After a long hiatus from this site, I have decided that I need to restart capturing some of the important ideas and lessons I learn over the course of fantasy seasons, especially when I am doing well. I’ve come to realize that success in fantasy sports is never guaranteed, but it is greatly increased through careful planning and shrewd decision-making. There are a great deal of ideas and insights that one can apply to fantasy management, but it is also easy to forget them over the course of the years. This is one of the reasons I wanted to start this site. I don’t want to have to reinvent the wheel every new season, but instead want to capitalize on what I’ve learned in the past and apply it to new situations and new seasons. That’s part of the fun of the game.
With the 2026 fantasy baseball season almost at its end, I wanted to go back and review the draft and how the season has gone. This season was particularly successful for me. At the end of the regular season, I finished in first place with an 18-win, 5-loss record. More importantly, I was the number one team in total points scored over the season.
More on that later. Let’s get on to the season itself.
League Settings
| Draft type | Snake |
| Teams | 10 |
| Scoring | Head-to-head, Points |
| Roster positions | C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, IF, OF, OF, OF, Util, Util, Util, SP, SP, RP, RP, P, P, P, P, BN, BN, BN, BN, BN, BN, IL, IL, IL, IL, NA |
| Batter Categories | Runs (R), Singles, Doubles, Triples, Home Runs (HR), Runs Batted In (RBI), Stolen Bases (SB), Caught Stealing, Walks, HBP, Strikeouts |
| Pitcher Categories | Innings Pitched, Wins (W), Losses, Saves (SV), Hits, Earned Runs, Walks, HBP, Strikeouts (K), Quality Starts |
| Playoff teams | 6 |
The Draft
There’s a fundamental lesson I’ve learned from playing points leagues over the years: the only objective is to build a team that scores the most points. This may seem painfully obvious, but it’s surprisingly easy to lose sight of it during a draft. It’s tempting to prioritize talent, reputation, or perceived player quality without considering whether that talent will actually translate into fantasy points over the course of the season.
I don’t remember the exact strategy I used, given that the draft was about six months ago at this point, but I can reconstruct the basic approach. The first thing I likely did was review the total points scored during the 2025 season and look for meaningful trends.
One trend that immediately stood out was the advantage held by batters among the highest-scoring players. Aaron Judge was the highest-scoring batter in 2025, with 693 total points, while Garrett Crochet was the highest-scoring pitcher, with 637. That gap became even more significant as I moved down the rankings. The 25th-best batter scored 489 points, compared with 422 points for the 25th-best pitcher.
There was another important distinction among the pitchers. The vast majority of the highest-scoring pitchers were starting pitchers, while relief pitchers generally provided considerably less value. The highest-scoring relief pitcher produced only 436 points.
More importantly, the value gap continued to widen as I moved deeper into the rankings. Starting pitcher production declined much more rapidly, while batters remained capable of producing a respectable number of points even when they ranked considerably lower overall. The 100th-highest-scoring batter, for example, produced 356 points in 2025, while the 100th-highest-scoring pitcher produced only 271 points. That’s an 85-point difference, and the gap continued like this further down the rankings.
That suggested a fairly clear draft strategy. If I could secure as much top-tier pitching as possible early in the draft, I didn’t necessarily need to invest in batters. The depth of offensive production meant I could wait until much later to select batters who might not have been among the best players in real baseball but could still provide enough fantasy points to contribute meaningfully to my overall scoring.
In other words, the goal wasn’t to accumulate the most well-rounded team. It was to exploit the difference in positional scarcity and maximize the number of points I could generate across the entire roster. If the data showed that high-end pitching was harder to replace than mid-level hitting, then the draft should reflect that.
With that in mind, here’s how my draft went down.
