In the final installment of the 2024 season, the Touts were asked: What is your plan for offseason prep? Are you considering doing any differently than past years?
Jeff Boggis (Fantasy Football Empire, @JeffBoggis): Looking at my numerous leagues that I’ve played in this season, I want to evaluate my draft results versus how well each player did at that draft round. Some leagues were better than others, so I want to conduct an internal retrospective of what went well and want needs improvement. This pertains to drafts, in-season management, and trades. I also want to conduct a deeper dive to see where my overall strengths and weaknesses are by each category. Finally, I want to review risk/reward picks and start preparing for 2025 with potential breakouts and prospects.
Ray Murphy (BaseballHQ, @RayHQ): Writing the 2025 Baseball Forecaster and putting together First Pitch Arizona will have me chomping at the bit to get in a draft room right after Thanksgiving!
Ron Shandler (RonShandler.com, @RonShandler): What Ray said.
Chris Blessing (BaseballHQ, @C_Blessing): I’m not the type to do a post-mortem until after New Years, getting as far away from the season as I possibly can, mostly because of my various assignments from now until then. This year, I felt behind the eight ball a bit with my in-season moves, especially in my dynasty leagues where I didn’t have the same success in FAAB and on the wire as I have in the past. I try not to analyze my player preferences most off-seasons. However, this year, I will delve into my player preferences much deeper than ever before.
Chris Clegg (Pitcher List, @RotoClegg): I have already started taking in what went right and wrong in each league and how I can improve on the things that did not go well. I think its always important to evaluate process, player evals, etc. to really see where you can improve. The start of my offseason involves writing prospect evaluations and top 30s for each team. After that it will be doing player evaluations on the major league side. From there my draft prep will really begin.
Seth Trachtman (SethRoto.com, Yardbarker, @sethroto): My offseason plan is generally the same each year: Evaluate farm systems in October, evaluate each MLB player in November/December, and finalize v1 of projections/rankings by Christmas. The rest of the offseason until Opening Day is a constant adjustment based on player news, league news, and ADP.
Howard Bender (Fantasy Alarm, @RotoBuzzGuy): My offseason prep will remain exactly the same. I don’t see a reason to change my process for that. My in-season work? Well, that requires me budgeting more time for MLB and less for the mouth-breathing knuckle draggers of fantasy football. Sorry for my in-season neglect, Touts. I’ll be better next year!
Dan Strafford (MoonshotsMLB, @DanStrafford): My offseason plan? To quote Homer Simpson “I’m gonna drink a lot of beer and stay out all night!” Sincerely though, every year I think I’ll look back at the drafts I did previously and assess what I did as best as I can. This year, I’m not even going to pretend that to be a possibility. Instead, I am going to take some time to check in on projections vs end of season results for any potential bounce back candidates or overachievers to flag for potentially early best ball drafting. From there, I’ll start tracking the work of some of the smart folks I follow to see where there first inclination on 2025 is.
Rob Leibowitz (Rotoheaven, @rob_leibowitz): Step 1: Repeat the mantra “I will not price enforce Esteury Ruiz” into a state of unconsciousness. Step 2: Systematically analyze depth charts evaluating players, playing time, and prospects. The earlier I begin, the quicker I finish, the more time I can spend adjusting and strategy prepping.
Doug Dennis (BaseballHQ, @dougdennis41): I need to be more careful about players who have shown a propensity to miss games for injury during the season. I need to re-think OBP and BA after the first half of this season. I need to consider how to change up my strategy in a couple of leagues where the league has figured out how to adjust to the prices/talent pool. I need to be more long-term going into my dynasty league. I need to think differently about the middle rounds of my draft/hold. I need to consider my own biases–particularly with pitching. (Why does all this make me feel like Bart Simpson writing sentences on the blackboard?) Otherwise, 90% of the work is identical year over year.
Patrick Davitt (BaseballHQ, @patrickdavitt): FPAZ prep from now till Oct 31, then no baseball until after Christmas. When I do start, I’ll have a reading regimen, and I want to go through the player value list to get an early start on what might be mis-valuations. I’ll also be noodling around with hitter-pitcher budget splits and auction-dollar allocations, hoping to develop some useful way of doing likewise for snake drafts.
