Dynasty Points Survival Guide w/Player Targets

Zac Beck provides an in depth look at Dynasty points leagues

By: Zac Beck

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This guide will grow and change over time to reflect my best recommendations for navigating points leagues settings, whether they be redraft or dynasty. It’ll cover guiding principles, preferred stats for projection and valuation, considerations based on league size, and my favorite points league settings.

Bonus: stick around to the end of the article for five players I’m buying in points leagues before opening day!

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1. Guiding Principles

How should you go about valuation at a glance? What should you keep in mind when prioritizing players and constructing team-build in points formats?

Starting Pitching

Generally speaking, starting pitching is more valuable in points leagues than it is in rotisserie formats. Check your league’s specific scoring format to be sure – you can do this by exporting 2022 stats and applying your league’s settings to see how certain players stack up. If you’re using Fantrax standard scoring, for example, roughly 75% of the top 20 players by total points will be starting pitchers.

Compared to rotisserie scoring:

• Innings volume is more important

• Strikeout volume is less important

• Healthy ratios are less important

This is all relative of course. In a perfect world, you’d be able to find a hurler who tosses 250 innings, strikes out 300 batters, and maintains sterling ratios. When deciding between two pitchers for your points league squad with similar rotisserie values, volume is king. Use projection systems like ATC (@ATCProjections, produced by Ariel Cohen) or Steamer to get a baseline understanding of the expected workload, then apply a little bit of your own critical thought – this is the part that will separate the wheat from the chaff.

Relief Pitching

If you pay attention to early ADPs for Draft Champions and NFBC leagues, you’ll see many premium closers go as early as the third round with regularity. Do not, under any circumstances, do that in your points redraft leagues or dynasty start-ups.

Compared to rotisserie scoring:

• Saves are less important

• Holds are less important

Most standard points formats do not award points for holds and the points they award for saves are paltry relative to their value in roto. For reference, Emmanuel Clase was the #1 RP in my main dynasty points league. He tallied 410 points for the entire season and finished 89th overall. 

Relievers are fickle and the market turns over regularly. Rostering an elite closer can separate you from the pack at the position group, but the total volume of points they produce is not always commensurate with their draft or trade cost.

Hitters

Here’s where it gets interesting. It is critically important that you reference your league’s specific scoring settings to fine-tune your personal ranks, but generally…

Compared to rotisserie scoring:

• Home run hitting is more important

Home runs are great! They are an instant source of scoring in both real life baseball and fantasy. The difference here is that home runs are the best immediate source of points and only one of several categories in rotisserie.

• Limiting strikeouts is more important

There are only a handful of ways to bleed points. The most common, by far, is strikeouts. In most standard scoring settings, netting a punchout from one of your hitters is worth -0.5 points. The other two are caught stealing and errors (if your league considers defense whatsoever).

• Maximizing walk rate is more important

A walk is as good as a hit, kid! Lean into one! We’ve got ice!

Walks are free points. They also present an opportunity to tack on more with a run or stolen base. It’s just math – fewer strikeouts plus more walks equals more points.

• Stolen bases are less important

Dynasty rankings typically hold stolen bases in higher regard than home runs. It should be the opposite in points – home runs are worth more outright and come with no inherent points risk, whereas a caught stealing incurs a -0.5 cost in standard points scoring. It’s always great to have a player who can do both at an elite rate, but if choosing between prolific home run hitting versus extraordinary stolen base prowess, all things otherwise equal, I’m siding with the slugger.

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2. League Size Considerations

General principles are just that: general. They ebb and flow with the size of the league you’re applying them against. 

Prospect Values:

As the league gets deeper…

• Prospect depth is more valuable

Shallow leagues condense talent. Farm system depth is less valuable – fewer of them will ever crack your starting lineup. In 10 or 12 team leagues, I would prefer to have one top 10 prospect than three or four in the 50 - 100 range.

