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A Word About Fantasy Baseball Position Eligibility

February 5, 2019 By Draft Buddy 1 Comment

Colorodo Rockies Garrett Hampson

This is Garrett Hampson, 2B/SS for the Colorado Rockies. Recently picked in one of my drafts at SS, not eligible at 2B, got me looking closer at fantasy baseball position eligibility.

The Super Bowl is (painfully) over, so now it is time to put all of our attention to the upcoming Major League Baseball season and fantasy baseball. Pitchers and catchers report early next week, with fielders trickling in after that for full squad workouts starting between February 16 to 21.

The first spring training games are February 21, and every team is playing on February 23. The regular season starts March 20 for the Oakland Athletics and Seattle Mariners, squaring off in Tokyo, Japan for a two-game series. Make sure to check if your fantasy league includes these stats or not. Official Opening Day is Thursday March 28, the earliest Opening Day in MLB history. Not long now!

Lets take a minute to talk about position eligibility, certainly a more complicated issue than fantasy football in which players almost always have a single position that rarely changes. In fantasy baseball, many players have multiple position eligibility, and it can change often and even in-season, depending on your league rules. It is important to know the rules for your league, but even knowing doesn’t make tracking it an easy task.

Here is a reminder about fantasy baseball position eligibility rules for the popular league managers, plus the National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC):

Position Eligibility Rules

CBS P.E. Rules (scroll down a bit)

  • 20 games played preseason, 5 games played in-season

ESPN P.E. Rules

  • 20 games played preseason, 10 games played in-season
  • 5 starts (3 in-season) to quality as a starting pitcher
  • 8 relief appearances (5 in-season) to qualify as a relief pitcher

Fantrax P.E. Rules

  • 20 games played preseason, 10 games played in-season
  • 5 starts (3 in-season) to quality as a starting pitcher
  • 8 relief appearances (5 in-season) to qualify as a relief pitcher

Yahoo P.E. Rules

  • 5 starts or 10 games played preseason and in-season
  • 3 starts to quality as a starting pitcher
  • 5 relief appearances to qualify as a relief pitcher

NFBC P.E. Rules (click “Rosters” to find P.E.)

  • 20 games played pre-season, 10 games played in-season
  • Does not use separate starter and relief pitcher positions

That is the gist of it, but there are other considerations. Such as, what if a player did not play in the Majors prior to this season? Then he could be eligible at the position he played the most in the Minors. What if a player with MLB experience missed all of last season? Then he could be eligible at the position(s) based on the last season he played in the Majors. What if a player only hit as DH last year, but your league doesn’t use a DH position? Probably only eligible as a utility option.

Last week I joined a slow best ball draft over at Fantrax. To my surprise, the rules for that league do not exactly match my Fantrax summary, above. For their best ball leagues each player is only eligible at a single position to start the season, determined by the position they played the majority of games last season.

Plus, players will not earn any in-season eligibility at other positions. I can only guess that is because figuring out the best ball lineups every week with multiple positions would be a nightmare. That’s fine, but definitely a need to know section of the rules, which gets back to my original point – make sure to know your league rules with respect to position eligibility.

Tracking Position Eligibility

To help you determine position eligibility and find multi-position eligible players for your fantasy baseball league, we have our games played by position tool. Draft Buddy (Excel download) includes games played by position for all hitters to dynamically identify position eligibility for your league settings, or you can manually adjust positions as necessary.

Unfortunately we do not have minor league statistics in our database because those are outside our budget constraints. However, we do have daily stat updates in-season to help identify new position eligibility for players.

Value Changes

Instead of recreating the wheel, here is a good article by Austin Bristow II from October of last year published at Pitcher List highlighting players who gained or lost position eligibility for 2019 based on last season. Clearly this can result in a value change for the individual player when gaining or losing position eligibility.

Plus consider the impact when a position group light on quality options to begin with gets deeper or shallower. There are some good comments to that article by readers with respect to the depth at first base this season.

Next Steps

The positions you see on our website player pages are from our depth charts that member krby13 keeps updated for us. If a player does not meet position eligibility based on 20 games played the prior season, then the depth chart positions are assigned as a default for Draft Buddy.

This was highlighted to me as an area for improvement when I input Garrett Hampson in Draft Buddy recently, at second base. He is a shortstop for fantasy. He played seven games at 2B but 8 games at SS last season. However, we have him as Colorado Rockies projected 2B in the depth charts.

Realizing this potential inconsistency between a player’s anticipated position and qualifying fantasy position – and we are a fantasy site – I am considering ways to make the tracking of positions more robust across the site and all of our tools.

Lastly, here is an excellent scouting report on Hampson. He was drafted early round 17 in my ongoing 12-team points draft. His NFBC ADP is currently 190th overall.

Filed Under: Fantasy Baseball, Fantasy Baseball Draft Buddy

Fantasy Baseball Utility Player Buys – Escobar, Peraza, Descalso

June 30, 2018 By avanfossan Leave a Comment

Eduardo Escobar, Minnesota Twins

Minnesota Twins 3B/SS Eduardo Escobar is neatly positioned between Eddie Rosario and Brian Dozier in the regular batting lineup. Andy says try to add him to your fantasy baseball team.

Happy Saturday to all! Short week this week with July 4th on Wednesday, and any short week is a good week. We’re only a couple weeks from the All-Star game in Washington, D.C. and about a month and a half from the MLB trade deadline.

The Nationals already made one move acquiring reliever Kelvin Herrera, albeit in a setup role initially but could pitch himself into the closer’s role. The Manny Machado sweepstakes is heating up with the Philadelphia Phillies and Los Angeles Dodgers the loudest in their pursuit of the Baltimore Orioles prize 3B/SS.

