Fantasy Baseball Strategy: The Tim Hudson Rule and Keeping Pace

As an avid fantasy baseball manager, with growing confidence in my own ability to assess players, I have found myself relying on the experts less and less.

That got me to thinking...what do I wish the experts would spend more time talking about?

Fantasy experts spend most of their posts writing about specific players, which certainly has a lot of use. Ultimately, however, I think there is a much more useful role to be played by fantasy experts.

Every once in a while, I've seen an expert write something not about specific players, per se, but about how to play the game. Alas, finding such articles is like finding a needle in a haystack.

Given my own experience, I thought it might be a welcome change to have someone talk, simply, about how to play the game. Rather than telling you only about specific players that are draft day bargains and which ones to avoid, I want to discuss how best to construct a team in the first place—and how to make necessary adjustments to take home the trophy.

With that in mind, let's start talking about the basic principles of how to win.

First and foremost, math is king, particularly in a rotisserie league. You don't always need the best players to win. You need the right players. This means you will need a comprehensive understanding of the standings to know what you need at any given time, what excess you have and how to go about improving as such.

There are a number of examples of this, but a good starting point involves pitching in leagues with an innings cap. If you're in first place in strikeouts, but you're 200 innings over pace, you're going to sink like a stone as other owners invariably catch up to you over time.

What this means is, if you're not paying enough attention, you're going to think that you're in better shape than you are, and your lead is a false one. You might be getting great numbers out of Tim Hudson, Mark Buehrle and Trevor Cahill, and you might be patting yourself on the back for late-round draft picks and astute waiver pickups.

Collectively, however, this trio will kill your chances of winning, even when they're pitching well. Their strikeout rate is going to tank you in one category, and I would bet there are very few league champions who finished last in any category. If you're not paying attention to your pace, you can't possibly understand where you stand in two of the five roto pitching categories (the other being wins).  

But there is good news, even if you have traveled some way down the road with this staff. In my experience, most managers—even relatively good ones—don't fully understand the standings. This makes them make bad decisions.

This past season, one of my arch rivals—a manager whose acumen I respect otherwise—made some seemingly shrewd moves at the trade deadline to try to catch me. But I wasn't that worried, because he used all of his capital to get the wrong thing! He dealt Colby Rasmus to a team that was out of the running for two closers. It was a keeper league, and he had offense to give, so he was sitting on a great trade chip.

But it was a great curiosity to me how he could miss such a basic fact. He was going to gain two points in saves from this deal, vaulting to the top of the charts. But he was already ahead of me in saves, and two points didn't match the five he was already behind me.

That same manager who dealt him the closers also owned Cliff Lee and was very willing to deal him. I know this because I had done my due diligence on who was available. All I wanted was to keep Cliff Lee away from the No. 2 team. Why? Because he had a chance to gain four or five points in WHIP, three or four in ERA and maybe one or two in wins (and some of them on me, making it doubly dangerous).

By landing the two closers instead of Lee, he gave up any shot to win the league—and I didn't have to lift a finger to make a deal of my own as a counterpunch.

But how did I get in first in the first place? Obviously, there are multiple factors contributing to the outcome, but one of the crucial ones is that I paid very close attention to the pace of my pitchers in strikeouts and wins. Since wins are the most luck-based of categories, it was strikeouts that I was watching like a hawk.

I frequently stay a bit behind in my innings because people never see me coming. I am rarely in the lead before mid August as a result. I'm usually lagging behind in K's and Wins. But if my pace is good, I know I can count on gaining points just by making up the innings—even if I have to use a month of Jorge De La Rosa to do it.

I haven't drafted a pitcher who doesn't have a good strikeout rate in years, because it's actually very easy to find a solid pitcher to give you good numbers who does not strike guys out. But the fact is, you can afford owning one guy like this at most. To really compete in K's, you should only use what I call "soft tossers"—guys who pitch to contact—for about half a season at maximum.

This brings me to the Tim Hudson Rule: Pitchers who don't strike guys out aren't usually worth a roster spot. Tim Hudson is an excellent pitcher in real life, as most casual fans will attest. But is he a good fantasy pitcher? I bet if you polled your competitors, most would say they would want to own him. I don't want to own him and never have. Here's why:

1. To begin with, he's a good enough soft tosser that I will need to draft him in the middle rounds, leaving me out of the running for other items of need. It's a wasted pick, and you can probably find a Kenny Rogers type who can pretty much do what Hudson can do. I know what you're thinking: Wait! He had an ERA below 3.00, a WHIP of 1.15 and 17 wins!

Okay, but let's take Dallas Braden as an example to see what you could get on the wire. His 3.50 ERA, 1.16 WHIP and 11 wins aren't too shabby—and they're free. He also did this in 36 less innings, so you can probably bump his win total up one or two to calculate what you got.

You're telling me that you needed to draft Tim Hudson in Round 12 so you could get four or five extra wins—which were no guarantee in the first place—and also hurt yourself in K's while doing it? I got Billy Wagner in Round 15 last year in a 12-team league.

See reason No. 2 to see why Hudson just isn't worth a draft pick, unless it's in the very late rounds. Even then, he needs to be used sparingly. You just placed yourself no better than sixth in K's with that pick if you use him.

