Underdog Fantasy Baseball Strategy

MLB Underdog Fantasy Best Ball Draft Strategy for 2024

Best Ball is the perfect format for people who love to draft teams, but don’t have the time during the season to manage all of them. As your league count grows, the responsibility of setting lineups, making waiver claims, and checking trade offers can become a chore. Best ball allows you to draft as many teams as you want and forget about them until October. Each week your highest-scoring players at each position are automatically put into your starting lineup, and the goal is to accumulate the most points throughout the season. For this article, I will be focusing on Underdog Fantasy’s version of the format, whose roster consists of 3 Pitchers, 3 Infielders, 3 Outfielders, 1 Flex, and 10 Bench spots. The scoring system is as follows:

Roster Construction

Unlike traditional fantasy leagues that have you roster at least one of every real-life position, Underdog Fanatsy breaks up the player pool into just infield, outfield, and pitching. It’s important to draft a good balance of each position to maximize your team’s floor and ceiling. Outfield is already considered one of the shallower positions in fantasy, and that is magnified even further in this format. Outfield is a top-heavy position, with a steep drop-off in production after the elite guys. The quantity of the position usually offsets this, but in this format, there are actually more rosterable infielders than outfielders. 

The graph above shows the Steamer projected point totals by rank of each position. The highest-scoring position at the start is outfield, but it is on a much steeper decline than infield and pitching. The 15th-best outfielder is projected for similar production as the 15th-best infielder, and that is the last point where the positions can be viewed as equals. OF20 is equal to IF30, and OF40 would rank in the 70’s of the infield position.

Despite the lopsidedness of the positions, it is still important to draft a balanced number of each one. The most popular roster construction is 7P, 7 IF, and 6 OF. With late-round infielders vastly out-producing the late-round outfielders, it is usually more worth it to draft the extra infielder. There will be one flex spot in your starting lineup every week, and in most cases that will be an infielder unless you commit four picks to outfield very early. The 7-7-6 is the most common, but as long as you stick to rostering between 6 and 8 players at each position, you will be putting yourself in a spot to succeed. Five players at a position is risky since just one or two injuries could completely wipe out your floor.

Pitching Overview

The pitching landscape changed dramatically last season due to the new rules. The pitch clock and shift bans led to more bad starts as a whole. Even the elite, most reliable aces saw an increase in starts where they got crushed. Those new developments combined with the fact that starting pitchers are generally more injury-prone than hitters make them a much riskier choice in the early rounds of best ball drafts. The previous graph shows just how little difference there is between pitchers throughout the draft. Everyone ranked outside of the top 40 pitchers feels almost the same, and it really just comes down to personal preference on who you want to take a chance on. That’s why my main priority in best ball drafts is to draft at least four top 40 pitchers, and then take a few chances on my favorite sleepers later in the draft. There are many ways you can do this, and it’s best to go with the flow and let the draft dictate when you take those four pitchers. If I draft a top-5 pitcher I’m more likely to fill the rest of those spots with guys from the SP25-SP40 range, but I’ve also had plenty of drafts where I hit pitching hard in the middle rounds, taking four guys ranked between 15 and 30. There’s no wrong way to go about it, as long as you are making sure to lock up as many top 40-ish pitchers as you can before they are gone. My two favorite pitchers at their current value that I end up taking in a lot of drafts are Cole Ragans (ADP 97.0, P27), and Gavin Williams (ADP 187.4, P61). Other pitchers I like at their ADP are:

• Tyler Glasnow (ADP 59.4, P13)

• Tarik Skubal (ADP 70.6, P17)

• Freddy Peralta (ADP 71.6, P18)

• Zach Eflin (ADP 98.9, P28)

• Tanner Bibee (ADP 132.3, P40)

• Christopher Sanchez (ADP 235.1, P82)

Infield Overview

There is always a good infielder available. No matter what point of the draft you are in, there will be infielders that you’d love to have on your team. My general strategy is to search out good value at pitching and outfield and to take an infielder if I don’t like my current options in that round. The depth is truly endless, making it easy to draft a group of infielders you’ll feel good about without having to spend an extreme amount of early-round capital on the position. The infielders that I have been drafting the most include Cody Bellinger (ADP 92.6, IF31) and Josh Naylor (ADP 163.3, IF51). I think Bellinger’s ADP will shoot up once he signs with a team, and Naylor is way too undervalued in general right now. Some other guys I like are:

• Tristan Casas (ADP 86.5, IF27)

• Ketel Marte (ADP 90.9, IF29)

• Vinnie Pasquantino (ADP 145.5, IF47)

• Jake Burger (ADP 173.4, IF55)

• Matt Chapman (ADP 221.4, IF74)

Outfield Overview

Outfield is the weakest position, and everyone knows it. Everyone is so desperate to fill up OF that the first 10 picks by ADP are all outfield, and so are 19 of the first 36 picks. It is sometimes worth it to “zig” while others “zag” in fantasy drafts, but this is not one of those times. It’s best to follow the crowd and scoop up your outfielders as quickly as you can. Ideally, I’d want at least two of the top 17 outfielders with my first three picks and would want four outfielders by the end of round 8. Some of my favorites at the position currently going outside of the first five rounds are:

• Seiya Suzuki (ADP 64.0, OF28)

• Evan Carter (ADP 67.8, OF30)

• Josh Lowe (ADP 88.1, OF37)

• Jackson Chourio (ADP 93.9, OF38)

• Chas McCormick (ADP 124.2, OF46)

• Jarren Duran (ADP 124.6, OF47)

• Kerry Carpenter (ADP 169.5, OF61)

Stacking

If you have ever played daily fantasy baseball, I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of stacking. It’s essentially drafting multiple guys from the same team, and if that team has a great offensive day then you will reap the benefits. Although not as important as in daily fantasy, stacking is still a good thing to consider in best ball. After the first 16 weeks of the season, the playoffs will start. This is where the top teams from each 12-man league will advance to a new group, and this process will continue until the final week. The specifics vary depending on which Underdog Fantasy contest you enter, but their $10 contest (The Dinger) features a 280-person final group where the grand prize is $100,000. Having the right team stacked at the right time could give you the extra edge in the playoffs. I don’t think you should reach for players at bad value just to build stacks, but if you have a choice to make between a few guys, it’s worth it to take the stacking option for the extra correlation. I usually try to develop one “main” stack of 4 guys and then build mini two or three-player stacks of other teams if the opportunity presents itself. However, the draft doesn’t always fall the way you want, and it is completely acceptable to leave a draft with no stacks if the opportunity wasn’t there.

Conclusion and Sample Team

It’s never a good idea to go into a draft with an exact plan in mind, but my general advice is to draft outfield early, attack pitching in the middle rounds, and fill in your infield with great late-round values. The most important thing is learning the types of builds you’re comfortable with, so I recommend hopping into your own drafts and finding out what feels the best for you. Here is an example of a team that I drafted recently where I met all of the goals I discussed in this article. I was able to draft two top-17 outfielders and four in the first eight rounds, along with four top-40 pitchers. I didn’t end up stacking too heavily in this one, ending with a small three-man Rays stack and two hitters each from the Yankees and Royals.