Drops & Disasters: Fantasy Baseball Roster Moves (6/1)

It’s hard to believe we are now into June. This week begins what I think of as “grinding season.” The excitement of drafting and then beginning to manage our teams has begun to wane, while outside distractions as we approach the summer are on the rise. For most of us, there are some teams that have done little but disappoint, and it may be tempting to throw in the towel on them. Please do not do so (unless in my leagues). So much can change in the next four months. Now, more than ever, managers need to bear down and grind each week if hoping for success at the end of the season.

There are a lot of potential drops to cover this week, and so I am going to keep my typical introduction on drops-related strategy brief and focus on several recommended process steps. First, if you have not already done so, go back to the draft boards of your leagues and see if there are any potential drops in your player pool that might be under the radar when looking at lists of available players. In the NFBC, undrafted players are removed from the player pool shortly after the season begins, and they do not become available again in FAAB until they appear in an MLB game. Drafted players, however, never leave the player pool. Thus, if players such as Jac Caglianone, Bubba Chandler, Andrew Painter, Roman Anthony, Ronny Mauricio, Quinn Matthews, Cody Bradford, Frankie Montas, Ha-Seong Kim and Shane Bieber were drafted in any of your leagues, they may have been dropped and are available for stashing. Early in the season, it is worthwhile for managers to review their draft boards and jot down players that ordinarily would be removed from the player pool but who were drafted in your individual leagues so that you can monitor if and when they become available.

Additionally, I assume most managers do this but, following FAAB every Sunday night, and after checking to see which players you may have won, carefully review the players that have been dropped by your competitors. Even in ultra-competitive high-stakes leagues, there typically are at least a few drops across my leagues each week that I find questionable and, when coming across such drops, I immediately prepare draft FAAB strings for the following week targeting such players to ensure that I do not forget about them.

Finally, managers should not be afraid to bid on and acquire players that they themselves have dropped, even in the preceding week. Sure, it may seem strange, or potentially embarrassing, to have to bid precious FAAB dollars on a player you yourself discarded, but circumstances change, and the overarching goal is to perform as well as possible in every league, even if that means reacquiring dropped players (something I do routinely enough as circumstances warrant). For instance, last week many managers dropped Calvin Faucher following Miami using Ronny Henriquez to save Sunday’s game. Of course, so far this week, Henriquez has been used earlier than the ninth inning while Faucher has picked up two saves. If mining for saves, managers should not overlook Fauchet simply because they may have dropped him earlier in season, perhaps as recently as last Sunday.

Some of the players that should at least be considered as potential drops this week are set forth below in the following two tables – the first includes hitters and the second includes pitchers. In addition to the player’s name, team and position, the tables include the player’s roster percentage in the premier 15- and 12-team contests: the NFBC’s Main Event and Online Championship, respectively. Finally, the tables list my rankings as to how strongly – or not – I feel each particular player should be dropped in those 15-team and 12-team formats, respectively. The key to these rankings, from 0-4, is as follows:

• 0 = Do not drop
• 1 = Team context dependent; probably should not be dropped on most teams
• 2 = Team context dependent; compelling arguments to drop and not drop
• 3 = Team context dependent; probably should be dropped on most teams
• 4 = Drop