Fantasy Baseball Strategy: Players who rise in H2H vs. Roto formats

If you came purely for the results from our latest Head-to-Head points mock, fair enough. Just keep scrolling. You’ll eventually reach them. But if you came here for the commentary, hoping to collect some insights for your upcoming draft, you’ll find them in much greater depth in the Fantasy Baseball Today livestream of this draft, either on YouTube or wherever podcasts are found.

But I’ll hit a few of the highlights here. Let’s get the introductions out of the way first:

1) Peter Clement, avid listener and smart guy
2) Jake Holland, The Cutoff Man podcast (@jakebaseball17)
3) Chris Towers, CBS Sports (@CTowersCBS)
4) J.W. Mulpas, Last Word on Sports (@CLEBoxscoreBeat)
5) Chris Mitchell, FantasyData (@CJMitch73)
6) John Sharples, hangs out on FanGraphs message boards
7) Chris Baskys, Mock Draft Megastream drafter 
8) Martin Sekulski, Pitcher List (@M_Ski22)
9) Scott White, CBS Sports (@CBSScottWhite)
10) Nick Fox, NBC Sports (@CT_FOX)
11) Chris Cummins, accepted invitation on X
12) Frank Stampfl, CBS Sports (@Roto_Frank)

It’s not uncommon in these little mock draft recaps for me to cite how the approach changes in the format du jour, but I said something on the livestream that I’m not sure I’ve ever expressed in quite the same way before. Here it is: Most every player you draft in this format is disposable. The draft isn’t an endpoint, but a starting point, and if you haven’t turned over half your roster by the time the season ends, you probably didn’t do that well.

That only goes for this format, by which I mean 12 teams, 21-man rosters, nine hitters started, and points scoring. At that size and with that scoring, the league is shallow enough and the parts interchangeable enough that you can feel certain you’ll always find a competent replacement on the waiver wire. The threshold for a player actually mattering, then, is much, much higher than most people imagine. You might say Tyler Soderstrom is a pretty good player for Fantasy, and he is, but his 2.77 point-per-game average last year was slightly less than that of Ramon Laureano (2.78), who went undrafted. TJ Friedl averaged 2.73 points per game, and he was nowhere close to being drafted. Meanwhile, Andy Pages and Jo Adell, who no one would dream of letting go undrafted, averaged 2.68 points per game and 2.58 points per game, respectively. Time is a flat circle.

You’re not getting ahead with those kinds of players, and you can always fall back on those kinds of players, which means your primary goal in this format, superseding all others, is to pursue with reckless abandon the kind of players with the upside for more than that. You need pillars in your lineup, the true stalwarts at a position. You need as many as you can get. And then you work your magic from there, taking big swings at the points in the draft you know the players are all disposable anyway. The bigger the miss, the quicker you can turn your attention to whatever new pillars might be emerging on the waiver wire. If you have a lineup full of players who are just good enough, well, you’re not going to be as motivated to pivot in those early weeks when it’s most critical to do so. So don’t even bother with them.

Looking at my own lineup, just because it’s the one I’m most familiar with, the pillars that I see are Kyle Schwarber, Cal Raleigh, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, Brice Turang, and Bo Bichette (once he picks up third base eligibility). I can’t see myself moving off any of them, for any reason apart from injury. For now, it’s only six, but not every team has six. I do have hopes that George Springer and Nick Pivetta will also be pillars, because they were last year. I have hopes that Brandon Woodruff, Mike Trout, and Joe Musgrove will be pillars, because they have been in the past. I have hopes that Cameron Schlittler, Bubba Chandler, and Tatsuya Imai will be pillars, because they’re supposed to have that kind of upside. But I don’t know. They won’t all be.

That’s where “working your magic” comes into play. What I mean by that is never settling for “just good enough” anywhere. You should always be pursuing the type of players with the potential to become pillars, and the best time to do that is the draft, when everyone is at zero, and you’re not having to struggle just to keep your head above water yet. This also explains my picks of Shane Bieber and Shane McClanahan. In no way would I be confident enough to pick them at 184 and 208, respectively, in a deeper league where every pick is of real consequence, but again, most every pick in this league — except for the pillars! — is disposable. Shoot your shot.

Does that make sense? Well, anyway … here are a few more scattered thoughts:

• Oneil Cruz in Round 5 struck us all as a reach, so don’t get too worked up about that one. Even before a rock-bottom season in which he averaged just 2.62 points per game and raised serious doubts about whether he can be a full-time player in the majors, we weren’t taking him that early in Head-to-Head points, where his strikeout rate presents too big of a hurdle. 
• The shortstop surplus is real in this format, where there is no extra middle infield spot to fill. It was apparent in our recent Head-to-Head points auction as well, with C.J. Abrams going for $10, Jeremy Pena for $9, and Trevor Story for $2. The same three sank in this draft, with Abrams going in Round 11, Pena in Round 14, and Story in Round $17. With no extra middle infield spot to fill, there just aren’t enough places to slot those players. I’m not saying it should stop you from drafting a shortstop who genuinely stands out in points leagues, like Francisco Lindor (3.59 points per game last year) or Geraldo Perdomo (3.63), but maybe think twice before investing significant draft capital in Zachary Neto (3.11, which was slightly less than Abrams and Pena, actually).
• This format always goes deeper into the starting pitcher pool for streamability reasons, so you’ll want to take note of some of the less familiar names drafted late in this one. Michael Burrows (218) has begun to gain traction as a breakout candidate in light of some of the changes the Astros are implementing with him. Mick Abel (229), Will Warren (234), and Rhett Lowder (252) have all shined this spring, with Lowder in particular showing unexpected strikeout potential coming off an injury-plagued 2025. He has an “in” now with Hunter Greene likely sidelined by an elbow injury to begin the year.