Rates & Barrels - Choosing & Building the Right Fantasy Baseball Leagues in 2024

Episode Date: February 8, 2024

There is an infinite number of ways to play fantasy baseball, so what factors should you consider when joining or creating a league?  Eno and DVR discuss some of the basic elements of building or finding a league to play in, as well as a few 2024-specific strategy considerations to keep in mind in the face of MLB's 2023 rule changes and the resulting impact on the run environment.  Rundown 1:40 How Do You Want to Play? - and - Key Questions to Consider 14:17 Where Do You Want to Play? - and - League Formats/Entry Fee Options 23:05 Yes, Free Leagues Still Exist! 39:03 Why We Like the FanGraphs Auction Calculator (https://www.fangraphs.com/fantasy-tools/auction-calculator) 46:43 What Are You Adjusting for 2024? Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: [e-mail] Check out our YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/c/ratesbarrels Subscribe to The Athletic for just $2/month for the first year: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Rates and Barrels, it's Thursday, February 8th, Derek Van Ryper, Eno Saris here with you on this episode. We are going to talk about some structural and strategy-based things for 2024 Fantasy Baseball League. So this is a great episode, whether you are playing for the first time or you're a seasoned player. We're going to get into some kind of unique 2024 things. We're going to pull all the way back and explain some of the things we say that might be a little bit jargony or insider-ish as we go through the draft season, hopefully making it a little easier, a little more accessible for anybody and everybody out there who wants to play more fantasy baseball

or just play some fantasy baseball for the very first time. Yeah, we've had some requests to go through the different types of games that are out there. We've had some listeners that were listening for baseball reasons who were intrigued by fantasy and jumping in for the first time.

And then for anybody who does play these, we should be able to add some idea of strategies and maybe even some advanced strategies. So hopefully it'll be appealing to all different kinds of people. So this was actually inspired, I think, by listener Fred, who kind of made this initial request, not the only person who's ever made the request, but suggested it could be put together as one episode. So we're giving it a shot. We'll see. We'll see what we get at the end of this. We'll call it the 101 laying the groundwork, preparing for a great 2024 fantasy baseball season.

I think the the entry point is just how do you want to play? How deep do you want to go? If you haven't played before, maybe you've played in a casual league with friends, what's that next sort of step? And obviously, we talk about different size leagues, right? Usually, a league has about 10 teams in it. At the smaller end, you could have as many as 20 or 24, even 30 for some super deep ultra mega dynasty league type things. Most leagues, the vast majority of leagues, are between 10 and 15 teams. So you're kind of finding the way the player pool

fits your knowledge and interest level in doing research. I think that's kind of finding the sweet spot for a league size, right? Because you have mixed leagues, you have mono leagues, which are AL or NL only. Those are super deep if you want to really dig into it. But if you're someone who watches a ton of AL teams, like maybe your favorite team plays in the AL and you know that side of the

player pool really well, that could be a really good fit too. I'm just curious what you prefer as your optimal format. Like what is your perfect league if you were the commissioner and you're only playing in one league in a season, even though I know you play in like a dozen every year. If you were the commissioner and you're only playing in one league in a season, even though I know you play in like a dozen every year. I like deeper. One of the reasons I like deeper is that you can identify an undervalued player that you think is going to get more playing time. And just that alone is a big win. You don't have to identify a breakout star or someone in a peak season like you can find a fourth outfielder that plays a little bit more than most fourth outfielders you know and i don't know i find that kind of compelling when you go all the way to the deepest though i do have a bit of a problem

so i'm in a 30 team basketball league. And I don't know if this is unique to basketball. What I find is that transactions grind to a halt. And I see this even in my 20 team league to some extent, which is people are just afraid to lose an asset in a team that large, in a league that large large because there's just no real picking up anything off the wire and when there's just really nothing on the wire and that can happen in al only uh but that can also happen it really is really the strongest i've ever seen in this 30 team basketball league if i you know list the waiver wire acquisitions we've had in the two years we played this league you wouldn't know probably nobody would know a single one of these players um and so unless there's some real

raptors fans out there who know who jonte porter is like that's been our biggest acquisition of the last two years on the wire so that gets a little bit too deep um so there is too deep for me but on the very shallow end i get get frustrated in a slightly different way where transactions even become difficult because there's sort of no point sometimes. You're just like, all these players are good. And why would I give you one good player for your three good players? Which is like, everybody wants to do that in like a 10 team league, you know, like, why would I give you one excellent player for your three? Okay. To good players,

you know? And so you start to see a lot of the same trade offers that way. But generally I like dynasty and I like slightly deeper dynasty. Cause I kind of like to play along with the GMs and, you know, have this idea of I'm building a team and I'm thinking about the future and I'm thinking about the present and I have to balance all these different things yeah so that's a huge choice too do you want to play redraft start the player pool from scratch every year or try and

get into something where you have keeper elements or even a dynasty situation where everybody gets kept nearly everybody and the draft is very small after the first year it might be a five round draft that you have because 40 players are on the roster, 35 get kept, and then you've got five rounds to fill it back out. That's a really unique challenge in and of itself. As far as the shadow leagues go,

I think if you're playing in a league with some friends and you can customize the roster spots, the one way you can take a smaller group of teams and make the league more challenging is just add some roster spots. I think if you play in a league that has one catcher, one of everything else around the infield, no corner, no middle, three outfielders and a utility, that doesn't push you very deep into the player pool. But if you start to make it look more like what we talk about when we talk

about NFBC leagues, where there's two catchers, there's a corner and a middle infielder in addition to all the other individual infield spots, There's the five outfielders. That starts to push you further into the player pool, a slightly deeper bench, right? It rewards you for drafting and finding the best players. It's not as easy to go to the waiver wire and find a good player, to find a 20 home run bat or a 20 steal player or a quality starting pitcher. So it really depends on how difficult you want the league to be. And I think if you're the commissioner of the league, or at least you, if you have the ear of the commissioner of the league, you have to understand what everybody else in the league actually wants, right? If you're playing with a group of friends,

a group of coworkers, it might be a little bit different than the actual goals of a highly competitive group of people that might want to play for higher stakes or even just play for some bigger bragging rights because they're consuming podcasts year-round. They're consuming content year-round. They're in love with prospect lists and trying to find the next great player. So I think that's a huge bar to figuring out what type of league you want to sign up for or what type of league you actually want to build. Yeah. out like what type of league you want to sign up for or what type of league you actually want to build yeah yeah i was in a league with uh dan rosenheck the economist at the economist and um you could trade players you could rent players so i could trade you a full season of i think we did something where we had some sort of speedster like i could trade you a full season of estuary reese for like two and a half months of mike trout and that was one of the worst

experiences i've ever had i do not want to do i didn't i just that was so deep and so intense that i just you have to not only kind of have a model for player value, but you have to have a model for player value on like the weekly basis. So you can be like, what is like three weeks of a story where he's worth in like, it's like we, we ended up finishing like fourth or something and it wasn't terrible, but it was,