I always found it amusing that Chien-Ming Wang was ever owned in any roto league of any kind at any time. I wouldn't own him in a 20-team league. He'll kill you. He makes Tim Hudson look like Nolan Ryan. But I digress...

2. When I draft, I'm not really looking for flawed players to fill out one-sixth of my innings. Let's compare Wagner to Hudson, even if the example is extreme as closers go. What were Wagner's numbers? In 69 innings, he struck out 104, had an ERA of 1.43 and a WHIP of 0.87. He won seven games and saved 37.

Granted, he achieved well beyond what I could have imagined, but even an average closer gives you good peripherals (i.e. ERA and WHIP), with decent K's, a decent chance at wins (given the late inning role) and obviously a pile of saves.

Let's subtract Wagner's numbers from Hudson to see the difference. If you pitched Hudson instead of Wagner, for example, you used 139 more innings, in which you had a higher ERA and WHIP, had the same win pace, got no saves and struck out 35 batters. Read that number again.

Hudson, by himself, gives you 104 innings with 0 K's. That's 1/13th of your whole season with NO help in one category. He's more flawed than you think.

One great thing about math is that it tells us that when something happens over and over, it's going to happen again. Hudson is an absolute lock to help you in ERA and WHIP, probably some in wins and he'll kill you in K's. Why take a guy who is guaranteed to hurt you in one area? That's what the wire is for. Take a high-upside guy instead who MIGHT be able to do it all. Then you can see what you've got.

If it's Mat Latos, Clay Buchholz or even Phil Hughes, you did much better for yourself. Even Hughes was ownable by every category's standard, and he had the potential to be even better. Hudson is who he is—and he'll hurt you for sure.

3. I have to use a roster spot on him, and I'm only going to use him about half of the time at most if I know what's good for me. Roster spots are precious. The experts don't talk about this even more than they don't talk about understanding your innings pace. The more guys you own that you can't use that much, the more you're going to miss out on must add free agents, and the more your competitors are going to get them.

Tim Hudson isn't worth a roster spot if he is guaranteed to hurt you in some way. You're better served letting someone else hurt themselves by owning him. Even though he'll be a real help in ERA and WHIP, his K rate will offset most of these gains, and there are better ways to get this help.

The league winner isn't going to have mediocre production in any area. He's going to need his roster maximized with explosive guys who either deliver or get cut for the next good bet.

4. The wire can provide guys like this again and again. You will always, always, always be able to get a commodity that is an 85 percent version of Tim Hudson. Granted, it's not as good as Hudson. (Actually, Trevor Cahill was—and he was free.) But even someone like Carl Pavano isn't too far off from Hudson.

I doubt there were many people excited about Cahill or Pavano going into the season. The difference for me is that I wasn't interested in them even when they were pitching well. They just can't be four-category contributors, so I didn't have time for them. But if you're desperate for innings filling, one soft tosser for half of the season won't kill you. I've certainly done it. But here's what you can do to supplement if you do decide to do that...

5. Go get a middle reliever or two. Or three, if you can hold that many. Once you see who your pitchers are—i.e. who is a mainstay in the rotation, who needs to be cut, who is a question mark you want to hold on to, etc.—you can assess if you need these guys. But don't ever forget them as a backup plan or even as an addition to your arsenal. These guys are free, available in spades, predictable and dominant.

If you owned Mike Adams for any length of time, you'd see that he gives you better peripherals than Hudson, but with strikeouts. Last year, in 66.2 innings, he posted a 1.76 ERA, a 1.07 WHIP, struck out 73 and won four. I pitched him for most of the season. I don't recommend using Hudson for more than 80 innings anyway, so Adams' innings total is nearly equivalent. Adams is the superior player to own. He helps you in four categories, and he does the same thing every year.

If you owned two of these guys, you got two-thirds of Johan Santana in his prime all for one extra roster spot (obviously this is a cost). Don't waste a spot on Hudson. If you're going to "waste" a spot, do it on Mike Adams or someone like him.

So, finally, then, what do you do if you've already made the mistake of getting multiple soft tossers on your team? Use the fact that other managers don't understand the standings to shift these resources elsewhere for other things. You can either cut someone like Trevor Cahill and get something you need from the wire or trade him.

A guy like Tim Hudson, though, poses an added problem. He's too good to just cut. But he's an excellent trade chip for two reasons. One, you don't need him for anything, and he looks very appealing to the average manager. You can get something for nothing. Two, you can hurt your opponent in the process by giving them pitchers who will kill them in strikeouts.

This is what I mean by needing to own the right players. Hudson isn't right in most circumstances. Neither is Buehrle, and neither is Cahill. If you own all three, trade at least two of them for something else you need to get the right balance. If you need some hitting, use this resource to get it. It's now useless to you if you know the math.

This is a killer deal for you, because it is the equivalent (for you) of trading a vat of Alpo for a month of gourmet chef cooking. Yum.

This is only one small example of how understanding the standings can win you a league, but it's a start. All you have to do is find out who is using the math wrong (or not using it at all), or what you aren't seeing that's right in front of you, and you'll have an advantage over everyone—even the experts.

Much more to follow.