It’s been a full fantasy baseball preseason at Yahoo Sports. We’ve ranked and we’ve mocked. We’ve given you sleepers and picks and pans, broken down the positions, offered up long-form strategy.
Today’s goal is something different. Quick-hitters. Cliff notes. Imagine you and I bumped into each other at the airport or the local market and you had just a few minutes for some last-second tips. These are the things I would likely share with you before we parted, my 24 best swing thoughts for fantasy baseball 2024.
Let’s get moving. I don’t want you to miss that flight, or miss out on your glorious run to a championship.
[Join or create a Yahoo Fantasy Baseball league for the 2024 MLB season]
1) Injury optimism is not your friend, especially with pitchers who got hurt (or revealed fresh injuries) in the spring.
Unless the discount is gigantic with these players, I will not draft them. Gerrit Cole is the most obvious name that applies here.
2) The AL Central is a division filled with soft, pillowy landings. The Twins are the nominal favorite, but it’s a roster filled with notoriously brittle players. Everyone else in the division would be thrilled to merely climb over .500. Although divisional matchups don’t dominate the schedule like they once did, I want pitchers in this cushy division. I will also attack the AL Central with in-season streaming decisions.
3) In most mixed-league Salary Cap drafts, I’ll lean towards a stars-and-scrubs approach, for two reasons. Obviously, the top of my roster will be filled with high-end talent. But the second aspect is I want the bottom 15% of my roster to be fluid, a group that I can easily cut from as new players emerge. The most significant free-agent portion of any fantasy season is the early weeks.
4) There are no real cheat codes when it comes to fantasy baseball picks — your roster requires too many players for anyone to carry a league-winner tag. But the best cheat-code strategy I have is to share a team with a trusted friend. This will work best if the tandem has a similar commitment level and view of the MLB landscape, but when the fit is right, you’ve significantly improved your chances to win. You also have someone to share the journey with, and someone to share the work with.
5) The six offenses I most want to invest in: Dodgers, Braves, Phillies, Astros, Rangers and Orioles. The five I most want to avoid: White Sox, Athletics, Royals (Bobby Witt Jr. obviously an exception), Marlins and (sadly) the Rockies. And…