D.J. Short (NBC Sports, @djshort): I’m usually competitive in Tout Wars most years, but pitching is one area (especially in regard to starters) where a little extra research and preparation could finally get me over the top. So, part of my prep this offseason will be looking at winners from this year and previous years to see their roadmap to success and see if I can glean anything from it. Granted, this was a weird year for SPs, but trying to draw conclusions from some of the brightest minds in the industry is never a bad idea.
Ray Flowers (Fantasy Guru, @TheRayFlowers): I think more of the same. I always look inward first to see what I can improve with my analysis. I will be looking more into head-to-head as the feedback I get from folks is that they are tilting away from roto, to my dismay. I try to take October off to focus fully on football, but I usually fail and start looking ahead to the coming year of baseball before Halloween.
Dr. Roto (DrRoto.com, @DrRoto): I turn my complete attention to football at least through the end of the year. Then I love to do a draft champions league which helps me know the player pool much better. Drafting 50 rounds makes for lots of catching up in short order!
Carlos Marcano (Triple Play Fantasy, @camarcano): I’m already looking at pitchers because I’m obsessed about them, like, unhealthily obsessed, to be honest. And I believe that’s the reason I tend to underperform with hitting so I will need to come up with a better plan to balance my attention and valuations towards hitting.
Mike Podhorzer (Fangraphs, @MikePodhorzer): Several years ago, I paused projecting player performance, as it became too time consuming and led to burn out. I have no plans to revisit those manual forecasts, so the offseason is finally a chance to relax and enjoy stressless days, no longer ruined by bullpens blowing my starting pitchers’ wins! I still follow player movement, but don’t truly get back into the swing of things until Spring Training begins.
Vlad Sedler (FTN Fantasy, @rotogut): First, a two-week siesta. When I awaken, I will comb through the copious amount of data I’ve collected from this season, run the accuracy of our 2024 projections, and begin the process of 2025 projections. I’ll also revisit notes I’ve made to myself throughout the season. Documentation in-season is key since there is so much we forget. It’s something new I’ve integrated into my process this year.
Erik Halterman (Rotowire, @erik_halterman): I’m going to add more columns to my rankings spreadsheet. Will that lead to more accurate rankings? No idea. Will it lead to a more cumbersome spreadsheet? Definitely.
Garion Thorne (DraftKings, @GarionThorne): As much as I’d like my offseason prep to begin as soon as the last out of the World Series happens, I have professional commitments to fantasy football and fantasy basketball that take up a lot of my Fall and Winter. I tend to think that a little time away from baseball helps refresh and reset. It can even help cleanse you of carrying over unnecessary ideologies from last season. That being said, I’ll be on FanGraphs and Baseball Savant as soon as that first free agent signs. Sweet, sweet addiction.
Frank Ammirante (The GameDayHQ, @FAmmiranteTFJ): I’m planning to start offseason prep much earlier. Usually, I wait until January because I’m heavily involved in football, but that won’t be the case this year. I had a pretty good season, but it could have been much better. Looking to dive in on each player as soon as the season ends.
Phil Hertz (Baseball HQ, @prhz50): Not going to change much, if at all. For the first couple of months, I’ll try to enjoy the postseason and follow player movement news. Sometime in mid-December , I’ll start organizing my players into tiers. In January and February, I’ll refine those lists and eventually try to “pick” my team.
Rick Wolf (SiriusXM Fantasy, @RickWolf1): This time of year, I promise myself that I will go to First Pitch Arizona to make sure I have to stay with baseball. When I was doing the radio show for the last 12 years, I was all football – all the time. Now, I can stay close to the September call ups and plan to spend MUCH more of the fall with baseball reading and watching at bats for pitching and hitting. Need to also understand better how to identify the rookies and breakout candidates. It is on the fringes that championships are won. Our core system is strong but we have been missing on the prospects and breakouts badly lately. Looks like another 2nd place finish this year. If you’re not first…
Matt Cederholm (Baseball HQ, @TheBigHurtHQ): First Pitch Arizona! Draft prep starts NOW. Admittedly, after the Baseball Forecaster whirlwind and FPAZ, I’ll wait until after the holidays. As I usually do, I’ll do a “what went right/what went wrong” assessment. This year, I’ll be focusing on why I consistently struggled to find starting pitching in almost every league. Maybe it was a fantasy-wide trend, but I think I went beyond that trend. I’m usually very good at identifying emerging pitchers, so maybe overconfidence?
