This past year I was in 4 ESPN leagues.  Everything was standard by their accounts (13 active hitters and 9 active Pitchers – no relief pitcher category) and I want to give you some insight into the numbers that you are going to need in order to win these leagues.  I am not going to tell you to shoot for the top score in each category because that would be ridiculous.  Instead I will say shoot for 3rd because it took about 78 points to win those leagues this year and 3rd place is worth 8 points per category.  That would get you 80 points and it doesn’t hurt to shoot a tad above as opposed to undershooting your goal.  In the next post we will discuss transactions made by league champions (no I am not revealing which leagues I won because there is no reason to try to show off!).

Let’s see what numbers it took to get 3rd in each category:

Hitters

Runs.  1088, 1115, 1115, 1106.  Between these four the average is 1106.  You see what each league gave…let’s say 1110 and that the 1088 was the aberration of the four.

HR.  271, 270, 260, 261.  The average is 265, and it looks like that is just about what it takes.

RBI.  1083, 1076, 1051, 1054.  1066 sounds fair, give or take 15.  Seems like a fair deviation.

SB. 180, 171, 174, 199.  The average is 181, but I would say shoot for 175…that 199 seems ridiculous compared to the others .

AVG.  .2837, .2825, .2862, .2892.  Shoot for the .285 range and it should be fair.  I don’t see why that would not be a reasonable aspiration.

Pitchers

K’s. 1213, 1081, 1253, 1321.  Seems to be a real live variant in 3rd place finishes.  1217 is the average, and honestly you might as well go with it.  Maybe a touch higher so if you guestimate a 1230 I would not argue.

W.  86, 79, 92, 92.   The average is 87.25, shoot for a number in that range.

SV.  122, 120, 134, 160.  The 160 was a league where a few people drafted wildly for the closers.  The guy who came in 3rd in that league was not even close to finishing well.  We’ll say 125-130 for the goal.

ERA. 3.581, 3.495, 3.637, 3.560.  You should be going for 3.58287711627.  Okay, maybe I will just say 3.56!

WHIP.  1.261, 1.225, 1257, 1.216.  This should tell you to get about a 1.24 WHIP in order to get a good placement in your league.

What does this mean you should be averaging per player?

Runs: 85.4 per player.

HR: 20.4 per player

RBI: 82 per player

SB: 13.5 per player

K: 136.66 per player

W: 9.69 per player

SV: 14.44 per player

Remember also that your starting pitchers will pitch around 3 times more innings than your relievers and thus there ERA/WHIP will also count that much more towards your statistics.  I believe this makes the 4 category guys that much more valuable.  Not a single player (not even Hanley meets our requisites for every stat.  Here is a sleeper for you now that you know this (and it is not much of a sleeper): Alexis Rios.  Last year he was 5 HR and 3 RBI short of having all 5.  Grady Sizemore has just become an option for me at the 6th pick in ESPN leagues now that I am looking at these stats.  You can also make judgments when you draft a guy like Ryan Howard.  If you project him for a 40/125 season you having 1 1/2 roster spots worth of RBI and two roster spots worth of HR.  You need to make sure you grab a good steals guy to grab you quite a few at some point, and if you can find a Juan Pierre later who will give you the avg. you need along with 3 roster spots worth of SB.  Everything is equatable, just be efficient with your selections!  Have fun guys, I cannot wait for about another month when everything starts up for real!