Groovin’ with Govier: H2H Fantasy Baseball Roundup (1/18)

Party people … can y’all get funky? Head-to-head fantasy baseball managers, it’s time to stand up and be accounted for. Groovin’ With Govier is officially back! So is the 2024 FTN Fantasy Baseball Draft Guide featuring some of the best in the business! Our venerable leader at FTN Fantasy Baseball Vlad Sedler has put together a stellar lineup of guest writers like Nick Pollack from Pitcher List. It also features my article on H2H strategy plus a bonus podcast complement diving deeper into H2H strategy with Dan Strafford and Michael Waterloo.

All of this comes just in time for the commencement of the annual fantasy baseball draft rituals, which will take us all the way up to Opening Day 2024. I’m referring to the proper Opening Day Thursday, March 28, not the faux-altruistic, “for the love of the game crap” MLB is attempting to sell us between the Dodgers and Padres March 20 and 21 in South Korea. I want to be more available to the readers this season outside of this article. Please hit me up on Twitter or better yet subscribe to our FTN Fantasy Baseball package where all season long our exclusive Discord provides our subs with unlimited access to all of our staff experts. 

For all the diehard readers who have become reliant on this piece without fail, there is one crucial change for this season that everybody should take note of. This year each edition of Groovin’ With Govier will be delivered to the readers with an intentional focus on H2H fantasy baseball. I will provide my usual antics from a writing perspective, but the goal will be to meet the needs of the droves of H2H fantasy baseball managers out there who have been underserved for too long. The people demanded this, therefore the people shall have it. 

It’s Time to Play Ball

This is an ideal time to create or join a H2H fantasy baseball league! Yes, it’s true that later in this article I question whether early drafting is a pursuit with clear advantages worth chasing. That premise is based more on roto, best ball or draft and hold leagues. Right now is the ideal moment to create a new H2H league. It could be done to salvage the bonds of a dwindling group of friends who are drifting away toward the supposed safe harbor of domesticity. For the roto lifers out there, the opportunity to branch out into a new mode of fantasy baseball could spice up that stale roto league that just isn’t doing it for everybody anymore. H2H isn’t just limited to redraft either. Dynasty baseball is growing as fast as any sect in fantasy baseball. H2H dynasty combines some of the most tantalizing aspects of fantasy baseball. Direct weekly competition opening the gates to 24/7 text thread trash talk while also satisfying the needs of the increasingly more common manager known as The Prospector. Get the Deadwood images of Ellsworth out of your head. The Prospector is becoming as common a site on Fantrax as pigeons are in New York City. The Prospector prioritizes acquiring the next Ronald Acuña, who at 16 years old was just freshly drafted in the MLB International Player Draft over winning money. Keeper leagues also get the fantasy baseball juices flowing. My home league BYB is a 14-team H2H keeper league. Our text thread is bumping all offseason long in anticipation of the annual March draft. Setting up the schedule, the draft date, the roster requirements, the inning minimums and the method of player acquisition all consume a fair amount of time. That makes January the ideal month to launch a new H2H league.

Allow me to turn the attention once more to my H2H strategy piece for the 2024 FTN Fantasy Baseball Draft Guide. Everything I cover in that article is an area of concern for all H2H fantasy baseball managers whether they be followers of the points or cats gospel. H2H points and H2H cats both share common traits of overlap. Starting up a H2H league this month for either of the two scoring systems depends on the laziness factor of the league commissioner and the participating fantasy baseball managers. Casual newcomers looking for another venue to waste time on their phones would do well with both H2H cats and points. Simple standard 5×5 scoring will do just fine for cats, but one of the misnomers about points leagues is the intensive scoring systems. H2H points certainly allows for a more intensive scoring system. However, it’s quite easy to implement the standard points scoring system of the platform hosting the league. In my first year in Tout Wars last season, I joined the 12-team mixed H2H points league. The fun quirk included in the league bylaws states that the previous year’s champion gets to choose the points scoring system for the following year. In contrast, a very detailed and well manipulated scoring system can be put into place for the more creative thinkers out there who love to tinker just as much as Ruxin on the toilet. 

