Today I’m going to give more focus onto my team specifically and share how I go about constructing my roster and how it turned out from an execution standpoint. Any time I talk about my team I’ll be referring to the one mentioned in my last blog that has a fab budget. That league also has keepers but we also still draft each season, and I’ll explain how that all works. The league is set up to where you get 5 points to spend on keepers. The way the point system works is that any player drafted in rounds 1 through 5 is then worth 3 points to keep the following season, and a player will never cost more than 3 points to keep. Meaning you could draft a player in the first 5 rounds and keep him for 10 years if you wanted and he still costs 3 points to keep. If a player is drafted in rounds 6 through 10, it costs 2 points to keep that player the following season. For example, a 2 point keeper for me that I kept going into this season was William Contreras. I never would have thought of myself as someone who would ever keep a catcher, but I believe it was the best option in my circumstance. Since I didn’t have a top 5 player or anything I didn’t want to keep someone for 3 points. If I would have done that, I would have kept Freddie Freeman, but I decided not to do that. Freeman has honestly been my favorite points league player and actual baseball player for quite a while. He has such a good approach at the plate and is really hard to get out, but I decided it was a good time not to keep him and to move on because of age concerns. It’s unfortunate, but he’s 35 years old now, and with how the season has played out so far, I believe I made the right decision. He already missed time and was put on the injured list after his surgically repaired ankle in the off-season was bothering him. He’s currently back from the injury, but the Dodgers have already given him a few games off and even said they won’t play him in day games following a night game. When you account for that and the fact he’s already missed games, he will probably only play in 130 games max this year, and you can’t really afford to keep or pick someone in the first two rounds with that being the case. I did still draft Freeman in a league where I was able to get him in the third round.

Going back to Contreras, the kicker is that if I want to keep him again next year he will cost 3 points to keep and won’t cost 2 points any longer. So whether someone starts as a 1 or 2 point keeper in my league, they cost an extra point to keep the following season. Then you have to keep in mind that players max out at 3 points. I’m unlikely to keep Contreras next season since hw will cost 3 points, but it has nothing to do with liking him or not, because he’s a great player who is clearly in a tier of his own at the catcher position. He also plays every day and is the designated hitter a lot even when he’s not catching. Any player drafted from the 11th round and on will only cost 1 point to keep next season. That also includes free agent and waiver wire pickups throughout the season, and is my favorite part of the way keepers are formatted. They are set up to reward people who find the good players before they are well-known and established as stars or elite hitters. As someone who is good at finding breakout players on the waiver wire I really like and value this format, and it also changes my strategies and the way I manage this specific roster. In a redraft league I would automatically sell high on a breakout even if I actually liked him and got the most value I could when their stock was at the highest. I would try to trade them for established players with more of a track record that I knew I could trust. In this league, it’s more to my benefit if I have a patient approach and hang onto players who could be potential breakouts and valuable 1 point keepers. The other 3 players I kept along with Contreras each for one point were Sandy Alcantara, Shane McClanahan, and Lawrence Butler. The strategy with Alcantara and McClanahan was pretty simple and straightforward, as they were players I drafted last year and kept in IL spots for the whole season, planning all along to keep them this season. Both missed all of last season recovering from elbow surgery, and I knew this was the case when I drafted them. Both have been top 20 caliber starting pitchers the last time they were healthy, so I was excited for the possibility to keep them each for 1 point. Ironically enough, players coming off surgery don’t scare me as much as injury risks because they are just coming off surgery. While teams are no doubt careful with their pitchers coming off surgery, in theory you should at least be able to count on them to be healthy for a while after having already recovered from surgery. The irony is that McClanahan ended up getting hurt in spring training after I had already decided to keep him. He was dealing with nerve discomfort. While it’s unfortunate he got hurt, it’s good news he doesn’t require surgery and will still be able to pitch this season. I still believe in my strategy and still see it as sound logic, as it’s very uncommon for a pitcher to get hurt again right after having elbow surgery.

My final keeper, Lawrence Butler, is a young outfielder for the Athletics who broke out in the second half last year. He was very good on my team last year, and I kept him as an upside pick and potential elite player that I only kept for 1 point. Last season he already was an elite player from a production standpoint, and in comparison his second half numbers were almost identical to Jackson Merrill. I would agree with the consensus that Merrill is better and was drafted as a top 10 outfielder for a reason, but the point still stands that Butler is capable of the same kind of upside. In the second half last season, Butler slashed 0.300/0.345/0.553 with 13 home runs and 32 RBI. While he’s gotten off to a slow start this year, I don’t worry about him because his plate discipline has improved even more. He has the same amount of walks as strikeouts with 10, and any player walking as much as he strikes out is notable and valuable in a points league. His chase rate is actually much better than Merrills, as it’s only 23.9% for Butler and 33.9% for Merrill. That also doesn’t have to do with a small sample size because their chase rates were very similar last year, but Butlers has improved from 27.3% last year to 23.9%. To compare to the second half stats of Butler, Merrill in the 2nd half last season slashed 0.314/0.349/0.596 with 12 home runs and 44 RBI. You can see how similar their stats were, and Merrill did have a substantial advantage with his RBI total. You can attribute a lot of that to Butler being a leadoff hitter and Merrill being in the middle of a much better lineup last season. This isn’t an attempt to tear down Merrill, as I also like him and have him in a couple leagues. It’s more to point out that both have the same real potential to be elite hitters this season. I also love that Butler leads off from a points league standpoint, because batting leadoff for an entire season ensures that he gets as many plate appearances as possible. So as an aside I only really ever start players who hit in the top 5 of a lineup. The higher the better, and most of my hitters tend to fall in the top 3 in the lineup for their respective teams. Getting as many plate appearances for your team as possible is really important and often overlooked. It definitely goes into my strategy, as I only have 1 player I start who isn’t in the top 2 or 3 of their lineup. Coming up on Thursday when I blog again, I will dig deeper into the rest of my roster and my strategy for roster construction. This year I was way more intentional and had a real plan and outline for how I wanted to draft and put together my roster. I believe it would be beneficial for everyone to build their roster in this way, in a points league specifically. I was able to execute my plan in a way I was very pleased with, and I’m excited to see how it plays out. I look forward to sharing more on Thursday.