To help you prepare for your Fantasy Baseball draft, our Scott White has constructed a list of five guidelines that often help him. He's released them in a series of columns called Draft Day Dos and Don'ts ( Part I / Part II ). Consider incorporating them into your own draft strategy to get a leg up on the competition.
Draft Day Dos and Don'ts No. 3: Draft pitchers for strikeouts; don't chase wins (the Shawn Chacon rule)
The year was 2006. President George W. Bush was in office, blue jeans were the fashion of choice and the movie Borat dominated the box office.
And in a crowded basement computer lab of a college dormitory, an aspiring Fantasy writer needed a late-round starting pitcher. With all the usual suspects off the board, the name Shawn Chacon crossed his mind.
Chacon, a then-28-year-old right-hander recently traded from the Rockies to the Yankees, didn't have great stuff. He didn't have great strikeout rates or peripherals. But he pitched for a great team for which he had a great second half the year before, and he made an All-Star team a few years earlier. Why not?
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Shawn Chacon served one purpose: It gave Scott White a sound philosophy on drafting pitchers.
(US Presswire)
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I'll tell you why not: His name is Shawn Chacon, and he stinks.
Yes, I did it. I drafted Chacon in 2006, abandoning all my Fantasy principles for the mystic allure of Yankee pinstripes. And I knew better. Obviously, no clear Fantasy studs remained in that late stage of the draft, but instead of aiming for someone who could develop into the complete package, I made a stab in the dark for cheap wins.
Wins are the ultimate Catch-22 in Fantasy Baseball. They offer immense rewards, especially in Head-to-Head leagues that credit them 10 points, but unless you want to end up with a Shawn Chacon, you can't go after them. You can't chase wins.
Wins have a totally unpredictable nature because they depend just as much on the team as they do on the pitcher. You can draft a great pitcher and watch him finish well behind the league leaders in wins simply because his team didn't score him enough runs.
So to counteract the effect, you want to draft the best pitchers for the teams with the best offenses, right? Better offenses lead to more runs scored, which lead to more wins for good pitchers? Not necessarily. Of the top 20 pitchers in run support last year, eight, or 40 percent, didn't pitch for the top 10 teams in runs scored. Likewise, of the 17 pitchers who won more than 15 games in 2007, seven, or 41 percent, didn't pitch for those same 10 teams.
Certainly, a correlation exists between wins, run support and high-scoring teams, but clearly not enough of one to rank C.C. Sabathia that much higher than Aaron Harang. You have a 40 percent chance of guessing wrong.
So if you can't reliably predict wins, what should you do instead? Here's the obvious answer: Forget them. Don't even think about wins on Draft Day and, instead, build your staff around the one Fantasy-relevant statistic that pitchers produce entirely of their own merits: Strikeouts.
Yes, by loading up on pitchers who record plenty of strikeouts, you assure yourself of finishing at or near the top of one Rotisserie category. Compared to the flukier statistics -- like wins or, to a lesser extent, ERA -- strikeouts have a much better chance of carrying over from year to year (or game to game, for you Head-to-Head owners) because a pitcher creates them on his own, completely independent of offense or defense. No matter where a pitcher goes, no matter what team he plays for, if he knows how to strike batters out, he'll strike them out.
And if he knows how to strike batters out, he probably knows how to do other things too. Most of the league leaders in strikeouts also sit near the top in ERA and WHIP, which, when combined, lead to more wins. So if you draft a pitcher for strikeouts without paying a second thought to wins, you'll likely grab a few of those 41 percent that end up bucking the trend of run support.
Likewise, when a young pitcher shows an early ability to make bats miss, his WHIP and ERA tend to drop as he learns to cultivate it -- and with that drop comes a rise in wins. Obviously, taking an elite high-strikeout guy like Erik Bedard is a no-brainer, but what about in those late rounds, when you want to grab sleepers who'll develop into more? The guys with the strikeouts are the guys you want.
So who fits the bill? Going into this season, I plan to target Chad Billingsley, Dustin McGowan, Ian Snell, Ubaldo Jimenez, Phil Hughes, Zack Greinke, Micah Owings, Ervin Santana and Ian Kennedy in the late rounds -- and for those of you in deeper leagues, I'd include Wandy Rodriguez, Matt Garza, Andy Sonnanstine and Jason Bergmann as well. They demonstrate the strikeout ability that could make them this year's versions of John Maine, James Shields and Rich Hill -- and isn't that what you want in the late rounds? Or would you rather have Tim Wakefield or Kyle Kendrick just because they have good offenses backing them?
And I'm not saying you should ignore a pitcher's supporting cast entirely. It makes a great tiebreaker for two pitchers with similar abilities. I rank Yovani Gallardo over Tim Lincecum for that reason. Both have similar skill sets and similar unknowns, but Gallardo pitches for a far better offense.
Might you, on some rare occasion, catch the short end of the stick in wins by drafting this way? Sure, but it's just one category. You might not lead the league in wins without having a 20-game winner, but 12 or 13 from everyone on your staff is certainly enough to keep you competitive.
No doubt, Chacon stunk on his own merits in 2006. I don't have the exact figures on his run support that year, but I don't think they matter when a guy posts an ERA of 7.00. Did drafting him condemn me to a season of misery? No. In fact, I think I won the league that year, having cut Chacon before he had a chance to ruin me. But I certainly didn't do myself any favors with that draft pick.
And that's the whole point of this exercise. Your Fantasy season doesn't live and die by the draft, but you can either jumpstart it or dig it into a hole on Draft Day. And you can avoid the latter simply by loading up on strikeouts. If you draft guided by a stat known to measure a pitcher's dominance, all the other stats will fall into place.
So you won't see me debating between Chien-Ming Wang or Fausto Carmona or Joe Blanton. You won't catch me drafting Tim Hudson, Mark Buehrle, Curt Schilling, Tom Gorzelanny or even Roy Halladay. If they don't have the strikeouts, they don't have a place on my team. I don't get caught chasing wins anymore.
And I'm not done just yet. Tune in later this spring for Part 4 of Draft Day Dos and Don'ts, when I give my most confounding piece of advice yet: Let your competitors make the big decisions for you.
Seriously.
You can e-mail Scott your Fantasy Baseball questions to dmfantasybaseball@cbs.com. Be sure to put Attn: Draft Day in the subject field. Please include your full name, hometown and state.