I mean, it was super super deep and super active and i was like i have 15 other leagues like i cannot be spending people were like really did have models to like oh like to really parse the player value down to you know daily chunks that they could add up and oh yeah no no no i'm not i won't give you three weeks of them i'll give you two and a half weeks like what yeah okay thankfully that's not how most people play uh i don't think i would enjoy a format like that it was so intense so what i did that on like a more relatable level for most people what that is is in a way a streaming league and so you do have to think about streaming when you're setting up your your your league because you

know do you do you think that everybody in the league will be on the waiver wire every day and if not do you think like a couple people will be and then the rest won't be and then will those couple people just win the league because they are adding players every day you And if you have a set of more casual players that don't want to be on the waiver wire every day for 162 game season, then you have to put in things like

innings minimum, which keeps people from basically doing full reliever strategy, or an innings maximum to keep people from streaming pitchers every day. You can change the number of lineup slots. So like if you have SPs and RPs. two SP slots and three RP or three SP slots, starting pitcher slots and three relief pitcher slots, then people will find starters with relief pitcher designation that they can sneak more

starts in. And the opposite is true. If you only limit the amount of relievers a team have, we will at some point, maybe today, talk about relievers that have starting pitcher designation so that you can sneak more relievers in your SP slot so you know that's a that's a consideration is to think about how active your people are going to be and how active you everybody wants to be and kind of maybe restrain the the the couple people that you have your eye on. You're like, you are just going to do everything every day that you can. I need to think about you when I'm making the rules. Right, yeah.

The availability of the people managing teams in your league and their attention level I think is really important. I think, obviously, you can go to the weekly cadence for both the pickups and for moves. You could do twice weekly for those things. You also have to decide, do you want moves to be first come, first serve? Available players in the waiver wire. Is it as simple as first person to go get the player and add them, drop somebody else, they get them?

Do you want a waiver system or do you want to do a free agent auction budget where everybody has a separate budget for those pickups usually it's a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars and you have to spend a little bit of that money every single time that you want to add somebody i think if you have people who are really into the whole process then i think fab is the most fair and equitable way to go ahead and and distribute players in season but i also realize if you have a lot of first-time players, that might not be the easiest way to do it. Fortunately, there are football leagues that do it. I think that's the thing you have to think about too.

Have the people in your league played fantasy football before? Have they played with those rules? I found, kind of using football as another example, my home league in fantasy football, like 10 years ago, finally switched from snake draft to an auction. And they never wanted to go back. And I think that's the case for a lot of people. Snake draft, you're picking one person, one person, one person, one person.

And why it's called snake is it kind of goes, you go one through 14 or one through 10, and then 10 picks again, and you go 10 through one. So it's like a snake snake whereas auction is everyone has a bunch of money and can buy whoever they want and you know the snake draft is still the more common format in fantasy baseball a little bit harder you have to have values you have to have an idea of how auctions work and you know i think that's you if you're doing going for a first time league like i would i would just do a snake draft the first time yeah i think the pace is a little more comfortable. It's a minute per pick usually.

Obviously, that can be customized on a lot of different sites as opposed to every player being on the block and a continuous timer to get a bid in running. That's got a lot more on it as far as pressure goes for each person. So my 11-year-old wants a league this year. What do you think is the absolute easiest entry point for a bunch of 10 and 11 year olds? I think head-to-head

will keep their attention longer. I bet you weekly lineups is better. Yes, I think you'd start with weekly. 11 year olds are not going to remember to set their lineup every night. Probably not. Not the whole league. Then you're just kind of rewarding the

kids that get glued to it the most which probably makes it less fun for the kids that aren't as into it how about waiver pickups maybe they just happen once a week but yeah sunday nights and then you have to set your lineup by monday i think so monday game time yeah or first game of the week monday tuesday and there's some flexibility with that do you think about a kid's schedule though like if it's if it goes through sunday then they go to school all day monday you know yeah run the transaction saturday and have them make lineup changes on sunday it's a little different but or do it you know on the weekend do it friday into saturday like it doesn't have to be perfect I think that's the funny thing is that we talk a lot on our show

about the NFBC style leagues, right? That's a high stakes contest that a very small percentage of fantasy baseball players plays. It's super competitive. We love playing it. It's a great format, but it's not very approachable at first. So you just have to think kind of outside of those usual things. Yeah, the people who play it don't make it seem very approachable at first. So you just have to think kind of outside of those usual things. Yeah, the people who play it don't make it seem very approachable.

And then just there's a fee for every one of the leagues. So you really have to be willing to lose your money. But the nice thing about it is if you're just looking at the NFBC, what they have. They range from $50 entry fees, I believe. What are those called? They're called 50s or something. They have a lobby where you can look at all the different contests they have. NFBC 50s are the lowest entry point that they offer

to 12-team league. There's actually an overall competition that is made up of all the NFBC 50 leagues. So you're playing against the 11 other people in your league, plus everybody else in all the other leagues, which is common for the NFBC. It's a league that goes up against other leagues. So how you score against possibly hundreds or even thousands of other entries actually determines your prizes even beyond what happens against the rest of your individual league. So that one's like, you know, 50 bucks to get in, 12 teams, 50 rounds.

That's a draft and hold. So that's the other thing you have to keep in mind too when you start looking at different public leagues. It seems like monetarily you're like, oh, well, that's not, that seems like a doable number. But then, you know, you have to think about, you have to have the time to do a 50-round draft, either sit down and do it for two, three hours.

