One common element of fantasy baseball that gets overlooked when discussing strategies is the Reserve Draft. This occurs normally after each league member has fully rostered 23 players and is done in snake draft format even in auction leagues.
This begs these questions:
1) Do you prepare for your Reserve Draft?
2) Do you simply take the best available players when your turn comes up in the Reserve Draft?
From personal experience, the more prepared you are for this portion of Draft Day, the more balanced your team will be and better capable of withstanding critical injuries that your team will inevitably face during the course of the season. The players that are available can range from Lineup Fillers, Closers in Waiting, One-Trick Ponies and Prospects. Depending on your teamâs overall construction, you are most likely going to get a mix of all these categories, but if you prepare for this portion of the draft, you will maximize your team/s chances for a run to a championship. Letâs discuss each of these categories of players to help identify their roles and importance to your preparation for this year and the future.
Table Of Contents:
LINE UP FILLERS
Primarily in mixed leagues, every teamâs focus will be the Lineup Fillers. The player pool in mixed leagues are deep enough in these formats that there are players that will slip to the reserve draft that when you see them available, you will be tempted to boast of what a great value you have gotten. What if you are in a NL-Only or an AL-only league? It is not so easy then, is it?
In all formats, be it either Mixed vs League-Only, or Snake vs Auction, your team is going to have holes in it. The 1st inclination you will have is to address those holes and fill them as quickly as possible with as many at-bats (ABâs) or Innings Pitched (IP)as possible. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that approach. With preparation though, you can have players identified that will fill those voids most effectively.
The best preparation here is identifying as many playersâ strengths and weaknesses before you ever arrive to your draft. Set aside a few hours to read your sources and create Tiers. These tiers can either be broken down by category or by position. Obviously by the time the reserve draft occurs, the top guys in every tier format you come up with will have already been taken, but there will be guys that will slip through.
Colby Rasmus is someone that fits this label and in mixed leagues may fall to your reserve round. He fills in admirably at the OF position giving you both power and speed while not killing your batting average too much. Is he an optimal player to be in your lineup daily or weekly? No. His role here is to help fill out your lineup and he satisfies all requirements.
In AL or NL only leagues, such talent may not be so accessible and you will have to dig deeper to find hitters that will get you 250-350 ABâs and be productive when they do get those opportunities. Scott Van Slyke is someone I constantly target as my lineup filler on the hitting side and for whatever reason. He will never be a superstar, but gains various position eligibilities while getting you 10 HR and does not kill your ratios.
On the pitching side, if you are looking for starting pitchers, you should look for someone who may end up getting between 120-160 IP realistically and try to get someone that may be at the back end of a rotation on an average to good team instead of a bad team. The reason for this approach is that these pitchers are at the back end of a rotation for a reason and if they are on better teams, they most likely will get better run support leading to more wins. Jonathon Niese, as a Met, always fell to the reserve draft in my NL only leagues. He always gets plenty of innings in and although he is far from spectacular, he gets you over 100 strikeouts a year, close to 10 wins a year and does not kill your ratios.
These lineup fillers are not players you should ever expect a breakout from. If you or anyone else expected a breakout, they would not have slipped to the reserve draft.
CLOSERS IN WAITING
One of more popular uses of the reserve draft is focusing on middle relievers that are believed to be in line for save opportunities down the road. These prognostications are normally based upon the current closer and our gut feelings or well-founded reports that they will not be able to hold on to the closer role. Depending on the depth of your reserve draft, you may take more fliers than you thought possible, but what is common in most formats is that middle relievers are the most predominant player pool available.
When evaluating middle relievers, you should always look to ratios more than you do their wins and losses or their strikeout totals. ERA & WHIP for middle relievers fluctuate more because of the lack of innings pitched. The elite middle relievers will already be swallowed up in the regular draft or auction, so you have to be savvy with your selections here. You may see a pitcher that comes into ball games that throws 96-98 mph and you say that he is closer material, but when you realize his lack of control leads to walks and more earned runs allowed, that speculation is hogwash.
You should look for middle relievers that you believe will get you 40+ innings pitched during the season as their basement. The more innings that they have pitched, bad performances are minimized in the overall breakdown of their numbers. You should also look at a ratio that helps simply overall evaluations that is called SWIP: Strikeouts minus Walks then divided by Innings Pitched. SWIP is something I just learned about last year from Ray Flowers of baseballguys.com and FantasyAlarm.com. The baseline for relief pitchers is anything above 0.9. The elite relief pitchers like Aroldis Chapman and David Robertson will have SWIPs that soar above 1.0 each year, but in the reserve rounds, getting near the 1.0 mark is the goal, but rarely ever the standard.
Targeting of the MLB teams that will have open closer roles to fill is also something to consider during your reserve draft. Every year, there is a revolving door at the closer position in many cities due to either injuries or poor performances.
Injuries occur more frequently as players get older, so if you are aware of an aging closer whose skills have diminished from their peak years of performance, this may be a team to seek a closer in waiting. Jonathan Papelbon in Washington is 35 years old this year and his SWIP is a weak 0.69. His set up man, Shawn Kelley is just 31 years old and his SWIP is 0.935. Even if Kelley does not get you the saves in the closer role, his ratios will help your team as a reserve draft pick and if Papelbon does lose his role, a player in Kelleyâs situation swoops in and your reserve pick investment pays dividends.