Deep leagues incentivize depth, and having more opportunities for a prospect to develop into a contributing force in your starting lineup becomes more attractive as the league size increases.

• Pitching prospects are more valuable

This is where the old adage TINSTAAPP (there is no such thing as a pitching prospect) comes into play – pitching prospects are risky and there should be enough pitching at the Major League level in shallow leagues to sustain a solid rotation. I am more comfortable trading prospect depth for proven pitching than I would be rostering high risk minor league talent.

Pitching gets very thin in leagues of 20 or more teams. Healthy volume is really valuable. Rostering pitching prospects outside of the top 100 becomes far more attractive in leagues with many teams.

Roster Construction:

As the league gets deeper…

• Major league depth is more valuable

Why on earth would a major league team trade for Mike Brosseau? That question makes a lot more sense when you dive into the world of deep dynasty leagues. Positional scarcity is real once you cross the 20 team threshold.

• Pitching, both frontline and depth, is more valuable

When there are only 10 or 12 teams in your league, everybody gets an ace. Everybody will roster 3-5 mid-rotation starters. Everybody will have a breakout candidate. The separation between teams is smaller. As the league expands, having a reliable stable of 5-7 starters is worth its weight in gold.

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3. My Favorite Stats for Prospect Valuation

Baseball generates staggering amounts of data. FanGraphs, RotoWire, Baseball Reference, Baseball America, Baseball Nation, and hundreds of other sites all provide incredibly deep and detailed content and statistics. There are so many sources of information that I made Baseball Nation up just to make a point but I’m sure many of you didn’t even break stride!

Such vast data availability can cause analysis paralysis and discourage fantasy players from taking the dive into valuation, leading to over-reliance on industry lists. The barrier to entry for player assessment and writing is nearly non-existent – if you’re accessing this document, you can do it too. It doesn’t have to be hard! A little legwork can go a long way, especially if you have unique league settings.

One obligatory note: watch film. Not highlight tapes, not single starts, but full games from different periods of a season or multiple seasons. It’s so much easier to articulate why you like a player when you see how he puts it all together. Chris Clegg (@RotoClegg) made an excellent point on his Twitter this week – a lot of people can scout a statline and tell you what they think a player can do, but fewer can watch them and tell you what they can’t do. That’s what film study unlocks.

Pitching

I always think of this scene from Moneyball when trying to place a pitcher’s value. In reality, you don’t have to have state of the art code or be a wunderkind a la Peter Brand to get a leg up on your leaguemates.

Stat #1: K-BB% (via FanGraphs MiLB Leaderboard) | use for MLB & MiLB

It’s pretty straightforward: at what rate do they K batters and issue free passes? These stats are helpful on their own and should be analyzed independently – not all K-BB% are made equal (for example, a 35% K rate and a 15% BB rate is the same as a 25% K rate paired with a 5% BB rate) but it provides a good starting place to narrow down your prospect search.

Stat #2: ERA Estimators (via FanGraphs) | use for MLB & MiLB

FIP (fielding independent pitching), xFIP (expected FIP), and SIERA (skill-interactive earned run average) tell you to what degree a pitcher over- or under-performed expectation. They function by regressing on-field results that the pitcher has little-to-no control over to the league average, reducing the luck influence of BABIP and LOB%. FanGraphs has a tidy ERA - FIP column in their leaderboards that can help you quickly identify the biggest beneficiaries and victims of luck-based performance.

Stat #3: HR/FB% or HR/9 | use for MLB and MiLB

How susceptible is a pitcher to the longball? Might their otherwise stellar performance be obscured by poor home run luck? Or is that indicative of their skill level? Digging into the outcomes on batted balls, along with park or league factors and GB/LD/FB% helps contextualize the pitcher’s performance.

Stat #4: Pitch Mix (via Statcast Player Pages) | Use for MLB

Identifying breakouts is as much luck as it is skill, but there are ways to get an edge in the educated guess department. Statcast contains a wealth of data on every MLB pitcher’s arsenal, including how often each pitch is thrown over time, the characteristics of each pitch relative to the league average, and the actual and expected results against for each pitch. I recommend looking for extreme outliers between actual and expected results plus velocity gains when trying to find your ace in the rough.