Sometimes there's slow drafts too. And then there's a slow draft, which is more doable in terms of you just have to watch your phone. And you have an hour or two hours to pick once you're notified. But that ends up being a lot of phone jockeying. When I'm in a draft like that, i'm looking at my phone a lot um so you know you might want to just sit down and do it but then you have to think like you're you it seems entry level but it's 50 rounds so and you have to buy you don't have the opportunity to buy anybody draft and hold means you're not picking up anybody during the season which is easier during the season you

don't have to like think about pickups. All you have to do is set your lineup once a week, and that makes it sort of easy. But you have to think at the beginning of the season about all the different players you might want to have. So just a little bit of draft and hold strategy here. I've got my team here that i drafted uh early in the season um and uh so this is you know you see here uh like i've got four catchers uh janier diaz patrick bailey christian

betancourt and christian vasquez the reason i did uh four was that i thought patrick bailey was an iffy second one. I wanted to have two shots and maybe a better second catcher. You can get by with three catchers. If you're doing this, three or four catchers. That's a thing that you want to do. I have four first basemen. Vladimir Guerrero, Paul Goldschmidt, Eli Harris-Montero, and Ryan Noda. You can have three bodies, but you need to have four eligibilities.

First base is one place that there's not a lot of people who have dual eligibility. So I just have four first basemen. But if you look then at my second baseman, I have five second base bodies. Haseong Kim, Tyro Estrada, Jeff McNeil, Brendan Rodgers, and Jordan Diaz. But Haseong Kim is third base eligible, and Jeff McNeil is outfield eligible, and Tyra Estrada is shortstop eligible. So my general rule is you want to have three bodies per infield position, but four eligibilities.

So when you look at my shortstop, have carlos correa and marco luciano that looks like a problem except i have carlos correa marco luciano joseon kim and tyro strata so i still have four bodies at third i have matt chapman brett baity justin henry malloy three bodies but joseon Kim counts and Jordan Diaz counts as a third baseman so my general rule of thumb is you want to have at least three catchers you want to have at least three bodies per infield position and you want to have four eligibilities per infield position and you want to have you know I think at least nine outfielder bodies, maybe 10, with some extra eligibilities in the outfield. So that's just some benchmarks that you want to hit. Within that, there's some advanced strategy, which is I think that you want to have a little bit of a mix in your backup bodies between upside

and just everyday playing. So when you look at something like my third base situation, Matt Chapman, Haseon Kim, Brett Beatty, and Justin Henry Malloy, what I have is in Kim and Chapman guys I think are going to play every day. Those are bodies that will play every day. That's a floor. Brett Beatty is an interesting bit of upside where I think he's going to play every day. Justin Henry Malloy is a shot in the dark. You don't want to have two shots in the dark at one position. I was thinking that Elu Harris Montero was going to be the first baseman in Colorado. I'm okay with that now that I have Ryan Noda. At least Montero becomes a guy who's a shot in the dark. Maybe I'll be using him for a week at a time when somebody is hurt in Colorado. Chris Bryant's probably going gonna get hurt at some point i'm gonna have montero in because he's got seven you know six games in colorado but you know just

generally a mix of upside and just a solid body you can't you can't like in my outfield at the back end i've got jesus sanchez dylan carlson dylan cruz and dominic canzone like cruz is just in there to be like hey hey, YOLO. Maybe he makes it. Maybe he plays every day. Maybe he's awesome. Maybe he makes it by the second half. But Jesus Sanchez and Dylan Carlson are there because worst case scenario, they're playing,

I think. So you have that mix between upside and just actual playing time in your backup situation. You want to buy playing time, but you also need to take these shots at capturing something that will be way better than its draft cost. If Dylan Cruz plays half a season and gives me 15 homers and 15 stolen bases with a 280 average, that'll be worth way more than what I got him for. And he'll be my starter in the whole second half. Yeah, so that's sort of core strategy for a draft and hold league.

And if you're listening, you're like, I've barely heard of some of these players. That's why that format can be really difficult, even though the price point starts off really low. So you have to think about it more of how well do you do the player pool? How comfortable are you trying to project playing time for guys that haven't even shown up in the big leagues yet? And are you interested in trying to figure out who's going to pick up extra position eligibilities along the way, right? That's an advanced sort of set of questions to answer. It's very fun if you've

played before and feel like you want to be challenged a little bit, but you also want to take one small step in as opposed to spending three times that entry fee. They have draft champions leagues. Those are $150 entries typically, and they're 15 teams instead of 12. So 15 times 50 for your player pool instead of 12 times 50. So you have to go even deeper in terms of what you're looking at. And the same principles apply just in terms of how much depth you want to have, how much coverage you need, the types of guys who play versus guys that could pop if they get the opportunity. You have to manage injury risk very carefully in a league like this. You compare that

and contrast that to the 10-team league that a lot of people start with, where you can take a lot of chances and a lot of risk, and your knowledge of the player pool doesn't have to be that deep, it's a huge difference in what you're playing, right? Totally different ballgame entirely. If you want to play draft and holds but not at NFC for whatever reason, Fantrax, I think, has some good draft and holds. Yep, Fantrax does a lot of good paid leagues

where you can see pretty easily when you sign up. Beyond draft and hold, you can see what are the payouts, how much of the prize pool comes back. All of these sites that have paid leagues do have costs. It's expensive to have stats.

You need programmers to build a game. You need to lobby local governments. Yeah, right. You got to pay licensing fees. NFPC has to pay those for pretty much most of the states they play in. So that gets expensive as well. So if you're wondering, hey, we're paying this much in, we're only getting 85, 87, 88% back. That's why there are a lot of administrative costs to actually running something like this. You have to be

kind of mindful of that. That's something that's different than playing with your friends where everyone throws in 25 bucks, 50 bucks, whatever you play for, and it all gets paid back, maybe less the commissioner service fee, right? So if you decide you want to have a league on CBS, you're going to pay for that. If you want to run a free league, there are options for that too. You can play on Yahoo, you can play on ESPN. Those are less flexible in terms of just how many things you can do, but they do have plenty of options right i mean you still have some leagues that i think play on on yahoo don't you what i like about yahoo is just um it's it's where i started i think it's just super easy in terms of layout and use and like i think it's super intuitive you know so yahoo i think is actually

a pretty good place to start but the problem with yahoo is that like you're either playing with a lot of people who don't know or you have to come up with your settings with your friends that you do know and if you do want to share money then you're somebody's doing the venmo or or paypal jockeying there is a site called league safe that will take a little bit out of your player pool less than sort of nfc keep the money for the year and then do payouts so you can you can do like league safe plus yahoo uh cbs i like because it's very customizable so i have a 20 team keeper league i talk about sometimes devil's rejects we are allowed to have to keep players that are not in baseball yet so So like you can, like Braden Montgomery, who just transferred from Stanford to Texas A&M,

is kept by one of the players in our league. He was just offered to me in that deal I was talking about the other day for Cody Bellinger. And so you can actually just have a placeholder, whereas in Yahoo, it's kind of harder to like keep someone like Braden Montgomery. You have to have like a separate Google Doc somewhere where you're keeping your minor league players and stuff. CBS has more customizability in that way. I haven't played on ESPN in a while.