Andy Andres (BaseballHQ, @sabermetrics101): Trying to figure out the right way to take advantage of the bat swing data for evaluations and projections — just used the tip of the iceberg this year. I also want to reflect on the right weight to put on pitching at the draft/auction — my thinking about this is all over the place.
Corbin Young (Baseball HQ, Rotowire, @corbin_young21): In the heart of football season, it will be minimal baseball prep beyond contributing to the Baseball Forecaster and maybe an occasional leaderboard/filter data pull. Once football season is over, then I do some deeper dives based on the filters and data I look at to see what’s going on. And of course, use some projections to see which players stand out based on the early draft market because there are a ton of sickos drafting during football season (only kidding).
Jason Collette (Rotowire, @): The exact opposite of what I did this past offseason. I did far better with individual player work than I did with team construction work and had another disappointing Tout finish despite a better year in LABR. I’m frustrated with my lack of success in recent seasons in this league and need to figure out how I continue to screw things up.
Alan Harrison (The Fantasy Fix, @TheFantasyFix): Preparation for the upcoming season typically starts in mid-November. Most of the process will remain the same: building out my spreadsheets, sorting out position eligibility, identifying timetables for injured players to return/when players will be promoted to the league and developing tiers/ranks.
Anthony Perri (Fantistics, @Anthony_Perri): One of the first things I do is look back and see if any new trends have emerged. How accurate were my projection models on a global scale, how accurate were they by position, by player? What indicators did I rely too heavily on or fade, and was there relevance? Are there new indicators that can be deployed moving forward.
Jeff Zimmerman (Fangraphs, @jeffwzimmerman): It’s tough to do anything new with so much on the table. One item I want to accomplish is to automate more items especially if I use the process in season. Shaving a few minutes here and there will help a ton.
Andy Behrens (Yahoo Fantasy Sports, @andybehrens): I will be meeting with the members of my Research Department individually and firing everyone who was tasked with forecasting pitchers. Also, I’m firing anyone who said Ohtani would just clog my Utility spot.
Derek VanRiper (The Athletic, @DerekVanRiper): I will take a longer break between the seasons. Playoff pods will fill up the calendar in October until First Pitch Arizona, so I won’t spend much time thinking about the 2024 regular season until the conference gets underway.
Todd Zola (Mastersball, @toddzola): I know my drafting needs improvement, but my in-season management requires more. Both Rotowire and the NFBC platform offer fabulous tools to facilitate weekly roster maintenance, but I need to design something more tailored to my personal weaknesses. I don’t know if I’ll make it commercially available as that depends on the ease of automation. As for drafting, I am wholly embarrassed by my public facing teams (TGFBI, Tout, NERF, Beat TZ RW OLC), but I am having a solid season in a few private leagues, so it’s not like I completely forgot how to draft, so I will dig in to try to develop more consistency. My offseason schedule will afford me more of an opportunity to achieve this than past years. Why? Because I am leading the relaunch of Fantasy Index baseball magazine, so the deadline for profiles is MUCH earlier. Up until this year, I always was knocking off some stragglers in January and February, but 500-plus profiles will be in the hopper by December 15.
Michael A. Stein (Fantasy Judgment, @FantasyJudgment): I need to focus on accumulation of quality depth with pitching because I have been burned severely the past few years in Roto leagues. Rather than targeting a couple ace starters in the first few rounds, I want to be more flexible and creative in drafts by considering taking the best hitters available and focus on building pitching staffs later on. I plan on doing more mock drafts with different rules, formats and number of teams so I can test out some theories and scenarios. For my H2H points leagues, I will make my spreadsheets with 2024 stats and 2025 projections and set my tiers at each position. I probably won’t start doing this until after Thanksgiving, but if there is a flurry of early off-season free agent/trade action then I may be more inclined to start prepping earlier.
Shelly Verougstraete (Fantasy Feud Podcast, @ShellyV_643): I plan to take time off and enjoy playoff baseball! This was my worst season to date, so after the World Series, I plan on doing a deep dive to see if there were any trends or just ‘one of those years’.
Steve Gardner (USA TODAY Sports, @SteveAGardner): Nothing too different for me. Some possible postseason “real” baseball coverage could be in the works. Happily continuing my annual trek to the Arizona Fall League and First Pitch Arizona. Wish I had more fantasy baseball “work” to do, but otherwise I’ll try to get started on 2025 rankings.
