Grab as many full-time players as you can, even if they don’t contribute much. In general, though, here are four tips for those reserve players, from my experience: How many backups do we need at each position? How do we prioritize our needs? What variables over the course of six months might influence our decisions? The answers to these questions are based on the strengths and weaknesses of your active roster.

But then the deep 27-player reserve round becomes a roster construction puzzle. Like every other league, we start by assembling a core of the best players. D&H leagues force us to commit to 50 players who we acquire through the most thoughtful analysis. That’s why 50-player Draft & Hold (D&H) leagues are perhaps the truest test of our skills at predicting the future. Every team goes into and out of the season with pretty much the same core group of players. Even struggling teams do not turn over their entire roster. They typically do not make mega-deals involving superstars before Tax Day. Most follow the 50-50-50 philosophy… 50 games to assess what you have, 50 games to make the necessary changes, 50 games to play it out. But it only provides limited insight into how good we are at player evaluation. And given how much turnover a typical fantasy roster undergoes during the course of a year, our in-season roster management can negate much of our offseason player evaluation efforts.īut should our rosters be so fluid that October’s team looks completely different from March? Every player we add to our team during the season means we’re eliminating one player we likely rostered through more careful analysis. These in-season roster moves are typically based on far smaller sample sizes, often with far less thoughtful consideration, which make the decisions less accurate and the results more variable. In the end, we decide that it’s time to make a change. We discount, or ignore, the reality that in-season managerial decision-making is driven by a stream of events that change constantly. We lust after the hot flavor of the past week with little regard to how long that heat will last. Or seemingly loses his job to a hot rookie. Then we draft players based on that comprehensive analysis, and our expectation of what they are going to do over six months.īut then someone gets hurt. The stats have stopped accumulating, allowing us to dig into them, evaluating each player’s individual performance in deeper context. We only fully exercise our player evaluation muscles during the offseason. Our final point totals are amassed not only by the players we draft-the results of our painstaking offseason research-but also by many other players who churn through our roster during the season. Yes, we get a “report card” every October, but it’s deceptive. But in non-D&H leagues, we don’t give ourselves the opportunity to measure the results of that process. Player evaluation and forecasting are vital parts of building the foundation of any winning team.

Fantasy baseball draft advisor