It never really hit a mark for me that was either as as usable as yahoo or as customizable as cbs so it was kind of in this kind of in between place where it was annoying most of the time so i i don't have the greatest i didn't have the greatest experience espn i kind of got off of it eventually um and i would recommend either yahoo or cbs uh for that um back to nfc if you're talking about like the one thing i like is you kind of you want to have some skin in the game and you can do this without finding a bunch of people or going on leader on message boards trying to find people to put a league together you can just go to nfc and they're there in the lobby uh what's another sort of entry level one where what is the uh amount of money you have to put down for a satellite?

Because I think satellites can be 12 or 15 team leagues, but they're not draft and hold, so they don't go all the way down. They're basically more 25 round drafts where then you have free agency and you have to do weekly lineups. It mimics their biggest games, but it's a smaller entry for you. What's their entry for you for a satellite? They start down at 125. They go up to, I think, at least 500. But yeah, it's a little more approachable.

The difference would be a satellite's not connected to a bunch of other leagues, right? We're talking with the overall component of that NFB C50. You can't win a big overall prize, yeah. Right, you're playing against 11 other people and then you're playing against the overall component of that NFBC 50. You can't win a big overall prize. Right. You're playing against 11 other people, and then you're playing against every other group of 12 in that format. Satellites are just standalone leagues.

That's a very straightforward way to play. You can have the in-season pickups. You can learn the game that way without being in a position to maybe be up against some of the absolute sharpest players out there. It's a great next step. I mean, you can do this. So you can do this at NFBC. You can do it at FanTracks as well. They've got standalone leagues.

They have best balls as well. You see best ball thrown out there. That's a league where you draft, and you don't even make lineup changes. You do nothing in season. The best lineup you have, every single lineup period gets played, and that's it.

And that's got a whole different set of things that you're trying to do, similar to draft and hold in some ways, but unique in that you have to kind of structure your roster a little bit differently. We'll kind of save that because it's a very niche sort of format that people are still getting into. But you could also play that on a place like Underdog. And I think Underdog is really interesting if you're thinking about best ball for the first time because they have a slightly smaller roster and they use a few different like position like multi-position just like outfield infield pitcher and utility yeah they just they narrow it down a lot it's a points-based league instead of a roto league we didn't really talk about that up top a lot of leagues are rotisserie leagues in fantasy baseball

where it's usually five hitting categories and five pitching categories. Your placement in the standings is determined by where you are in each individual category. So if you're a 12-team league, you have the most home runs in the league to that point in the season, you get 12 points in home runs. If you're last in the category, you get one point, and then every spot in between gets an equal number of points. So tally up all the points for all the categories. That's your standings for a rotisserie league. Points is much more like fantasy football, right? A home run has a value. A stolen base has a value. Every kind of thing that happens has a value, some positive, few negative. Tally it all up.

Your final number is your total points. Sort by total points. That's the best team in the league. the nice thing about points leagues is in some ways it can approximate what's happening in the real game more or better because you can assign points based like walks will have a point whereas they may not have a point in a five by five category that only values home runs stolen bases runs rbi you, and batting average. So you can approximate the big league value better. One thing I don't like about it is if you're in a league

with trading and you have points, I think that people get hyper-fixated on the points, and it's very hard to make trades because people are like, well, why would I trade this guy who has more points for your guy who has fewer points? Or why are you offering me this guy with more points for fewer? You know what I mean? Like, players end up having just, like, one number associated with them.

And it seems to me like people can kind of model out the system and figure out a couple ways to win, and it doesn't allow for, like, for like categorical needs based trading which i like which is i have too many homers you have too many stolen bases we have a match you know it's always like well my guy is going to score more points in the future and your guy's going to score you know or my guys are going to score fewer points in the future and like i've modeled this out better than you and so you know it's like i don't know I for some reason I don't like points these as much I like categories I think it leads to more interesting back and forth between between managers

needs based trading sort of idea yeah I haven't played in points leagues in a long time I don't enjoy them as much as I enjoy roto I think the reason why I enjoy a rotisserie league more is it generally forces you to have a more balanced roster you see you hear people talking about punting a category that's just basically saying i'm not worried about saves i'm not worried about steals it's usually one of those two categories way easier in a points league when you can just get a reliever that gets points without saves you know it's kind of baked into a points league in a roto league if you do that it's a very risky strategy and it really limits

your overall ceiling. Sometimes it works and sometimes it makes sense just based on something that's happened on draft day or maybe you lose someone to an injury. The deeper your league is, the more it makes sense to punt a category. Right, but generally, you want to try and be competitive in every category in a rotisserie league and I like that challenge. I just think that

that's kind of how my brain works. You can tweak the categories. If you don't like batting average you can use obp if you don't like wins you can use innings pitch you can make it bigger you could have six hitting categories and six pitching categories you could go 10 by 10 if you really want to i don't play that way some people love it they have their reasons when you start having tons of categories it almost gets more like a points league where you kind of, it just blurs. And you're like, I just need good players.

I can't, I can't, I, what am I doing here? I got to, I'm in one league, uh, the pitchfork league that I talk about sometimes where we have like, um,

OBP and slugging, but also K's by the batter. Um, and it's, I think it's like nine by nine. So it's like nine categories in each. And it's so hard to build a good team which i guess that's that's cool i like that and i get that it makes it harder because you can't like

think about how hard it is to get stolen bases with a really good obp and slugging like and so if you do put a guy like ruiz on that team you really take a big step forward we've talked a lot about how to use a guy like history reason on that team, you really take a big step forward. We've talked a lot about how to use a guy like Hesteria Ruiz on this podcast, but in that league, it's very hard to use him. Plus, that league is both head-to-head

and Roto. In head-to-head, you're just thinking about, how do I win this week? In rotisserie, you're like, how do I win the year? You could have a Ruiz on your bench, just like, I need to win stolen bases this week. And you could win the week and be worse for the year by playing that player. So there's lots of different ways that you can play around with your settings.