James Anderson (Rotowire, @RealJRAnderson): The one thing I know I want to re-dedicate myself to is digging deep(er) on the mid-to-late round SPs. I did NFBC Gladiator drafts in fall of 2022 but didn’t do them in fall of 2023. I might get back to doing those this fall since it’s good practice for the 12-team formats that I struggled with this year. I think I’m also going to spread my draft champions leagues out better this offseason. I did a bunch of early DCs last year and fewer late ones, but I think the quality of the owners is better in the early ones, so I could do better (and be better prepared) if I did fewer super early drafts.
Larry Schechter (Winning Fantasy Baseball, @LarrySchechter): Last year I needed to streamline my process because I was crazy busy finishing my new book and this year I will be crazy busy promoting it so I am going to have to use the same streamlined process…hopefully with better results…because this year sucked.
Sky Dombroske (Fantistics Insider Baseball, @SkyDombroske): I’m less burned-out on baseball this year than I have been the past few, but I’ll likely still take a few weeks to decompress and enjoy the playoffs. After that, I really need to take a look at my traditional roto strategy. I was pretty unsuccessful in that format this year (1 1st, 1 3rd, 3 OOM), while in any other format I had a very solid year. It’s pretty common knowledge that I don’t prefer the format, but is that the reason for the lackluster performance?
Scott Swanay (FantasyBaseballSherpa, @fantasy_sherpa): I noticed some strange relationships between 2023 auction prices and final stats, both for Hitters & for Pitchers; I’ll be curious to look at the final 2024 stats and see if those relationships held true this year as well or not.
Dave Adler (Baseball HQ, @daveadler01): I’ll start by analyzing 2024 player stats to see if their performance was more fact than fluke; the goal is to identify under- or over-performers and adjust the 2025 outlooks accordingly. I’ll then track off-season transactions and determine the effect on 2025 playing time. now that I’ve played in the league for a year, I’ll figure out how I want to change my strategy for next year.
Ryan Bloomfield (BaseballHQ, @RyanBHQ): Break? What break!? Diving straight into writing/editing work for the 2025 Baseball Forecaster and continuing twice-weekly episodes of our Bubba and the Bloom podcast. Check us out!
Rick Graham (Pitcher List, @IAmRickGraham): I’ll take a week or two to enjoy the postseason before starting to look into 2025. I’ll be working on early closer/reliever rankings in October and look forward to attending FPAZ at the end of the month. One thing I plan on focusing on this offseason is looking at draft/auction strategy trends, as I feel like the shift towards spending heavy draft capital on hitting over pitching seemed to pay off this year. Was this season just different or is this here to stay?
Ryan Hallam (Fighting Chance Fantasy, @FightingChance): As someone who is also an analyst of sorts for football, I don’t normally take time to go over what I did right and wrong in baseball each season, but I definitely want to grade myself this season as it did not go my way. Injuries were definitely a factor, but everyone had that, so it is hard to make that a crutch. I also want to take a look at trends over the last two months of the season to see who I think can take that momentum into a much better 2025.
Peter Kreutzer (Rotoman.substack.com, @kroyte): I’m going to do pretty much the same: Write 1,000 or so profiles for Rotoman’s Fantasy Baseball Guide 2025 A-Z with prices and projections and update them all spring for the rotoman.substack.com newsletter. The goal is to know the player pool and identify players with potential who are being overlooked. I’ve got to get on it, the XFL draft is a month away.
Nick Pollack (Pitcher List, @PitcherList): I sprint through the finish line and publish a way-too-early Top 200 SP days after the season ends to ensure all my current interpretations of the season are on paper, while setting a baseline to update in February and March. The next four months involve livestreams of each team’s expected rotation, ensuring I’ve updated my baseline expectations for them entering 2025. If you want Abs in the summer, you have build them in the winter!
CJ Kaltenbach (Fantasy Guru, @TheSeigeDFS): Focus more on the elite bats, the gap between the elite bats and the replacement level has gotten higher than ever so missing on early hitting can doom your season the way it hasn’t in the past so I’ll be spending more time at the top of the draft than I have in past off seasons. Other than that will do NFBC Cutlines to hone in on the player pool for next spring.