Stat #5: Pitching+ (via Eno Sarris @ The Athletic) | Use for MLB

Eno has come as close to perfecting pitching evaluation using sabermetric data as you’re going to find. Fair warning: This content is paywalled, but it’s worth the subscription if you can afford it. Pitching+ breaks down pitching performance into Location+ (the value of a pitch based on its location at the plate) and Stuff+ (the value of a pitch based on its physical characteristics). 

Hitting

Stat #1: Hard Hit % (via RotoWire paid subscription) | use for MLB & MiLB

I cannot recommend this piece by Davy Andrews enough. It underscores the importance of hitting the ball hard with regularity. Even when you don’t hit it hard, you’ve got to hit it hard (or at the very least not hit it softly). Read the article and it’ll make sense, but here’s the TL;DR – hard hit rate is sticky, it’s nigh impossible to improve it once you’ve established a baseline, and it’s highly correlated with wRC+.

Stat #2: Contact % (via RotoWire paid subscription) | use for MLB & MiLB

Whiff issues have derailed more prospects than any other defect. The most common culprits are high velocity and spin out of the zone. If you can get your hands on zone contact and o-swing percentages, more power to you. Pair contact % and film study and you’ll get a good sense for a player’s ability to contact pitches he should and lay off pitches he needs to.

Stat #3: K-BB% (via FanGraphs Leaderboards) | Use for MLB & MiLB

Minimizing strikeouts and maximizing walks is critically important for points leagues, but also relatively predictive of the likelihood that a minor leaguer will have a successful transition to the show.

Stat #4: OPS & ISO (via FanGraphs Leaderboards) | Use for MLB & MiLB

As it just so happens, OPS and ISO measure the on-field performance that generates points pretty well. After I’ve identified players with the requisite hard hit, contact, and plate approach skills, the next step is typically to evaluate the performance on field using our run-of-the-mill OPS and ISO stats.

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4. Recommended Points League Settings

I love baseball. I like fantasy baseball. I prefer that the leagues I play in emulate real-life, on-the-field baseball, as much as possible. Points leagues catch some flak for being reductive, but I prefer them to categories for their customization and idiosyncrasies.

Some of these preferences run afoul of the principles outlined thus far. In my opinion (and again, this is my piece, so you’re getting my opinion) – it’s way more fun when leagues encourage the viability of different playstyles and generate parity between position groups.

Setting #1: Make Pitcher Wins and Losses Matter Less

We stopped caring about pitcher wins over a decade ago. They are only tangentially related to a pitcher’s value to his team, and aren’t a reliable stat to target. My preference is to reduce the points value attached to wins and losses to remove variability that isn’t directly associated with the pitcher’s performance.

Setting #2: Reward Quality Starts

So we’ve knocked down the value of pitcher wins, how do we make up for it? Sure, quality starts are relatively arbitrary (6 innings pitched with 3 or fewer earned runs), but they’re at least an accepted benchmark for a solid performance.

Setting #3: Give Bonuses for Stolen Bases

I’ve spent a good part of this article talking about how stolen bases don’t matter much in points leagues. The unfortunate downside of that dynamic is that an entire class of player profiles isn’t viable. Give a little bonus to stolen bases and you create a healthier ecosystem for position players, rewarding different playstyles and allowing for more possible team builds.

Setting #4: Punish Poor Defenders

Defense is part of the game even if we don’t usually think about it for fantasy. Integrating a consequence for poor defense adds layers to player valuation and incentivizes evaluation of a player’s entire toolset – not just the offensive tools. It’ll make you a better evaluator and inject an interesting wrinkle to your leagues.