Each time you do it, you have to try to think of the unintended consequences. If you're a commissioner that's about to put the league together and you're thinking about these things, each time you do something, you have to think about that most active player in your league, the least active player in your league, what kind of workarounds, what kind of cheat, not cheats, but what kind of workarounds like people could do with the different settings you're putting into place? I would try if you could to look back at a previous season or even more than one previous season and look at the rules you had versus the rules you're thinking about implementing and just see what changes in the valuations of players, who ends up moving up, who moves down? Does it flatten things in a way that makes it

viable to use different strategies? What did those changes actually do based on some of the recent seasons? I think that will give you a better idea of the categories you might actually want to add to your league as opposed to just getting a little click happy when you've got the commish tools and going to the 8x8, 9x9, 10x10 range. I feel like it's not necessarily something I want to do, so I've never explored it in detail, at least not recently. I think the first time I played Roto way back in early 2000s in college, it was something like a 9x9 league, and it was too much.

Because there were too many categories that were irrelevant relative to the others. They didn't correlate well enough, and that made it pretty strange. Or just ones that make it just harder. Like when we have Ks by batter in this league, it's like there are so many players that have good OBP, good slugging, might steal some bases, hit some homers, and you're like, but they strike out too much.

You know, and you're just like, I can't play that guy, you know? I can't play a 30 strikeout guy in that league unless i have like two 10 strikeout guys the other sort of logistical question where you prefer to play and how you prefer to play it does come back to stakes right we kind of talked about some of the lower entry options that they have both at the nfbc and even at fan tracks you can start much lower I don't know if I mentioned it. Underdog's best ball stuff starts at like seven or eight bucks,

much, much lower than the others. So very, very approachable. And the rounds are really short, right? Like you're almost doing, you're just taking 10 players or 15 players or something, isn't it? 20 players. I want to say it's a smaller number of teams than some of the other best ball formats too.

So the drafts are quick. 20 players and like you're only starting 10 or something. Yeah, it moves pretty fast now that the higher stakes stuff right i mean for me i think you could reasonably say that a 350 entry fee is actually higher stakes it's not the highest stakes but for a lot of people 350 is more than they've ever played for a long time that was the that was the highest i'd ever done something like that yeah and that gets you into something like the online championship over at the nfbc that's a 12 team league 30 round draft five-round draft, 5x5 Roto with moves.

You've got your individual league prizes, which come in at $1,400, I think. Big, big prize pool for the overall contest playing against everybody else who also is in the online championship. It's a fun way to take that kind of second step towards playing in the higher, higher stakes. I think it's similar to a lot of the leagues people play in before they go into high stakes. Like a lot of people play 10 and 12 team leagues. We learned that from our listener survey last year.

If you make the leap all the way up to something like the main event, which is 15 teams and a $1,750 entry fee, you are in a completely different place than what you were in in your home league in most instances. So you really have to be careful about your league selection, not just from the entry fee perspective, but also just from the league structure perspective. Yeah. Yeah. You know, just as an example of, you know, what you can do to be prepared for each of these levels, I think if you're doing a satellite league and you just go in with the auction calculator values and a general sense of who you like

and you've just listened to this pod and you have some names, that's pretty fully prepared. I think you could win a league like that. If you're starting to go up to um you know uh more of the uh four hundred dollar level um i think you'd want to have a better sense of um each each team's uh depth charts and some idea of um you know some players that were risky for losing their jobs and some players that were risky for losing their jobs and some players that were risky, like could win jobs, have a good sense of like, you know, you might

have done a satellite and realize that, oh, yeah, I didn't keep any of the players like none of these players made it to the end of the year on my roster. So like there's a there's like the first 10 rounds where you really want to have players that are going to stay on your roster all year and have high floors. But then there's a moment where you can start taking chances because the likelihood that players on your roster all year changes. So that's sort of an idea of risk and ceiling and floor. You kind of start having an idea of ceiling and floor. And I think if you want to get to the main event, you almost want to have your your own values you don't want anybody to be able to play along and know what your values

are and you know have a sheet open that's just the fangrass auction kind of be like oh you know it's going to take this guy next you know um and then you really want to know every depth chart down to the bones that's why draft and hold can actually help you play main event because you'll know all the players you know you'll you'll be com like you might think you know think about that combining that idea of risk and reward and um your knowledge of the depth charts from the from the from the drafting holds and you might be able like justin henry alloy is going to make the roster from opening day if you just you you have a dis you you start making decisions like that and And you'll be like, I think he's just going to make the roster from opening day. And then you can take Justin Henry and Aloy as your

first bench pick or utility guy in main event, you know, and take and make your shot and be like, that guy, I think is just going to be there all year and hit me 25 homers. And I didn't spend much money on it, you know? So you're going to have to have your own set of values, basically money on it you know so you're going to have to have your own set of values basically your own set of risk and reward and knowledge of how the the drafts go in terms of when people do what and so that's why it's sort of built this way where you can do draft and hold you can do the satellites you can build your way up to the main event right yeah you don't have to take the plunge all the way to the the higher stakes end of the pool. You could start much, much smaller if you want to and learn more about the machinations

of a game that size. I think that's the highly recommended route if you're thinking about joining NFBC leagues for the first time this year or fan tracks leagues or anything that's deeper and more competitive than what you're accustomed to. You mentioned the auction calculator. We talk about it a lot. I mean, if you've been listening to the show for more than just this episode, you've probably heard us talk about it before. The auction calculator is a great tool to use just to get player dollar values for the type of league you're playing in. And the best thing about it is there are multiple projection sets over at Fangraphs. You can choose the projection sets that you want and actually run it and get those numbers.

