand, has done a fantastic job of creating hard contact, with a 42.9 percent Statcast hard-contact rate and 15 Barrels, for a better-than-average 11.9 percent Barrel rate.

All of this misses the reality that he’s a guy accomplishing all of this while leading off his team’s lineup at Coors Field. Joe is a must-have for your fantasy lineups with three games to start the week.

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Oakland Athletics’ Seth Brown, OF: The Athletics face two of the more favorable hitters’ lineups in Week 2, first facing the back end of a thin Baltimore Orioles rotation that just lost its ace, John Means, to a forearm injury, and then hosting a Texas Rangers staff with a shaky bullpen that has a Major League worst 5.66 ERA and a whopping 11 home runs allowed after the first fantasy scoring period. Someone in this lineup will put up “better than you expect” stats, and it looks that manager Mark Kotsay loves to put Tony Kemp, Sean Murphy, Brown, Chad Pinder, and Jed Lowrie in the top part of his lineups, presumably in that order. Brown, on the other hand, gets my vote today since he’s left-handed and has the most power of the group, and his Athletics are expected to play five or six right-handed pitchers this week.

Brown has a lifetime big-league Statcast Barrel rate of 13.4%, which is similar to Matt Olson’s, and 9-of-19 batted balls he’s hit this season have been classified as “hard hit” (95-plus mph exit velocity). He’s a batter who’s available in 91.3 percent of ESPN clubs this week, and he’ll come in handy for filling up lineup gaps.

Alex Cobb, pitcher with the San Francisco Giants: Consider this a last-call recommendation, as these are likely the last days to get this right-hander for a bargain through trade or as a free agent in the 47.0 percent of ESPN leagues where he’s still available. Cobb is a high-floor pitcher with a potential 9.0 K/9 and a 24-25 percent K-rate when he has his greatest stuff, which has traditionally been when his hybrid splitter/changeup nicknamed “The Thing” has been at its highest efficiency. In his first start of 2022, on April 12, he struck out ten San Diego Padres partly because he threw the same pitch 43.4 percent of the time, resulting in five of those whiffs, as well as 8-of-14 swinging strikes in total. That, in my opinion, counts as “back.”

Cobb seems to be the next in line for the Giants, who have been one of the league’s most successful organizations at recognizing latent potential in other teams’ pitchers and then getting the most out of that talent once acquired. I’d be more worried about his injury history than any statistical regression, since he has a top-25 fantasy starter’s potential in the healthy games he offers you, thanks to the restoration of his strikeout rate and the pitching-friendly venue he currently calls home.

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Hits that happen quickly

Garrett Whitlock, one of the pitchers I profiled in my column last Wednesday, could be called upon to fill a spot in the Boston rotation in the next 10 days, given the Red Sox’s 17-day stretch without a day off (along with the news that Tanner Houck is unlikely to pitch during the team’s upcoming April 25-28 series in Toronto). Whitlock’s 1.04 mark puts him one out short of ERA-title qualifying as of Monday morning.
MacKenzie Gore, who made his major-league debut on Friday with a five-thirds-inning two-run, three-hit performance, has been named the San Diego Padres’ starter for Wednesday’s game against the Cincinnati Reds. It’s a stronger matchup for him than the last one, since the Reds’ lineup has more strikeouts (the Forecaster ranks it about 2% higher in terms of raw strikeout rates) and may be missing Jonathan India, who is out with a hamstring injury.

The “fantasy baseball 2022 ” is a game that is played by setting up a team of players and competing against other teams. The two leagues that are most popular in the United States are the Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League.