Lastly, H2H is the central entry point for most fantasy baseball managers. I’ve asked around plenty amongst seasoned vets and newcomers alike. The origin stories have made it clear. Most first timers get into a H2H league with their friends or sign up for a public H2H league. The site that most of these stories take place at? Yahoo! Yep! The site that started as a search engine in the ‘90s really only functions now as a vessel for fantasy sports. Sure, maybe my uncle has an email address with Yahoo still, but that’s about it. I seriously don’t think Yahoo would still be alive without fantasy sports. I don’t care to wage class warfare or chide the people who choose to use Yahoo as their home base for fantasy baseball. On the contrary. I’m glad Yahoo is still around. The more people who get into fantasy baseball because of Yahoo, the better. I love this game! I want it to thrive because it creates connections with people who we haven’t even met yet. Entertaining, meaningful connections which are a result from participation in this game. I know that because it happened to me. Living those experiences increased the depth of appreciation I have for the people and the healthy competition outcomes that H2H fantasy baseball provides. I love H2H because it is the proving ground for this timeless game. Why wouldn’t we want to cultivate that sacred territory? I proudly took the first steps of my fantasy baseball journey in 1999 on a desktop computer in the basement of The Towers at Central Michigan University. Sure, my dream of becoming Dick Enberg was slipping through my fingers as I was on the brink of failing out of my freshman year. Still, it didn’t matter in the long run. There are no regrets hidden there. It was there that I drafted my very first fantasy baseball squad. There is no way in hell that my 18-year-old self sitting in that computer lab could ever imagine that one day I would be writing and broadcasting about fantasy baseball while promoting the benefits of H2H specifically. H2H leagues bring people together. For those who have never taken the H2H plunge, now is the time! 

Wake Up Wake Up It’s the First of the Month

Right now, the disciplined fantasy baseball managers have already organized their bankroll typed out on a Google Sheet with debits listed for each draft they have completed. To all those types I offer my respect for the dedication it takes to get busy before the close of the hot stove season and prior to pitchers and catchers reporting. Despite my admiration for them, they are the few. Not the majority. This piece is for the larger percentage of managers out there just waking up from a football induced coma. The majority of fantasy baseball managers are just finishing up their morning tinkle as they rub their eyes open to the reality before them. 

The reality for H2H managers right now isn’t much different than the other realms of fantasy baseball. There are still several players of note who have not locked into an agreement for 2024. Cody Bellinger is waiting for someone to buy into the fact that his 2023 performance with the Cubs was more akin to his 2019 NL MVP season as opposed to being an exception. Josh Hader wants the Edwin Díaz treatment. Blake Snell wants MLB front offices to forget that Jordan Montgomery is still on the market. Those dedicated volume drafters I mentioned earlier operate on the premise that they have already done the legwork of prediction with the expectation that most of these signings will work to their favor based on the drafting strategy they’ve already executed. Is it really that worthwhile a cause though when it comes to drafting players before they find new confines to play in? I still have not drafted yet. (Technically I did an auction at First Pitch Arizona last November, but that was a communal event that I did for the thrill of the live auction experience in the moment that I partitioned in my mind separately from draft season.) That is an intentional decision. I don’t see the proposition of drafting a player before he signs on with a team as one that blatantly provides a meaningful advantage to do so. With more information readily available at our fingertips than at any point prior in known human existence, managers still take the risk of the unknown. Blake Snell may only have a few suitors left. Is drafting Snell prior to the closure of his deal a risk a manager should tolerate? Any managers who draft Snell now are expecting he signs with the Blue Jays, Angels, Giants or Yankees. The Yankees signed Marcus Stroman recently though. Does that rule the Yanks out? Are Snell’s outcomes so varied depending on location that locking him in now is a clear-cut advantage? There isn’t a favorable answer to this quandary. Roster construction definitely lives off the fat of the land that the draft provides. The phrase “case-by-case basis” is apropos here. 

Beating the market on a player’s free agent terms seems more like gambling than the game of fantasy baseball does. The rest of us out here in fantasy land are just tending to our morning java. We haven’t even gotten to the sports section yet. (My god is that reference dated!) There will always be late signings in the latter days of spring training that will tilt team depth charts in a different direction than some fantasy baseball managers planned for. Injuries will absolutely happen, which will dictate that immediate arrangements to be made.

Gavin Lux last year is a prime example of having to make additions on the fly. Miguel Rojas is a swell fella from what I hear. He wasn’t a viable fantasy replacement for Lux or the Dodgers. At least not by the standard of potential that Lux was offering. I think most H2H managers in particular are happy to wait to draft on a date that’s as close as possible to the real opening day March 28. No matter the format, most managers will agree that drafting a player right before they hit the IL for 60 days takes a toll on their well-being. Personally it could be one or maybe two days before I am able to move past something like that.