And it gives you a better sense of which player you want at various points. It gives you a sense of what the positions are shaped like as well, too. As you kind of go through each tab, you look at groups of players, you see, oh, there are plenty of second basemen that are $10 players or more. second baseman that are $10 players or more. But when I look at, let's say third base, it actually tails off a little quicker or outfield isn't as deep as I thought because there are fewer players than I want above a certain threshold, right? So you can get a good sense for what you might need to prioritize in the early and middle rounds of your draft and where you can wait as you build out a roster. So even if you're not playing in an auction, you're a say auction calculator. That's a huge part of why we use it. It's just getting a good sense of a player's overall value for the size and type of league that you're playing

in. Yeah. It brings you up to speed really quickly. And then, you know, on top of that, as you get more comfortable with the playing pool, as you get better at fantasy baseball, you will start making decisions on top of the auction calculator so you're not just being like dollar dollar done you know one of the ways that i see often that i disagree with the auction calculator is playing time because the playing time is set by human beings and if you yanni diaz keeps showing up as like the sixth best first baseman in fantasy baseball this year and i'm just like uh yes if you believe you know 650 plate appearances or whatever they have in there so you can start to then be like okay and you can also use that

where you're like well i may not agree with 650 but i do agree he's undervalued you don't have to take him as the sixth best first baseman when you when you can see the draft room like when you can see where he sits as the available first baseman because you when you can see the draft room like when you can see where he sits as the available first baseman because you're in the draft room you can sort by available first baseman you can see there's like eight guys who are drafted ahead of him by adp so you can wait a little bit you know and you can be like okay i'm not going to take uh who's who's like after paul goldschmidt because i like him too much i don't want to i him too much. I don't want to use him as an example. I'm not going to take Anthony Rizzo.

Or I'm not going to take Jose Breu or Josh Bell. Some guys that might be going ahead of him. Because I think Andy Diaz is worth more. And so I can just take other players and come back to him. A note too about how the auction calculator is done some people don't love z score so z scores are the what's behind the auction calculator what it does is it just takes all the stats in the player pool uh the relevant player pool that you've done and sort of looks at the standard deviation um in in those stats And so if you are Astoria Ruiz,

you are X amount of standard deviations above in stolen bases. And those are Z scores. So each one, you get three Z scores because you have three standard deviations above. So you get a three in that category. But you're two standard deviations below in home runs. So you get a three in that category but you're you know two standard evens below below in home runs you know so you get a minus two in that one and it adds up the value what i like about that is it's agnostic of who was in the league how the league was played you can put the

settings in so it knows the settings of the league but it just looks at the numbers in the thing and says okay these are how the numbers are shaped and this is the value of these league but it just looks at the numbers and the thing and says okay these are how the numbers are shaped and this is the value of these players um and so i like that to some extent now there's another kind of a way of doing it which is called standard gains points and sgp looks at um like the the standings in your league and says this amount of stolen bases was worth this point in the standings so like last year we had 20 you know there was 20 stolen bases between first and second in the league you know so that's worth 20 stolen bases and you do that over and over again you'd be like 20 stolen bases worth one standing point so then if estuary ruiz you know steals you six bases it's plus you know it's

plus 12 you know whatever um that's better i think in leagues where the same people have been playing and the same strategies have been used and you can really say this is i don't think sgp is that good when the league is changing the rules every year you know and i also think that sgp is not that because if you think about it like if you did stolen base standing if you were doing standing gains points from 2022 to 2023 on stolen bases you'd be totally off right because the run environment changed the run environment changed but even if you made an adjustment for that on top of that i don't think standing gains points is a good way to identify different strategies that you can use to win now i'm talking sort of main event type strategy so if you use z scores you can it might tell you to punt saves

right you could ignore that you can tweak standard. You can tweak your Z scores a little bit and be like, no, make stolen bases worth a little bit more. You know, you can do something like that. If you're doing your own values, you can react to it, but it might tell you to punt stolen bases. It says punt saves. Maybe that's the right way, you know? And I think there's a lot of group think in main event. Think about how starting pitchers have been drafted. They just keep getting drafted higher and higher and higher, you know and i think there's a lot of group think in main event think about how starting pitchers have been drafted they just keep getting drafted higher and higher and higher you know and um you know maybe like yeah you can look at this is our draft and hold league and um you know this

is actually not a great example because we only have one first round starting pitcher uh in strider but look at all the yellow in second in the second and third rounds and there's a sort of you know I have to get an ace and so you you get this I'm going to get a bat and then I'm going to get a pitcher in the second or third round and you can see just by the coloring right now you can see all the yellow in the second and third rounds and there were other times in the history of NFPC where that yellow would start in the fourth and fifth rounds. When I started drafting in Yahoo in 2002, I started drafting pitchers in the ninth and tenth rounds. So there's been this general inflation. If you do Z-scores, it might tell you, don't do that.

I'm looking at the numbers. The Z-score says I'm looking at the numbers the score says i'm looking at the numbers and you know this pitcher is not worth this batter you should take the batter um it's i think it's valuable to know that standing gains points will just tell you given all the strategies that people implemented last year you know given the ways people played in this league last year this is what you should do. See, I'm kind of a Z-score guy. Well, I have thought more about standings gain points in season when I'm trying to catch somebody.

Where can I actually do the most damage categorically? Which categories are bunched up more? What should I be trading for? What should I be comfortable trading away in order to make up ground? But then you know who you're playing against and what strategies other people are doing What should I be trading for? What should I be comfortable trading away in order to make a ground? But then you know who you're playing against and what strategies other people are doing and what the standings actually look like, right? You're not comparing it to some other satellite league that was played last year by other people. You know what I mean?

I think Z-scores are just kind of agnostic of some of that context in a good way. So 2024 is unique. Every season is unique. And we're projecting the future right now. We're trying to guess what the season is going to be like. We look back at previous seasons and we go, oh, 2023 was different because steals were easier to find and aces that could strike guys out were more valuable because it was harder to post great ratios, right?

There were certain characteristics that made players more valuable. And thinking about just the draft and the whole board that was on the screen and how we don't, at least at this point in draft season, when it is more of that format and less like the main event where you have the in-season moves,

I'm starting to wonder if there's an opportunity with Spencer Strider in particular. Like if you're in drafting in the first round this year, everyone's going to have a first round pick in a snake draft. If you're in the early part of the order, one of those first four or five teams in a 15 team league,

let's say there seems to be this consensus of five hitters going first and then Strider usually going sixth. Sometimes someone pushes Strider up. I actually think pushing Strider up earlier into that order is the smart play because of the way everybody else wants to build their teams. And I think part of the reason I think this is if you look at the gap between Spencer Strider as the best projected pitcher versus anybody who's projected next, whether that's Garrett Cole, Corbin Burns, Castillo, Kirby, whoever. It doesn't matter who it is. That's a big gap

similar to the gap from Ronald Acuna, who's the consensus number one overall player, to Julio Rodriguez or Bobby Witt Jr. or Corbin Carroll or Mookie Betts. There's this massive gap this year. For the handful of early auctions that have happened,

we're seeing numbers on Acuna and redraft above 60 out of a $260 budget. That doesn't usually happen. That's something that happens in a keeper league where there's a lot of inflation. My trout was like 40 and 50. Right. Because the projections we're seeing on Acuna coming off of the season he just had are just absurd.

