2026 MLB Season Thread

$10 million in incentives. He wanted to stay with Jays.

I have imagined it, and I think he would be terrible even if he were a great skater. I'm guessing that a 7'6 goalie would get five-holed to death.

will probably format like aids but figured worth sharing - never did this before - the juice was never worth the squeeze before, but with ai coding now it's pretty simple to do while inebriated and watching something with a lot of back and forth and iteration - which i actually enjoy

found fangraphs has an interesting feature where you can input your specific league settings to get a revised rankings for your league - but they are dumb about implementation - they apply position scarcity as a flat bonus - so in a 12 team league that does 1 catcher each - so we can expect about 12-15 catchers drafted - they'll still give the catcher premium to the 20th best catcher - it's really dumb, we should only be applying it to the catchers who are good enough to be rostered if they weren't catchers (which is few) and then in minor increments - ie alejandro kirk isn't very good, but you can do worse, much worse at catcher - so he's worth reaching for a little bit despite being awful

this specific ranking system is for me own league - standard 5x5 roto league, 12 teams, deep rosters & 2C $285 budget

it overvalues rp but maybe they are worth more than we normally value them - i didn't apply any scarcity metrics to pitchers because they aren't scarce and good relievers are scarce by default being the only ones to produce saves

figured people may be interested - fg is what fangraphs assumes is the auction value, fp is what fantasy pros believes is but for standard leagues with 280 budget (options were limited for free version and lol at paying for their trash)

hitter projections are sourced from thebatx, pitchers from atc - but you can mix and match and use any and you'll be fine, they don't really disagree much anyway - fantasypros is just crowdsourcing what randos think but is nice because it does reflect market sentiments and a lot of people draft off that as well - so it's good for a sanity check

edit: it was aids - cutting off long tail and going to post image again

nice, that one works

still needs some minor work, as you can see, despite shohei being a better option than judge, we slightly favor judge because he gives you more options to work with whereas shohei clogs up your dh start from the start which is a horrendous outcome for other players but possibly not enough to to warrant judge>ohtani more so mid level dh vs mid level of

also got some issues elsewhere as our position scarcity is still very much a work in progress - but a lot of that is likely driven by the fact that this league has 5 OF

here's it for a standard yahoo league - so there's clearly some gaps out there that need to be fixed

I have no idea what’s going on.

- Towelie Mod

i'm trying to build something that adjust player rankings based on league specifics - it's clearly not working well

Is what you’re saying that it doesn’t have enough Tegridy?

Another example of why I'll never do fantasy baseball ever again. **** takes so much time. I'll stick too hunchcapping round robins every day.

txdome,

who do u have winning it all this year?

if it's any consolidation - nobody in any of my leagues ever believes it whenever they find out what i do for a living

precisely because there's so much variance that spending hours on this kind of thing only grants a slim edge in something with so much variance that the edge is basically noise - there are good drafts and there are bad drafts - but it's much like winning a tourney, you need a lot of stuff to go right for you

the real edge in fantasy sports is grinding the waiver wire, making the big pickups before others even know about whatever caused that guy to suddenly rise in value and i'm terrible about that because although i have my finger on the pulse for that stuff for dfs and sportsbetting, that's where i also have tunnel vision - there's a bunch 2p2 leagues i signed up for, paid a few hundred to enter, did the draft and then promptly forgot about because all my sports bandwidth was focused on the active stuff

i do this now because ai greatly simplifies the process and makes it more of a "no that clearly didn't work, let's try this adjustment instead" and then it does all the legwork and go back to watching tentacle porn until i get a notification that it's ready for me to test and give feedback and that's a fun process

i doubt this will give me much edge, and any edge it will give me i'll lose because i'm going to forget to set the lineup quite a bit

was in a 2p2 baseball league last year and did pretty well because for once i finally stayed somewhat active but the format rewarded streaming pitchers and while i abused that system more than most, there were some people who stayed up until 3 am each night to get first pick off waivers so any edge i may have had going into the playoffs was soon toast once i was facing teams that were willing to go the extra mile that i wasn't and i got smoked in the playoffs

i will absolutely crush the general public in a "how many passing yards will stafford have today" game because the variables are known and variance is reduce - even if he misses half the season due to injury, of those 8/9 games he plays, we'll know ahead of time and we'll know his updated injury status and account for it - only real wildcard is if the big injury happens mid game - but then it's just 1 game getting nuked vs an entire season

but... if you want me to tell you if stafford is going to be a top 5 qb next year then your guess is as good as mine and simply looking at the preset rankings will get people 95% of the way to what a sophisticated season long projection model can produce

Give me couple weeks. Now It's obv doyer til injuries pop up. No injuries=Braves.

I wish I could be as optimistic as you about the Braves, but I can’t get there, at least not yet.