The theme this week is fantasy baseball utility players – players with multi-position eligibility. They can help your team get over the hump and into the money of your fantasy league.

3B/SS Eduardo Escobar, MIN

As a Twins fan, Escobar is everything you would want in a player: charismatic, leader, team player and productive. He originally took the place of Jorge Polanco at shortstop, who violated MLB’s PED policy, but since Miguel Sano’s injury and then demotion, Escobar excelled in his role not only on the defensive side but more importantly for fantasy owners, in the batter’s box. Escobar has 33 doubles which are two away from his career high set in 2014. He’s also second on the team in runs batted in and home runs.

Manager Paul Molitor, mixing and matching with all of the Twins’ injuries, is taking a quasi-sabermetric view with regards to his lineup. As long as Eddie Rosario hits second, and stays hot, Escobar should continue to hit third in the lineup and has plenty of RBI opportunity as a result.

Another factor boosting Escobar is where Brian Dozier is hitting. Over the past couple of weeks, Dozier is hitting fourth through sixth, in a position to drive in runs. This sweetens the Escobar pick up because not only will he be driving in Rosario, but Dozier will be driving Esky in.

Fantasy Advice – Buy
I love Escobar’s position eligibility at third and short, and that he’s hitting third in the Twins lineup. The Twins are well off expectations from back in the spring so maybe the team can turn things around in the second half making Escobar a good trade target.

2B/SS Jose Peraza, CIN

Peraza is hardly a household name but he is somebody who can help your fantasy team. He is second on the team in runs (43), stolen bases (14) and fifth in average (.274). He leads the team in at-bats and is only 24 years old.

Normally, this wouldn’t be a huge pick up but take the opportunity to add stolen bases and runs to boost those categories. Having Joey Votto (who still hasn’t hit this season), Scooter Gennett (.331 average) and Eugenio Suarez in the lineup gives Peraza the opportunity to not only score runs, but also steal bags.

Let’s face it, who is going to pump fastballs to Votto pitch after pitch to keep Peraza in check at first? Yeah, that is a recipe for disaster, so Peraza should have plenty of advantageous opportunities to run on off-speed pitches.

Fantasy Advice – Buy
The Reds won 9 out of their last 10, are still in last place, but are starting to hit the ball and score runs. They came off a sweep of the Chicago Cubs and took a series from the Atlanta Braves. Like Escobar, Peraza gives a fantasy player multi-position eligibility and contributes stolen bases and runs. Hopefully you have some power to trade for this guy. I think he’s going to keep putting up numbers and at his current value is a steal (pun intended).

1B/2B/3B/OF Daniel Descalso, ATL

Descalso is a true utility player and he’s generally available. Descalso is owned in only 26% of Yahoo fantasy baseball leagues.

He’s not going to give you huge numbers but given the other free agent options in most leagues, his 41 runs driven in are fourth behind some big hitters Joey Gallo and Adam Duvall. The number that makes Descalso a better bet is the fact he’s struck out 60 times. Gallo by contrast has struck out 118 times.

Descalso should get consistent at-bats thanks to his versatility in the field. He’s not going to be a guy you’d want to run out there every day but he isn’t a horrible fill in either.

Fantasy Advice – Buy
I appreciate guys who are versatile and with Descalso able to do pretty much everything, he’s a guy that can help, or at least spot start, in your lineup a couple times a week. And, he is available in most leagues for nothing.

Extra Innings

This time of year around here, in Omaha, Nebraska, is College World Series time. Eight of the best Division I college teams descend on Omaha for a chance at a National Championship. It’s always great to see the fans not only from different schools, but also different parts of the country bring their passion for their team into the heartland.

What’s better is the atmosphere. Often times, we get caught up in football traditions like Camp Randall’s, “Jump Around” and the, “Tunnel Walk” at Nebraska, but baseball has their own as well. Seeing older fans chant and the players in the dugout having fun is what the College World Series and baseball is all about.

It’s sad that we as a society sometimes feel it necessary to take the fun out of the game, suppressing these traditions in the name of, “good sportsmanship”. Very rarely is it kids doing these things. I’m 44, purposely heckling an opponent. Fans are keeping themselves mentally in the game and supporting their team at the same time.

We tell kids to play the game for the fun of it but then take the fun away because a small group is offended by traditions they don’t really understand. The College World Series is what is good about college and baseball and I’m proud to say it’s in my neck of the woods.

Filed Under: Fantasy Baseball

Position Eligibility for Miguel Cabrera

February 12, 2014 By Draft Buddy Leave a Comment

Here is a question received from Ken using the fantasy baseball Cheatsheet Compiler & Draft Buddy:

Mike,

Thanks for the great tools. One quick question. My league’s positional eligibility is based solely on games played previous year. As such, Miguel Cabrera should not qualify at 1B.

Is there a set-up that I am missing that is causing him to appear on the 1B cheatsheet? I have the position eligibility set to 20 games. If not, is there a means to manually remove him from the first base list, while keeping him on the 3B list?

Thanks,
Ken

And my answer in response to that question:

Hi Ken. Thanks! The reason he pops out at 1B is because he is on the depth charts (in my database) at 1B. Surely once he plays a minimum number of games at 1B then you can start him there this season, no?

Anyway, you can make an adjustment to prevent him from showing at 1B. Go to the hitters tab and under Position for him, change from 1B to 3B. Hit Compile Cheatsheets and it should remove him from 1B, since he doesn’t have position eligibility there based on number of games played last year. Each time you update, you’ll have to make that change.

Maybe I can create some kind of option to only choose positions based on games played prior year, not both games played and projected position this year.

Cheers,

Mike

Filed Under: Fantasy Baseball, Fantasy Baseball Draft Buddy

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