So I think Acuna is the consensus one one one i'm not fighting anybody on that but i do wonder if people are overlooking the possible edge of taking strider if they have that second pick because we had a few people ask us what would you do if you had the second pick and i think you can argue five or six different hitters in that spot but the more i think about it the more i'm tempted to say strider might be the optimal play for this year yeah it's interesting that there's a z score argument man the z score argument is that strider is worth more than julio rodriguez i mean straight up five dollars you know and so uh i think that it's at least an interesting idea that you should put kick around

as a drafter and and then the nice thing is you know as you get more advanced you can kind of you can uh do a league where you try it before you do the main event you know you can do a satellite or uh you know that's what these these these sharks are doing they they've got you know 50 leagues you know they're just doing it over and over again they're trying different strategies time to see how it goes out. Even if you don't want to spend all that money, you can look at the ADP board and be like, okay, if I took Strider second, what would happen to me? What would be available to me on the way back? I'm looking at a draft champions league where Bobby Witt went second. He went Luis Castillo, George Kirby second and third. What was available to him at that time? he could have done Vlad Guerrero and Bo Bichette.

If he'd gotten lucky, he might have been able to take Michael Harris and Bo Bichette. Well, that's actually pretty interesting. A Michael Harris and Bo Bichette combination would still give you a lot of power and speed and batting average. You may be off a little bit in runs an rbi from you know your rodriguez or wit but you wouldn't be that far off in terms of batting average homers and stolen bases and you would have the best starting pitcher in the in the in in by by projections in the big leagues so you know there's uh there's certain you know that's why i like z scores it it it unearths different strategies it kind unearths different strategies

it kind of shows you different things i think standard gains points is too much like this is how you won last year and that's a that's a thing that can happen too with um looking at what happened last year and being like okay um i'm i'm making benchmarks so in the main event last year in order to get uh 12 points in each category i have to do this this this and this and this right and that's a good idea you should do that um but again the league environment is going to change again so last year uh in draft and holds 160 165 steals was good enough to get into the top end for for steals right that's more than the year before and i believe it's going to be even more this year because if you look at stolen base success rates

especially on third base they're 85 percent and stolen base success rates over over the entire league were 80 percent what happens traditionally when your stolen base success rate is so far above the break-even point which is like 70 to 75 is you keep stealing until you get closer to that break-even point it's like why not you know like it's free money you know so if there's more stolen bases next year then you really have to think well am i just gonna stick with and main events you had to get 180 to get in the top. Are you just going to, are you going to say,

well, I'm just going to get 160 and be good everywhere else and just get five points or six points, or I do have to budget for 200 steals in this draft, you know? So you have to think about those things. So that's a, that's a way of kind of taking some of that standard gains points idea, which is what happened in these leagues before.

You can do that. If you have that, if you're doing NFC, you can do it on fan tracks. You can do it in a lot of places. It's a little bit harder on like a Yahoo, if you're just playing, you know, but you can do it in your own league. If you're just playing one league with a bunch of players, you can just look back the last couple of years and just what was good enough. You can combine that with Z scores and then you start to see some cool synergies of

strategy, right? Okay, I needed this many stolen bases, but they're only worth this much in the auction calculator. Does that mean I need to just value them over what my auction calculator says? Do I just need to take stolen base guys higher than the auction calculator says? Or do I take this approach where I'm like, I'm fine with five or six points in that category. I'm fine with just being middle of the pack in stolen bases, non-zero, and

dominating everywhere else by using the Z-score strategy. And my brain says my optimal approach is to not pay a premium for steals right now, to not worry about that early, to make sure that I'm more dominant in the power category, right? And batting average. It's silly. I know people are saying, you're an advanced stats baseball show.

Why do you care so much about batting average? You got to keep batting average high. You got to keep it high. It's the easiest thing to punt, but it's co-correlated with, and that's another thing you have to think about when you punt one thing, what is it? What is, what are you punting along with it? And I think you're giving up less. Never punt homers.

No. Because then you're punting RBI and runs, and then you're punting three categories. You can't win. I think you're giving up less if you wait a little bit on steals. It doesn't mean you don't draft any early, right? Depending on who your early round picks are, you may just get some. You may get 30 steals from one or two different players that you take in the first three or four rounds. That might just happen that way. I wouldn't panic if I didn't have it because I think you're right that I think

teams are going to be more aggressive. They're going to see, oh, we did this and it worked fine and this is still a good success rate for us. So even the guys you're counting on for 10 might just get 15 next year. You might just get inflation across the board in the category. So some of it might kind of take care of itself, but the other part of it is saying, well, maybe I could just find more of this a little bit later on because new players entering the pool are going to be able to offer this. There are maybe some guys that don't hit for a lot of power available late

that will run even more than they did last year because they're going to realize, hey, I could add more value to my team than I have ever before. I could keep taking off. And it was easier than I thought last year. And they've been planning on it. They've been working on that part of the game. We used to have like 120.

We used to do that. We used to have people like that. Vince Coleman, Ricky Anderson. So I think that's part of what I'm adjusting. we used to do that and we used to have people like that vince coleman like ricky anderson so i think that's part of what i'm adjusting i'm worrying less about how much speed i have in the first three four five hitters on my roster and knowing i'll find enough over the bottom half of the roster the bottom two-thirds of my core of hitters i think that's the that's like the slight tweak at the top the other part is you know you're talking about hitters. I think that's the slight tweak at the top. The other part is, you were talking about hitters you could pair with Spencer Strider. I think you're pairing

another pitcher with him. I think you're just double tapping with pitching. Just because you have that edge with the strikeouts right away from Strider, I think you want to try and push it with ratios too. I think you want to back it up and possibly go two or three starters. Oh my God, Strider, Castillo, Kirby to start. I'm not advocating for that just yet. I'm thinking about it, but I think you should be strongly considering a second pitcher with your second and third round picks behind Strider this year. All these rules are pushing offense, which just means there's more and more offense available everywhere. And it does make the top end pitchers more valuable. The other thing that I'm finding is,

especially in draft and holds was that at some point last year in my draft and holds, I would have one choice to make in my pitching staff. Do you know that the average injured list chance for a starting pitcher is 40%? 40% of just an IL stint of some kind, even if it's a minor injury. And then we know that pitchers stay on the IL longer than hitters. And the chance of a drastic injury, i.e. Tommy John or the shoulder, is higher. So what I'm doing a little bit more of this year is concentrating on buying innings. And that goes a little counter to the strider approach.

