Tuma: What I Got Wrong in 2022
A look back at my biggest misses of the fantasy baseball season
I’m not ready to turn the page on 2022 just yet. The MLB playoffs are still going on, after all. We have an entire offseason to project playing time, react to signings/trades, and begin finalizing out 2023 draft plans by next March.
The longer I play fantasy sports, the more important I believe “looking back” becomes. What were the biggest bets I made last spring? Why did I make those decisions? And what can I learn from them for next year and beyond?
It’s become an essential part of my process. I’m going to do the same for what I got right in 2022. First, though, let’s focus on where I missed.
Byron Buxton
A lot of my preseason analysis could be found on Underdog Network, including my entire strategy guide for 2022. The first piece I’ll highlight is my “5 Hitters to Target.” So let’s talk about him - Byron F’ing Buxton.
I’ll beat you to the punch. I’m aware Buxton had a bad injury history entering this season. Guess what? So did Aaron Judge.
My rationale for overlooking Buxton’s past ailments was that it was being baked into his ADP. This was a Round 1 talent going in the 3rd, 4th, and even 5th round of most 12-team leagues. Finishing as the No. 1 player in fantasy was in his range of outcomes. This is how leagues are won.
Of course, it only took until April 15th for Buxton to suffer what appeared to be a devastating, possibly season-ending knee injury in Boston. Incredibly, he never even went on the injured list at the time. Buxton returned on April 21st and played intermittently for months, a maintenance plan the Twins didn’t publicly reveal until mid-May.
This changed who Buxton was as a player. He continued his 2020-21 power gains and finished with a career-high 28 homers. However, his strikeout rate spiked to over 30% after being in the mid-20s for a few years. The stolen bases evaporated and he wound up batting just .224 for the year.
Essentially, Buxton was never fully healthy after that early-season knee injury. While he managed to avoid the IL for most of the summer, a strained hip on August 22nd pushed pushed things over the edge. Minnesota’s collapsing season and Buxton’s previous issues eventually led to season-ending knee surgery to fix inflammation, scar tissue, and fraying. He finished with 92 games played, which tied for the second highest total of his career. Sigh.
I knew the risk I was taking with Buxton, and I stand by it. Maybe the odds of a fully healthy year were longer than I initially imagined. But let’s not forget just how dominant he was in 2021 - batting .306/.358/.647 (1.005 OPS) with 19 homers and 9 steals in 254 plate appearances with elite-elite max exit velocity and sprint speed. He totaled 4.2 fWAR…in 61 games!
I think in general fantasy players should take more risks. I don’t mean reckless upside swings but rather leaning into uncertainty. Making bets that could be “small misses but big hits.” And that’s where I didn’t take my own advice. Buxton’s risk was more than a “small miss”, even in hindsight. I let my dreams of a 40/40 campaign cloud that part of the equation. He was someone to have exposure to in 2022, but not someone to use as a flag plant player. RIP to my MVP tickets.
The Return of League-Winning Rookies
So, this isn’t one that I missed on as much as it was a situation I just didn’t respond quickly enough to.
But look, after 2021, I was scared off by investing too heavily in top prospect promotions and rookies in general. This is coming from the self-proclaimed champion of prospect supporters. And yet in my home league draft I took Nelson Cruz over Bobby Witt Jr.!!! (my buddies haven’t let me forget).
This past March I did some research into whether or not 2021 was a bad year for rookie hitters. A year ago at this time there was a lot of talk around how much the canceled 2020 minor league season affected ‘21 rookies. What I found was that the 2021 class wasn’t terrible on a league-wide basis, but the season lacked any standout performers.
I ultimately hedged my 2022 stance with “I'm not necessarily targeting top prospects in redraft leagues as aggressively as I was in 2017-19, but I'm also not shying away either.” I felt it made sense to target at least one of Witt, Julio Rodriguez, Spencer Torkelson, etc. in drafts.
A month into the year this position appeared to be fine. All 3 of the aforementioned top prospects were struggling while offense was down (in a major way) as a whole. Maybe there really was something to the idea of minor league player development being impacted by COVID-19.
Then, suddenly, everything changed.
From May 1st through the end of the year Julio hit .297/.355/.550 with 28 homers and 16 stolen bases. Witt popped 20 homers and swiped 26 bags during this time. Michael Harris came up (from Double-A!) in late-May and fell one homer short of a 20/20 campaign. Among backstops with at least 450 PAs in 2022, nobody posted a higher wRC+ than Adley Rutschman (133). Gunnar Henderson and Corbin Carroll both arrived in September and made meaningful fantasy impacts.
