2023 Fantasy Baseball Preview: The Truths & Misconceptions of Scarcity

In economics, to say that a resource is scarce is to say that demand for that resource exceeds supply. So understood, scarcity is an essential element of fantasy baseball. The goal is of course to compile more of certain statistics than your competitors, and those statistics are in limited supply – there are only so many runs, home runs, wins, etc., to go around, and some fantasy players will inevitably be left wishing they had more. While the fact that scarcity is essential to fantasy baseball will be obvious to anyone familiar with the game we play, its impact on fantasy baseball strategy is less obvious and, I think, often misunderstood.

There are two main varieties of scarcity in fantasy baseball: Positional, which concerns the supply of valuable players at each position, and categorical, which concerns the supply of each fantasy-relevant statistic. Positional scarcity seems to receive at least as much attention as categorical scarcity, if not more. Fantasy baseball articles, podcasts and social media are rife with debates regarding the relative depth of the various positions, the valuational “cliffs” within each position, and how these considerations should impact players’ strategy. There was a time when this sort of focus on positional scarcity was warranted — when, for instance, the player pool was deeper at shortstop than at catcher, but much deeper at third base than at shortstop, and deeper yet at first base. In recent years, though, positional scarcity has scarcely been worth discussing. Catcher has been the only position requiring a positional adjustment, the replacement level for all other hitting positions being similar enough that fantasy players can safely treat them as single-player pools. (Third base in 2022 was a possible exception, but it required at most a minimal positional adjustment and 2023 valuations suggest that may have been a one-year blip.)

Check out the full FTN Fantasy 2023 fantasy baseball draft guide! At the same time that positional scarcity has diminished in strategical importance, categorical scarcity has arguably become more important (and more difficult) to properly account for. Changes in the scoring environment and shifts in MLB strategies have altered the statistical landscape that fantasy players face, rendering some categories scarcer, others less so. Those changes have not always been unidirectional or otherwise predictable. For example, home runs were down during the first half of the last decade, then way up during the second half of that decade, peaking in 2019. Now, they’re down again, but not as far as they had been prior to the juiced-ball era. This sort of variability can make categorical scarcity difficult to assess in any given season. While positional scarcity hasn’t been as important in recent seasons as the attention paid to it might lead one to believe, the variability of categorical scarcity makes it well worth the attention it receives from fantasy analysts and players. However, that attention is misplaced to some extent.

The ‘Scarce’ Categories Insofar as analysts and players discuss categorical scarcity, their focus is almost always on steals and saves. These two categories have indeed become scarcer in recent years. Prior to an uptick in stolen bases in 2022, there was a clear downward trend, both in terms of leaguewide SB and the number of players making a significant contribution to the category. In 2012, there were 3229 total SB and 48 players who stole 20 or more bases. By 2017, leaguewide SB were down to 2527 and only 29 players reached the 20-steal threshold. 2021 was a low watermark (2,213 total SB and 19 players with 20-plus) before a partial rebound this past season to 2,487 total SB and 24 players with 20-plus. The total number of saves hasn’t changed much, but with more MLB teams divvying up save opportunities between multiple pitchers, the number of pitchers recording 20 or more saves has similarly decreased from 27 in 2012, to 23 in 2017, to 18 last season. Although the impending rules changes complicate matters somewhat for stolen bases, these two categories are indeed scarce enough that it makes sense for analysts to draw attention to them and for fantasy players to prioritize them. If you don’t have a plan for how you’ll get your steals and saves, you run the risk of missing out on these scarce resources and paying the price in the standings. However, there are other fantasy baseball resources that are far scarcer than steals and saves, yet rarely enter the categorical scarcity conversation: the ratio categories of batting average, ERA and WHIP.

In order to compare the scarcity of the standard roto categories, we need to put them all on the same scale. The standings gain points (SGP) method of valuation provides an effective way to do that. As explained in the Baseball Forecaster , the SGP method of valuation “converts a player’s statistics in each Rotisserie category into the number of points those stats will allow you to gain in the standings.” For instance, if on average it takes 2 wins to move up one spot in the standings, a pitcher with 10 wins has produced 5 SGP in that category. This method accounts for year-to-year changes in the statistical landscape. For instance, in the homer-heavy 2019 season, it took 6.6 HR to gain a point in the category on average. In the more subdued offensive environment of 2022, 5.2 HR were enough to move up a spot in the standings. (All SGP formulas used here are for the NFBC Main Event, as calculated by Jeff Zimmerman and Tanner Bell in The Process .) Below are the number of players who contributed various levels of SGP over the past two seasons.

R HR RBI SB AVG K W SV ERA WHIP SGP 21 22 21 22 21 22 21 22 21 22 21 22 21 22 21 22 21 22 21 22 1+ 435 444 333 306 417 424 157 168 59 76 546 476 434 419 70 77 80 76 59 73 2+ 308 329 184 193 309 304 89 93 26 28 374 390 267 258 47 48 25 23 17 29 3+ 224 242 118 114 211 228 48 51 8 11 260 291 159 143 38 32 7 5 6 13 4+ 164 168 75 63 134 154 25 32 1 4 172 199 91 86 25 24 0 1 2 2 5+ 115 106 43 40 89 88 13 15 0 1 112 130 71 63 20 21 0 0 0 1 This means, for example, that in 2021 there were 435 hitters who were worth at least one SGP in the runs category. 115 of those hitters were worth five or more SGP in the category. In 2022, those numbers were similar: 444 hitters worth 1 or more SGP in runs, 106 worth 5 or more.