I think it's an option on the other side of the strider approach, which is just, let me just have a lot of credible options, you know, because there's going to be if i get more choices on my roster of more credible starting pitchers on my roster that are going to be in a rotation i will get patrick sandoval in oakland you know i mean i'll have that choice and that'll probably still be a good choice and be better than not having that choice so in in that same, you know, league that I showed earlier, you know, the bottom of my roster in terms of starting pitchers, you know, I've got, let me find me here. I've got Patrick Sandoval, Matt Manning, Joe Boyle, JP France, Paul Blackburn, Spencer Turnbull hasn't signed yet. And I also started doing some relievers that I know would play

so I'd have an option where at least in one week I'd be looking at Giovanni Gallegos not as a closer but as a pitcher who will pitch this year and maybe win a game or save a game versus Paul Blackburn. Maybe this week he's at home, you know, versus Patrick Sandoval. I don't want these. You know, I want to have options. I want to have guys who I want to have innings on my roster that I have options that I can choose between. And so injury risk is something that is hard to project,

but is something that I want to think about because I want guys that I think are going to be healthy and give me choices this year. Yeah. I think in draft and hold and mono leagues, especially those are the formats where my risk tolerance goes down. And I take some injury risk on because I think there are instances in which we overestimate injury risk, and I try to buy in those opportunities. An example for me is Tyler Glassnow. I think people price Tyler Glassnow in their minds as though 160 innings are just impossible, and it's not impossible. It might be less likely than other pitchers in the range, but only by a relatively small margin. Because as you just said, 40% of the pitcher pool ends up on the aisle at some point. And a lot of those injuries are significant injuries.

So I tend to lean into some pitchers like that, even in those formats. But the depth options especially, I try to make sure I've got as much coverage as possible. But the depth options especially, I try to make sure I've got as much coverage as possible. Playing time becomes so important in those deeper leagues because your replacement level in a mono league is really low. It's hard to find anybody who's good on the wire. Sometimes it's even hard to find someone who's playing in an AL only or an NL only league. Draft and hold, you don't even get to make a move. So every time you lose a player for the season, fewer and fewer options, right? You might be taking on a lot of extra water with those ratios, having to play someone you don't really like skills wise, or having to throw someone out there that doesn't even necessarily

have a role. All of those things really start to hurt you if you don't build your depth up correctly in those formats. Yeah. And one other thing I noticed in draft and hold, uh, just because I've done more of those so far this year than others is that if you don't take players with multi eligibility early on you can fill your roster, but your options are worse, you know? And what, what I did with taking Haseon Kim is just make sure that entire Estrada,

especially it's like, make sure that at shortstop third and second i probably have a good option every week you know um you know and so if i when i did another draft after that where i didn't have as many multi-eligibles and like jake cronerworth is like my only multi-eligible and that i think that's a good example. It's like, okay, well, in that league, I may end up playing Jake Cronenworth a lot. And it made me use more bodies to fill the same slots and gave me less flexibility at the end of the draft, where I had to take a guy because he was the last shortstop left or had to take a guy because he was the last shortstop left

or I had to take a guy because he was the last guy who was going to play third base this year. Whereas when you start taking multiple eligibles early on, you keep yourself flexible for way more in the end of the draft. You can be like, you know what? I don't need a third baseman. I'll just count Haseon Kim as one of my third basemen, and I'll take somebody else.

That allowed me to take Malloy and Jordan Diaz as the worst players on my team because I had more flexibility, whereas my other team, I think they're more worse players at the end. So hopefully that was instructive, helpful, thoughtful in some way. It was a lot of information from a lot of different corners. I think it's

a little bit of a, why is fantasy baseball less popular than fantasy football? I feel like a lot of the explaining we just had to do, the lack of consistency from format to format, and I realize every fantasy sport has different wrinkles and scoring rules, and

you change the league sizes a bit, but i just feel like baseball has more variation than any other fantasy sport by a healthy margin plus it's it's so long i mean that's why i think you should have a if you're gonna have multiple leagues i think you should have a mix between weekly and daily because just having a ton of daily lineup leagues is exhausting. And so for me, I try to keep the daily lineup leagues to a minimum. So I'm only setting two or three lineups a night, even if I have 12 leagues. So I actually have a little bit more balance towards weekly because at least Sunday, I can just carve out an hour and sit down, do free agency, do lineups, that sort of thing.

Right. And I think that's where a lot of the strong cases for the draft and hold format originated and best ball where it's like, you can do more drafts, you can do more prep, you can use that for the leagues that are higher stakes or more important to you as ways to learn the player pool. You don't get the big pile of in-season maintenance quite the same way. So I do think that's a really important consideration as well. Know how much time you have available before you commit to leagues of moves and limiting your leagues can be a big

deal so last year in our in our main event um we were like 740th out of 780 main event teams at one point so we were at the very bottom of the very bottom we ended up uh cashing out in that league and getting third place just because we examined the player pool every week and we went back and forth about who we should pick up. And we were very, we were very, we made a lot of strong decisions, like you were saying about like, where can we make moves with what strategy? Let's stream, you know, pitchers and give up ERA. And we gave up ERA in May. Right. And that gave us a very big advantage in terms of streaming for strikeouts

because we didn't care about ERA anymore. So the fewer leagues you have that have the same sort of pain points is probably a good idea because then you can really sort of focus on what you're doing. Yeah, strongly recommend that as one way to make sure that you're actually set up to have a great season. You can end up overwhelming yourself

if you fail to do that. If you're looking for some information, some tools, rankings, all sorts of things that can help you, theathletic.com slash rates and barrels will get you a subscription. If you're a new subscriber to The Athletic, it's $2 a month for the first year.

It's one of the best deals that we run throughout the year, so be sure to sign up for that if you haven't done so already. If you've got a question for a future episode, ratesandbarrels at gmail.com is the best way to reach us with those. We'll get to some mailbag questions here in the next week or so. We're always keeping an eye on it and using it for topic ideas, but maybe more specific mailbag episodes are on the horizon. You can find Eno on Twitter at Eno Saris.

You can find me at DerekVanRiper. You can find the pod at Rates and Barrels. That's going to do it for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We're back with you on Monday. Thanks for listening. Thank you.