| 1. | (9) | Garrett Crochet (BOS – SP) |
| 2. | (12) | Cristopher Sánchez (PHI – SP) |
| 3. | (29) | Logan Gilbert (SEA – SP) |
| 4. | (32) | Bryan Woo (SEA – SP) |
| 5. | (49) | Chris Sale (ATL – SP) |
| 6. | (52) | Joe Ryan (MIN – SP) |
| 7. | (69) | Framber Valdez (DET – SP) |
| 8. | (72) | Michael Harris II (ATL – OF) |
| 9. | (89) | Tyler Glasnow (LAD – SP) |
| 10. | (92) | Steven Kwan (CLE – OF) |
| 11. | (109) | Nathan Eovaldi (TEX – SP) |
| 12. | (112) | Robbie Ray (SD – SP) |
| 13. | (129) | Brandon Nimmo (TEX – OF) |
| 14. | (132) | Matthew Boyd (CHC – SP) |
| 15. | (149) | TJ Friedl (CIN – OF) |
| 16. | (152) | Robert Suarez (ATL – RP) |
| 17. | (169) | Spencer Torkelson (DET – 1B) |
| 18. | (172) | Luis Arraez (PHI – 1B,2B) |
| 19. | (189) | Merrill Kelly (AZ – SP) |
| 20. | (192) | Zac Gallen (AZ – SP) |
| 21. | (209) | Trent Grisham (NYY – OF) |
| 22. | (212) | Spencer Steer (CIN – 1B,2B,OF) |
| 23. | (229) | Alejandro Kirk (TOR – C) |
| 24. | (232) | Brandon Lowe (PIT – 2B) |
| 25. | (249) | Isaac Paredes (HOU – 1B,3B) |
| 26. | (252) | Otto Lopez (MIA – 2B,SS) |
As you can see, I selected starting pitchers with eight of my first 10 picks. This relates to another point that is distinctive to baseball: starting pitchers are typically used only once every five days or so. Because I had six roster spots available for starting pitchers on any given day, I could draft considerably more than six starting pitchers and rotate them in and out of my lineup based on whether they were scheduled to pitch.
Hitters are different. Because they play almost every day, there is much less value in carrying multiple players at the same position. If I had two productive players competing for the same roster spot, one would frequently be sitting on my bench, creating what I call talent rot. The nature of the baseball schedule makes this particularly important. With so many games and relatively few days off during the season, productive hitters should be placed in active roster spots rather than sitting on the bench. Starting pitchers, however, are a different story. Because they pitch once or possibly twice per week, having quality starters on the bench is actually an advantage rather than a waste of talent.
I did consider the possibility that I could take this strategy too far and overload my roster with starting pitchers. If, for example, seven of my pitchers happened to have starts on the same day, I would have to leave one of them on the bench, creating the same talent-rot problem I was trying to avoid. However, I ran the numbers and determined that this was highly unlikely to become a significant issue. As I recall, there were only one or two occasions during the entire season when I had more starting pitchers scheduled to pitch on the same day than I could use.
Looking back at the draft, I think I did an solid job of monopolizing quality starting pitching. That depth ultimately proved critical to my season. After only a month or two, my first-round pick, Garrett Crochet, landed on the injured list and never pitched for me again. My seventh-round pick, Framber Valdez, declined significantly and was eventually dropped by the middle of the season. My ninth-round pick, Tyler Glasnow, also went on the injured list after about two months and missed roughly 60 days.
Losing three of my early-round starting pitchers could have been a major problem if I had built my roster around only a handful of starters. Instead, I had accumulated enough depth to absorb those losses and continue generating points. In retrospect, loading up on starting pitching early wasn’t simply about acquiring more talent. It created a structural advantage that allowed me to rotate pitchers throughout the season while also giving me enough depth to withstand injuries and declining performance.
The Rest of the Season
As the season progressed, I started accumulating quite a few wins. By Week 13, which was around the All-Star break, my record was 12-1. However, fantasy managers can’t directly control their win-loss record. They can control how many points their team produces, and that is ultimately a more useful measure of whether a strategy was successful.
With that in mind, let’s look at where my points came from.
As I mentioned earlier, I scored 9,512 points over the course of the season. The second-place team scored 9,325 points, while the third-place team scored 9,087. The difference between first and second place was only about 2%, but that relatively small advantage was significant enough to give me three additional wins over the course of the season against my opponents.
It’s also worth noting that my team ranked near the bottom in virtually every major offensive category. I was second-to-last in runs, triples, and RBIs, and dead last in home runs. It probably didn’t help that I dropped Michael Harris II in the middle of April, only to watch him go on to have a solid season. On the other hand, I did make one particularly important waiver-wire addition. I picked up Jordan Walker, who ultimately became my highest-scoring batter and finished as approximately the 16th-best batter in the entire league in terms of points.
But those offensive shortcomings ultimately didn’t matter because the strategy was built around dominating several of the highest-value pitching categories. I finished first in the league in wins and quality starts, and second in strikeouts and innings pitched. Those categories generated enough points to more than compensate for my relatively weak offensive production.
The result was that I moved into first place in the league by around the second week of the season and never looked back. I finished the regular season in first place, which provided a strong indication that the strategy had worked over the course of an entire season rather than simply producing a strong start.
Lessons Learned
As I write this, I’m now in the championship bracket of the playoffs. I expect to get through the semifinals and into the championship matchup next week, but regardless of how the playoffs ultimately turn out, the regular season provides some useful evidence that the draft strategy was sound. The important lesson isn’t that I had the best hitters. I clearly didn’t. It’s that I identified where points were most difficult to acquire, concentrated my resources there, and used roster depth to make up for the areas where I was willing to sacrifice production.