Poor performances of a closer are not always seen in the W-L columns. When a baseball manager loses confidence in his 9th inning lockdown closer, it may not be because games are lost, it can be as simple as a feeling that a manager has about the guy in the role now and the guy who is waiting in the wings. Santiago Casilla went 4-2 in 2015 with the San Francisco Giants with 38 saves. What you do not see in those stats is that he had 6 blown saves last year, and now Hunter Strickland has been seasoned against MLB opposition and is primed to take over the closer role. Casilla will most likely be the closer to begin the year which may allow Strickland to fall to your reserve round and there are plenty of closers in waiting like him for their opportunities and you can certainly buy low on them.
When searching for these closers in waiting in the reserve rounds, try to control yourself and not take too many fliers on these guys. Yes, there are gems to be found, but there are plenty of duds too.
ONE-TRICK PONIES
The one-trick ponies are guys that you will target to help you fill voids you may have in hitting categories such as HR and Stolen Bases. We love Ben Revere for his SB and we love Lucas Duda for his HR production, but neither will really help you in other categories.
Mark Reynolds will be a one-trick pony for HR almost every year that should fall to your reserve draft in mixed leagues You may not have been willing to invest heavily in your 1B or Corner Infield (CI) position or you went with speed and batting average and now lack power. Reynolds will help fill those voids with regular at-bats.  By grabbing him in the reserve round, you get max value from a player like him that will get you 20 HR and will be a satisfactory fill in at 1B or CI.
On the speed side of things, Leonys Martin is someone that falls to reserve rounds consistently and will get you double digit SB each year, but hardly anything else. He has never reached double digit HR nor has he reached the 50 RBI mark.
The one-trick ponies that you find in the reserve rounds are found here because they are just not that good. The downfall of rostering them is that when you are desperate for the categories you drafted them for and you put them in your lineup, other categories will suffer.
When preparing for your reserve draft, if you have to resort to these players, try to find players that hurt you less when they are bad than they would help you when they are good. Protect yourself.
PROSPECTS
The top prospects are now being taken during the draft or the auction before ever beginning the reserve portion of the draft. The beauty of baseball is that there are always prospects.
The skill of choosing the right prospects for your team is what may make or break a great reserve draft for your team. The main thing about prospects that people fail to take into account every year is what the MLB organizationâs game plan for that prospect may be. Letâs take Jose Peraza for example in 2015. He was the Braves #1 prospect last spring and he had wonderful stolen base totals in the minor leagues that helped make him a popular reserve round pick last year. The Braves would end up trading Peraza to the Dodgers and the Dodgers have since traded him to the Reds. What did fantasy owners get from Peraza in 2015? He would finish 2015 with 4 hits in 22 at bats and just 3 SB.
One key indicator of how an organization feels about the impending arrival of a prospect is whether or not they bring them up after September 1st of the previous season. When rosters expand to 40 players each year, ball clubs are taking a glimpse into their future as well as giving their young talent a taste of the major leagues. These players may not impress us with their September performances, but that is not so critical. The key point here is that their team was impressed with their performance in the minors during their minor league season that they earned the call up to be evaluated against opposing major league talent.
The acquisition of prospects in the reserve rounds of keeper leagues makes the most sense because you can wait on their long term growth and potential success. In redraft leagues, you need to be sure that the prospect you select will make the ball club by no later than the middle of June so they can make an impact for your team. Prospects are future rookies and only a select few have breakout rookie campaigns.
EVALUATING YOUR RESERVE DRAFT
After your reserve draft is complete, the best way to evaluate your own performance is pretty simple. Use the following checklist:
- Did I address my areas of weakness left over from the main draft or auction?
- Am I happy with the players that I drafted?
- Have I found any bargains or steals with these picks?
- Will my reserve picks provide sufficient production if they need to be activated?
If you are satisfied with your answers to these questions, then you have done well.
The beauty of fantasy baseball is that there are numerous ways to win and having a solid performance in your reserves draft will only help you. As always, I welcome your feedback and criticism and I wish you well with your reserve picks. Choose wisely.
Comments 1
Very well done. Nice work. When using formulas always give examples.. math is hard 🙂 Also most of this read as an introductory article, but then you throw in a Raaaay moment with SWIP.
A few random thoughts.
A lot of teams will try to use the reserve draft to do exactly what is above. Depending on your needs and length of reserve list. You can actually try to get the set up guys of teams poorly positioned. Focusing on good set-up guys behind iffy closers, on teams that have one guy or two weak ones. Know which owners in these spots will be willing to trade or spook easily. Steals and Saves can always be flipped. In keeper leagues, understand the rule on how reserves can be kept and for how long. A lot of it is dependent on your situation as how you draft. Look at how much might be out there after the reserve draft, is it a deep league or a shallow one? In our AL only league getting position players on reserve is a must as only 2nd and 3rd catchers remain afterwards.
I wouldn’t prepare separately for a reserve draft in regards to mlb level players. Be deep with your lists.. have an idea what you’d pay for a back up guy if the start gets hurt the night before or even that day. With that being said prospects are a different animal, having a list of those guys is vital. Having opportunity is key, being in Cinci Peraza has a shot but has been traded by essentially 3 teams in a short amount of time. (CWS wanted the LAD guys instead). That does matter as every team has a scouting and stats department. So I have Peraza in a keeper but Im very iffy on if he’s good yet or will gel with a clubhouse.
Anyways great work! As you can see I’m much too scatterbrained to write anything that coherent.