Contributors in runs, RBIs and strikeouts stand out as the most common, with over 200 players worth at least 3 SGP in each of those categories. Home runs and wins are somewhat scarcer, but each still had over 100 players reach the 3 SGP threshold in both 2021 and 2022. As compared to those other counting categories, stolen bases and saves are indeed scare resources. In each of the past two seasons, there have been more than twice as many hitters worth 3-plus SGP in home runs as in steals. And sources of 3-plus SGP in saves have been even more rare. When we broaden our attention beyond the counting categories, though, we see that comparable contributions to the three ratio categories were far more difficult to secure than even steals and saves. Whereas the number of players contributing 3-plus SGP in steals has been right around 50 each of the past two seasons, only eight hitters reached the 3 SGP mark for batting average in 2021 and 11 in 2022. And whereas the number of players contributing 3-plus SGP in saves has been around 35 for the past two years, the number of pitchers reaching that mark for ERA has been in the single digits, with contributors of 3-plus SGP in WHIP only slightly more common (6 in 2021, 13 in 2022). Even with the recent decline in substantial sources of steals and saves described above, it is much easier to find significant contributors in those categories than it is to find players who move the needle to a comparable degree in batting average, ERA or WHIP. And finding steals and saves is easier not only numerically, in that there are more player who contribute a given level of SGP in these categories than there are who reach that level in the ratio categories, but also in terms of the acquisition cost of those players.

There are so few players who contribute 3-plus SGP in the ratio categories that in order to get a sample worth analyzing, I will lower the bar to 2-plus SGP. Here’s where the players reaching the 2-plus SGP threshold in each category came from over the past two seasons. (ADP from the NFBC Main Event.)

R HR RBI SB AVG K W SV ERA WHIP ADP 21 22 21 22 21 22 21 22 21 22 21 22 21 22 21 22 21 22 21 22 39 42 33 38 40 40 22 25 12 10 27 33 27 28 5 9 7 10 7 12 75-150 43 41 38 35 42 40 15 12 3 6 23 25 21 22 5 7 3 4 4 5 150-225 41 41 29 29 41 41 10 9 2 1 29 26 23 23 7 6 2 1 1 2 225-300 33 37 24 21 36 35 10 8 5 3 35 20 31 17 7 2 3 2 3 3 300-375 37 41 18 20 36 36 8 9 1 2 25 29 21 22 3 5 3 1 1 2 375+ 56 61 22 24 57 58 10 14 1 3 69 96 49 66 5 8 1 2 1 1 Undrafted 59 66 20 26 57 54 14 16 2 3 166 161 95 80 15 11 6 3 0 4 Players worth 2 or more SGP in runs, home runs, RBIs, strikeouts and wins are available throughout the draft and in FAAB. If we were to graph the supply of hitters worth 2-plus SGP in stolen bases, we’d get an inverted bell curve, with a significant portion coming from the early rounds, a trough in the middle rounds, and then a good number coming from the final rounds and FAAB. The saves supply had a somewhat similar shape in 2022 but was more evenly distributed in 2021. In both seasons, though, a large percentage of the pitchers worth 2-plus SGP in saves emerged in-season and were added via FAAB. 2-plus SGP sources of batting average, ERA and WHIP, on the other hand, are disproportionately found in the early rounds. Outside the first 75 picks, your chances of finding players who will make a significant impact in these categories drops off very quickly. Undrafted pitchers worth 2-plus SGP in ERA or WHIP are a partial exception, but these tend to be “pop-up” middle relievers, like Aaron Loup in 2021 and Evan Phillips in 2022. Such pitchers are valuable, to be sure, but also difficult to properly utilize, given their volatility and the fact that they are unlikely to contribute much to strikeouts, wins or saves.

Working Backward to Fill Scarcity A common approach to formulating a draft strategy is to “work backward” by first determining what you can expect to get from the later rounds and/or in FAAB, and then planning to use more valuable early picks to address other needs. This approach is frequently applied at the level of individual players: Don’t pay for a particular fourth-round first basemen if you’re confident that you can get a comparable player in Round 10, for instance. But it also makes sense to work backward in a more general way by considering the kinds of players (and stats) available at various points in the draft. The data presented here suggests that you can expect runs, home runs, RBIs, strikeouts, wins and saves to be available late in drafts as well as in FAAB. Other things being equal, you should therefore use early-round picks to secure other resources, those that you’re unlikely to find elsewhere. That includes stolen bases to some extent, but most especially batting average, ERA and WHIP. This of course doesn’t mean that you should completely neglect other categories in the early rounds or ignore market trends. Drafting Luis Arraez in the third round is both unwise and unnecessary. Nor should you use that third-round pick on a hitter who is neutral or worse with respect to stolen bases and batting average and valuable only for sake of his expected contributions to runs, home runs and RBIs, all of which can be had later. Analogously, with early pitching picks the priority should be to secure good-to-great ratios rather than counting stats, which are plentiful by comparison.

It's a fantasy truism that “any strategy can succeed if you draft the right players.” Nevertheless, your odds of drafting the right players are greater with some strategies than with others, and this is in large part due to categorical scarcity. Waiting until round seven to draft your ace can work, for instance, as can loading up on low-average sluggers early in the draft with the plan to make up batting average later. But recent history indicates that these are low-percentage plays. Elite pitching ratios are much more commonly found in the first five rounds than any subsequent part of the draft. And late batting average is even harder to find. By drawing attention to trends such as these, a complete appreciation of categorical scarcity puts fantasy players in a position to develop a strategy that will maximize their chances of drafting a winning team.

2023 Fantasy Baseball Preview: The Truths & Misconceptions of Scarcity

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