First TD Bets — Wild Card Monday Slate
Alex Christenson
Tiers without fear.
Welcome to my annual preseason series breaking down each position by value groupings, aka tiers. The tiers are derived from our constantly evolving Top 500 VDP Rankings, and the series will provide in-depth insights about the players within each positional tier.
Many of us have played fantasy baseball long enough to know that it’s never wise to draft top-to-bottom from a rankings list. After all, every draft is unique, and a list or cheat sheet does not provide proper roster construction context.
Grouping players into tiers assists with our research and draft process in many ways:
- Helps us identify where value drops off in each tier per position
- Gets us comfortable with who our targets and fades are
- Keeps us from reaching for players just for the sake of filling starting roster spots
- Facilitates earning the most projected equity/value out of every draft round
Value grouping fuels us with a macro perspective of the draft pool to identify positions we are comfortable waiting to fill – usually because we’ve identified underpriced hitters or pitchers comparable to those in the positional tiers above them.
Mapping out the positional tiers over the next several weeks of this series allows me to fine-tune and adjust rankings to an optimal setting heading into prime fantasy baseball draft season in mid-March. Meanwhile, our rankings will continue to fluctuate and be updated weekly based on free-agent signings, trades, injury news and playing time assumptions once spring training starts.
Let’s get started.
Within the tier tables are each player’s:
- current NFBC average draft position (ADP)
- our per-position and overall rankings (VDP Rank)
- current auction value (VDP$)
- delta: the difference between VDP rank and current ADP
The players with high deltas are the ones my market research and valuations consider underpriced. Low deltas are overvalued players our model does not recommend paying the market price for.
The FTN VDP Projections is the model that formulates our auction values. VDP stands for value draft position, a system I created in 2016. Our rankings consider market value (ADP) while VDP Projections do not. Our projections are market-agnostic, meaning they don’t incorporate ADP or positional scarcity, only category scarcity.
One tradition of this series is to group first basemen with third basemen and shortstops with second basemen. Position eligibility of each player (at least 20 games at that position last season) is listed for each hitter, as per NFBC rules. ADP is from standard 15-team 5×5 roto style formats.
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