He is trying to recreate Rotolab using AI.

you're forgetting that i'm also arrogant so i think whatever i ultimately produce will be better

ie there are flaws galore in fangraphs version of it despite that it is a site centered around data analytics

There is a flaw that is common to all models that produce auction values for fantasy baseball, but it's complicated to solve for only a modest amount of improvement, so I've never bothered to try and do it.

Generally speaking, all the models account for playing time risk, injury risk, and skill instability in the same way. They try and figure out what stat line would look like for a player with that skill and risk profile if you did the moral equivalent of a Monte Carlo simulation. In other words, they say, "what would the blended average stat line for this player be if we had the opportunity to see X interations of the 2026 season play out?" Then they back into a dollar value based on that "blended average" stat line. The problem with this approach is that it implicitly assumes that the the value implied by the blended average stat line is equal to the blended average value to your fantasy team of those X iterations. And when it comes to your actual performance in fantasy leagues year over year, I'm 99.9% sure that isn't the case.

oh my main focus here is beating season long player props - where 99% of the efforts go

and with i get around that issue by never collapsing into a single blended stat line in the first place. i take that blended line - which is fairly accurate based on plate appearance rate, but wildly inaccurate in terms of being unable to predict plate appearances

so when i'm figuring the rate at which alejandro kirk, a guy who is projected to hit 18 hr, will hit o14.5 as DK has his at 15+ at -180

but it's not simply yes that's value because 18>14.5 but rather "he's a catcher so his pa are capped to begin with and due to his age and position/platoon chances" we think this is a good distribution of PA - so he'll get over 15 more often than he doesn't, and he's going to have a bunch of years where he hits 25+ or even has 15 by the all star break - but along with those he is going to have a lot of 200-300 pa seasons where he hits 8-12 instead - my goal is to focus on frequencies

but for the auction values calculator i'm working on, that's my main goal is to have a dynamic value where we can punt categories and recalc on the fly and we adjust based upon who's already been taken

biggest example i can think of is nfl, where there's a couple qbs that are clearly better than the others - but once those are gone, all qb value evaporates because there's more playable qbs of largely indifferent projections than there are teams without qbs so you're better off literally taking your defense and kicker prior to taking your qb with the last pick (i rarely do this because i usually overvalue one or two 2nd or 3rd tier guys and want to make sure i get em but if i'm surprised and they go early i do and have taken my qb with the last pick)

This is the same problem I am discussing, just a different context.

If anyone cares, here is Bobo's 2026 Model Projections, I'll remind anyone who cares I was more accurate than books and fangraphs last year

National2026 vs.FG/vs.BP/vs.Ceasar's
Phillies 90-72 (+2.5)(+5.0)(+0.5)
Braves 86-76 (-3.5)(-6.0)(-2.5)
Mets 83-79 (-6.5)(-5.5)(-7.5)
Marlins 68-94 (-7.0)(-7.0)(-5.5)
Nationals 62-100 (-6.0)(-3.5)(-3.5)

Cubs 93-69 (+7.0)(+2.5)(+4.5)
Brewers 91-71 (+9.0)(+10.5)(+6.5)
Reds 84-78 (+5.5)(+5.0)(+1.5)
Pirates 76-86 (-7.0)(-3.5)(-2.5)
Cardinals 71-91 (-4.0)(+5.0)(+1.5)

Dodgers 103-59 (+3.5)(-2.0)(+0.5)
Padres 89-73 (+9.0)(-7.5)(+4.5)
Dbacks 87-75 (+5.5)(+10.0)(+7.5)
Giants 84-78 (+1.5)(+1.5)(+2.5)
Rockies 51-111 (-14.0)(-9.5)(-4.5)

American2026 vs.FG/vs.BP/vs.Ceasar's
Yankees 96-66 (+9.5)(+7.5)(+5.5)
Red Sox 90-72 (+5.5)(+8.0)(+2.5)
Blue Jays 86-76 (+1.0)(-3.0)(-2.5)
Rays 82-80 (+2.0)(+1.0)(+4.5)
Orioles 82-80 (-1.5)(-2.5)(-4.5)

Tigers 89-73 (+3.0)(+5.0)(+3.5)
Royals 84-78 (+3.5)(-0.5)(+1.5)
Guardians 82-80 (+6.5)(+6.0)(+2.5)
Twins 77-85 (-1.0)(-2.0)(+4.5)
White Sox 65-97 (-2.5)(-4.5)(-2.5)

Mariners 89-73 (+1.0)(-4.0)(-0.5)
Rangers 85-77 (+4.5)(+0.5)(+1.5)
Astros 83-79 (+2.5)(-2.5)(-2.5)
Athletics 70-92 (-8.5)(-5.5)(-6.5)
Angels 63-99 (-9.5)(-3.5)(-7.5)

Yankees with the best record in the AL.

Seems legit to me.

Mets 83-79. I can see that too.

Yes as a Mets fan, I am displeased by my own projections.

Jurickson nuked. So it be
gins