It was a non-stop pipeline of rookie contributors. This doesn’t even include periods of promise from Jeremy Pena, Vinnie Pasquantino, Jose Miranda, and MJ Melendez, among others.
This isn’t to say that every single top prospect paid off, especially when you consider the disappointments of Torkelson, Riley Greene, and partial stretches for Nolan Gorman and Oneil Cruz.
Still, rookie bats returned with a bang this summer. It might’ve been one of the best rookie classes ever. So what, then, are the lessons to learn?
We appear to be through the “worst stretch” of first-year player performances impacted by the pandemic now that the 2022 class rebounded so strongly, so, at minimum, I think we always want to get some exposure to these highly ranked prospects when the price is right.
Julio Rodriguez was the best rookie you could’ve rostered this past year. That’s partly because he was the best rookie, period, but also because of the price it took to acquire him.
From January 1st through March 15th Witt had an ADP of 90 on NFBC. J-Rod was at 273. From March 28th through April 6th, the final stretch of draft season, Witt’s ADP was 57 with Julio at 126. So even once it became clear that Rodriguez had a good shot at making the team, he was still being drafted at a significant discount compared to Witt, who quickly became extremely expensive.
Even with the benefit of hindsight analysis, should we really have been so sure that Witt was more deserving of a top-60 pick? I’d say no. Either get your rookie exposure EARLY in draft season, or continuously take the best discount possible. 2023 rankings should be fun considering Henderson and Carroll have already debuted and flashed their upside.
The (Immense) Importance of Power
I did not have any shares of Aaron Judge in 2022.
Now, is a 62-homer campaign in a year with a deadened ball something we should’ve foreseen? Not exactly, but I got halfway to figuring out the offensive environment and really wish I had brought it all home.
In mid-March I published “No More Juiced Balls: How to Approach Hitters in 2022 Fantasy Baseball Drafts.” My thesis was that 2019 was such an outlier season for homers, but it didn’t feel as if the public perception had caught up with it being the height of the Juiced Ball Era:
Simply put, 2019 stats are “skewed” because of this. It wasn’t that the juiced ball allowed any one hitter to go nuclear, but rather it allowed a huge number of players to hit 20+ dingers. After 2019 the most scarce resource in fantasy baseball was elite starting pitchers. Power could be found anywhere, even later in drafts.
Knowing that the deadened ball was coming for good in 2022, I felt that fantasy managers could wait on SPs during drafts. Investing in upper-echelon bats made more sense to me. That was good process that we’ll cover more in depth during the “What I Got Right” breakdown in the coming weeks.
What I failed to consider was how important exit velocity could be with the deadened ball. Judge didn’t need the juiced ball to hit for power in the same way that someone like DJ LeMahieu did.
The reason I’m counting this as a miss by me is because I knew this, but I just didn’t make those uber-power hitters a core part of my strategy. I made “high end bats” an essential aspect of my approach, but I should’ve been even more interested in Judge, Yordan Alvarez, and Pete Alonso. Judge was the one you needed to have a 99th percentile fantasy year, but if I had emphasized “power” over “hitters” I might’ve landed on him in a few drafts.
Joey Votto
We’ll wrap things up with one more micro take I had, and that was drafting Joseph Daniel Votto anywhere and everywhere in 2022.
In 2021 the future HOFer posted a career-best ISO while falling one homer short of a career-high (despite being limited to 129 games).
Votto talked openly about changing his swing late in the 2020 campaign in order to hit for more power. After years of being obsessed with controlling the strike zone by crouching in the batter’s box and choking up with two strikes, Votto stood more upright throughout 2021. Incredible offensive results followed.
I felt Votto was being unfairly dinged due to his age. He had an ADP of 110 on Underdog and went even later in some managed leagues. I felt if he was 30 instead of 37-38, then he would’ve had a 4th round ADP.
Unfortunately, Votto cratered this past year. His chase rate rose while the barrel rate plummeted. Upon further inspection, Votto’s 17.2% barrel rate from 2021 was such an extreme outlier that I shouldn’t have assumed he could come close to repeating it.
Ultimately, I don’t think using a mid-round pick on Votto was that much of a draft killer, but I had to acknowledge my preseason fondness for the legendary Red.