RADIO
Jon Anderson looks at stolen base projections for 2022 to determine the optimal draft strategy in fantasy baseball.
In this series of posts, I will go through a few situations in today's fantasy baseball game where resources are scarce. These are the parts of the game where the smartest and best players really excel, as they recognize the scarcity and know how to use it to their advantage.
Category scoring is a zero-sum game. If you draft 40 steals from Trea Turner, nobody else can have those steals – they are gone from the draft pool. This isn't a problem if there are tons of other players who can also chip in with those 40 steals, but that just does not turn out to be the case.
As the supply of steals gets smaller and smaller, it becomes more and more important to prioritize them in your draft. So how do you approach this category on draft day?
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Creating Scarcity
Major League teams have attempted fewer and fewer steals in recent years. Would you like more proof?
That plot is staggering. We have really seen a drastic change in the way teams approach the game in recent years. The strategy seems to be to try to hit as many homers as possible and to limit the ways they can make outs while they're trying to do it. This shift certainly made sense with home run rates reaching new heights at the same time, and it doesn't matter what base you start on if the guy behind you hits one over the fence.
It turns out that while teams are attempting fewer steals, they are succeeding more often when they do try it:
The reason for this probably has most to do with the fact that the average to bad base stealer just isn't trying it anymore. The players attempting steals are the ones that are good enough at it to still be permitted to try.
What Does It Mean For 2022?
The distribution of steals in the draft is very important to understand. We will use ATC projections to help us on our way from here on out.
Looking at the top-200 hitters in terms of ADP (equates to about the top-350 players), we have a total of 1,488 projected steals. Let's say you play in a 12-team league. If each team ends up with the same amount of projected steals, that puts us at 124 steals per team. This won't happen of course, but it's a good target to try to beat. One-twelfth is 8.3%. A good target then would be to draft 12% of the available steals on your team, which would put you in the top-three of the league most of the time. So you're looking for about 178 steals. Now you know what you want, so now we need to figure out where to find it.
One thing that has happened in the fantasy game as steals have become less plentiful in real life is that the steals guys have been floating toward the top of the draft board. In the past few years especially, we have seen an oddity where lots of the league's steals are concentrated in the hitters that are also really, really good in other categories.
Trea Turner, Fernando Tatis Jr., Jose Ramirez, and Ronald Acuna Jr. are all in the top-10 in projected steals while being very good to elite in the rest of the game's categories as well. These guys would be drafted near the top of the draft even if we cut their steals projections in half. What this means is that after the first round, a ton of the steals are gone.
Here's a plot of the percentage of total projected steals for the whole standard draft that each round holds (I am thinking 12-team league, so picks 1-12 are Round 1, 13-24 are Round 2, etc.):
Here is that graph in number form:
The top-12 in ADP at this current moment is made up of nine hitters, and those nine hitters project for a total of 176 steals, a near 12% share of the total here. Those names and projections: Turner (32), Tatis (26), Soto (10), Ramirez (25), Bichette (21), Guerrero (3), Ohtani (22), Harper (14), and Acuna (23).
You can see that Round 2 holds about 6% of the total and then Round 3 grabs nearly 10%. Add those percentages up and you have a whopping 28% of the available steals gone by the first pick of the fourth round. That makes it enormously difficult to catch up if you haven't drafted any steals by that time. The first three rounds hold 411 projected steals. The next eight rounds hold just 385.
Consequences
Starting a draft with Vladdy and two aces has its merits, but it leaves you begging for steals. You simply have to be competitive in all categories to win a rotisserie league, so a team in that situation will have to turn to someone like Adalberto Mondesi or Myles Straw to catch up. One of the other effects of steals being scarce is that one player actually can make a huge difference for you, but then you have to stomach Mondesi's .230 batting average and sparse playing time or Straw's three-homer season while they get you there in steals. It's not ideal.
Only 15 players project for 20+ steals. Six of them are drafted in the first round, and the rest of those names come up well short in at least one of the five standard categories.
Recommendations
The top-200 hitters project for totals of:
Runs: 18,608
Homers: 5,501
RBI: 17,997
SB: 1,884
Doing the division, we find that one steal is the equivalent of 9.8 runs, 2.9 homers, and 9.5 RBI. It may seem like a player stealing five bases is more or less the same as someone stealing 10, but by this (admittedly rough) calculation, it's the equivalent of adding 14.5 homers, and nobody would say that a 20-homer player is similar to a 35-homer player. Getting your steals from the elite tier of players is hugely beneficial to your fantasy team.
Given the landscape of the league in 2022 and how concentrated steals are in the first 30 picks, I would highly, highly recommend you prioritize steals with one or two of your first three picks. A draft that begins with Trea Turner and Ozzie Albies gets you 49 projected steals, which is around 3% of the total that will be drafted the entire time. After that, you can focus more on players going for 5-10 steals and you won't have to waste a pick on one of the steals specialists that are going to murder your team in other categories.
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