Setting #5: Remove Unnecessary Bonuses

Some leagues incorporate huge bonuses for complete games, shutouts, no hitters, perfect games, cycles, and so on. They can add some excitement, but the huge point totals already accrued from those feats are more than enough and a novelty shouldn’t decide a matchup or a season. 

Setting #6: Give Relievers Some Credit

Rotisserie formats place absurd values on relief pitching options. Points leagues largely neglect them. Consider giving a little more credit to saves and holds to reward managers who excel at identifying both elite and breakout relief pitchers.

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6. Early Players to Target for 2023

If your leaguemates are using popular rotisserie-focused lists, they’re likely blind or indifferent to the deltas in value between scoring formats. These are players I believe you can acquire at a bargain ahead of the 2023 MLB season!

Disclaimer: Nearly all starting pitchers are more valuable in points than they are in rotisserie. Pitchers listed here are exceptionally undervalued because they possess qualities that exacerbate the difference in value between league types.

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Hitters

Rhys Hoskins, 1B, PHI - ATC Projection: .237/.331/.460, 29 HR, 3 SB

He’s one of 9 players projected by Steamer for 30 home runs, <25% K rate, and >10% BB rate. That’s points league gold. The other first basemen that fit this criteria: Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Paul Goldschmidt, and Matt Olson. 

Hoskins is your man if you’re looking for 80% of the production for 50% of the cost.

Jesse Winker, OF, MIL - ATC Projection: .251/.359/.437, 19 HR, 1 SB

I’m a Brewers fan, so say all you want about this being wishful thinking. There are several compelling reasons to consider acquiring Jesse Winker if you’ll hear me out.

Winker has been a stud against the Brewers. Every plate appearance in 2021 gave me heartburn. His career line against Milwaukee is .322/.409/.605 for a 1.013 OPS with 13 home runs, 28 RBI, and 34 runs scored. Pretty good.

He loves playing at Miller Park (no, I’m not acknowledging the new name). He said so himself, “It’s an amazing place to hit. You can see the ball. It’s just a great spot.  It’s definitely one of my favorite places I’ve ever played.” The numbers back it up – he’s slashed .344/.440/.491 on the west side of Milwaukee over 32 games.

He’s going to provide almost no speed. His 2022 campaign was marred by injury. Those are classic ingredients for sliding down ranks. I’m buying him in points formats.

Corey Seager, SS, TEX - ATC Projection: .278/.352/.496, 28 HR, 2 SB

Are you sensing a theme? All three players here will not contribute meaningful stolen base impact barring serious surprises. Seager is a much better asset in points leagues than he is in rotisserie, and he’s due for a bounceback in 2023. 

2022 was the third consecutive year Seager recorded a barrel rate of over 10% and a contact rate over 70%. You might not have assumed those figures, given a down year. 

He stands to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the shift ban – if not the biggest outright. No qualified hitter recorded more ground balls and line drives into the shift than Seager did.

Pitchers

Framber Valdez, HOU - ATC Projection: 192 IP, 3.24 ERA, 179 K, 67 BB

Say it with me: I will not underrate Framber Valdez!

Since December 1st, Valdez has been selected 24th among pitchers in NFBC competitions. He finished the 2022 season as the 8th best overall player in my main dynasty points league and 6th among starting pitchers.

He will not wow you with elite velocity or stuff. He will not make many appearances on the Pitching Ninja Twitter feed (I counted one in all of 2022, which was about his fidgeting on the mound, not highlighting his stuff). What he will do is throw an immense volume of high-quality innings.

Chris Bassitt, TOR - ATC Projection: 175 IP, 3.75 ERA, 152 K, 47 BB

There isn’t a lot of extravagances in Chris Bassitt’s game. Rotisserie analysts unfairly fade him because he doesn’t rack up strikeouts at an elite rate, he doesn’t put up stellar ratios, and the landing spot in Toronto is less than desirable.

So why do I like him? He pitches. A lot. In points leagues, volume is king. Of course there’s a difference between any ol’ volume and good volume. Bassitt is far better than a ho-hum arm.

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