Zach Steinhorn (Steinhorn’s Universe on Substack, @zachsteinhorn): I don’t plan on changing much. Aside from participating in mock drafts for publications, I like to take a break from fantasy baseball thinking until after the new year. I’ll then read as many articles and listen to as many podcasts as I can with the goal of formulating my own lists of overrated and underrated players, also known as early-round avoids and late-round targets. I didn’t hit on as many late-round starting pitchers this year as in years past, so I’ll try to figure out what went wrong in that department.
Brendan Tuma (Underdog Fantasy, @toomuchtuma): This offseason, I’m interested in taking a deeper look at MLB as a whole. This includes 2024 as well as previous seasons to get an understanding of where the game is trending, and how we can use that to our advantage for fantasy purposes. League-wide stats I want to dive into include ERA, BABIP, homer-to-fly ball rate, etc. The Juiced Ball Era is over. Sticky stuff is gone. Stolen bases are up. Now that the dust is settling on a flurry of changes from the past 4-5 years, which positions and stats should we consider scarce? Which are readily available throughout the year? This will help shape an optimal approach heading into 2025.
Grey Albright (RazzBall, @razzball): I will watch postseason baseball and bask in the glory of my league winnings and pretend the leagues I lost never happened, then I’m going to Paris in November, while there I will tell them “je suis Raygun” and break dance. When I return, I will begin my 2025 rankings.
Michael Govier (Pallazzo Podcast, @mjgovier): Sigh…I have to reduce the amount & the variety of different league formats I am in. It’s just not working. Two straight years of ho-hum results has made that clear. 2022 was a great year with solid returns both financially & as far as placing in multiple leagues. I have too many dynasty leagues that I need to purge. I also want to focus much more on best ball leagues next year instead. I put in the time during the offseason last year, but I am going to start even sooner this time with more focus on pitching because I am falling short in K’s too often across the last two years. All I know is what I’ve been doing the last two years isn’t working, but most of all I want to be in-person for my Tout Wars draft in 2025. That’s my number one goal of the offseason because I love being in Tout! I am grateful for the opportunity & next year is my year!
Rudy Gamble (Razzball, @RudyGamble): Last year, I tried something new and put out a Beta version of the Steamer/Razzball projections in Oct/Nov. I did not think it was very productive and will likely go back to my standard practice of taking Oct-Dec off from MLB and spend Jan-Mar building and iterating on the Steamer/Razzball preseason projections where I focus mainly on player roles and playing time (AB/IP). I’ll also analyze 2024 projections vs actuals to see if there are any notable areas to try and improve upon.
Joe Orrico (Fantasy Pros, @JoeOrrico99): I plan to take the month of October (mostly) off from producing content, just to give the batteries a chance to recharge. Once the cold days start to come in November, I start to break down every team, player, position, and stat category to try and see if there are any trends or patterns I should be aware of. Then, I’ll start my initial rankings process, entering into some early drafts to battle test my initial gut feelings. Before we know it, it’ll be pitchers and catchers time
Greg Jewett (The Athletic, @gjewett9): Very different. I had a tremendous year in 2023 and rested on my laurels. I will get back to my roots and dive deeper into my off-season process of assessing players for the upcoming season. My closer work has increased, but it’s also prepared me for content this winter. I thank Tout for the opportunity to play in the H2H league for the past four years.
Joe Gallina (Fantasy Alarm, @joegallina): I’m hoping to be able to recharge my batteries, watch some Yankees playoff baseball, and I also plan on spending part of the offseason taking a deeper dive into learning more about the nuances of using Statcast in my baseball prep and content creation.
Bret Sayre (Baseball Prospectus, @BretSayreBP): Generally, I just enjoy watching the playoffs in October, level set my dynasty rankings/teams in November and then try not to think about it at all in December (to varying degrees of success). I don’t plan on doing anything differently this offseason in terms of that process, but I definitely feel like i had more success from a strategic standpoint on the hitting side than the pitching side in 2024, so I’ll likely dive into that a little more specifically come January.
Justin Mason (Friends With Fantasy Benefits, @JustinMasonFWFB): I always begin my prep for an upcoming season by looking backwards first. By examining the previous season, I am able to see why I did well or I didn’t do well to make sure if I have any gaps in my approach, I can fix that for the upcoming season.
