When we announced our fantasy football coverage in August, we used a GI Joe analogy to explain how we built the group, with specialized backgrounds combining to give you every angle possible on how to win the game. Baseball is a little different.

Baseball is actually a lot different. There are 10 times as many games for each team, five times as many relevant players, and an infinite number of ways to interpret statistics. Baseball needs translators — people who can take stats and numbers and injuries and splits and minor-league steals and history and coaching tendencies and ADP and BABIP and xFIP and HH% and boil it down to this is why Rich Hill is going 75 picks too late.

One thing we stress at The Athletic Fantasy is making sure we are earning your subscription. We’re pretty normal people who know you can get free stuff anywhere. So, over the course of the last several months, Brandon Funston, Nando Di Fino, Jake Ciely, Eno Sarris and Dan Kaufman (our editorial director) made lists, had meetings, sat on calls, exchanged a lot of emails and ultimately came up with a list of people we thought would offer the absolute best fantasy baseball advice. Anywhere. Bar none. And forget about the fact you get the entire site when you join The Athletic. We wanted this group alone to be worth your subscription. And it is. And maybe even beyond that. This group we assembled will make you look at fantasy baseball and love the game more than ever.

So. Let’s get to it …

Introducing The Athletic Fantasy Baseball

Here are your writers:

Jake Ciely: The two-time No. 1 FantasyPros.com ranker for baseball (2015 and 2016), Jake has averaged a No. 1 finish in the last three years. He was a finalist for seven industry awards in 2018. You’ll get rankings, columns and an interactive mailbag every week.

David Gonos: A 15-plus-year veteran of the fantasy sports world, Gonos has worked at CBS and FanDuel and is one of the most creative and entertaining writers you’ll ever come across. He has a Tout Wars title under his belt, winning the Mixed League in 2008.

Inside Injuries: They’ll tell you everything from what your player’s injury means, when they should come back, and how much they’ll be affected by it. It’s a wholly different injury analysis experience (with algorithms and objective numbers based on data), and one we think will enhance your draft prep and in-season gameplay. Here’s their first article, on the injury risks associated with the first-round picks this year.

Gene McCaffrey: The creator of Wise Guy Baseball, Gene has won a Tout Wars title — and four under the WGB banner — as well as several other expert league championships. He’s a salary cap game genius and has brought home several DFS wins in recent years. He writes with this great, inexplicable rhythm and does not mince words. You will love him, we promise. Here’s his introduction.

Al Melchior: Al has been writing about fantasy baseball for nearly 20 years. He has worked for CBS, FanGraphs, and several other outlets. He has a very accessible style that presents deep stats and data in a way you can enjoy and understand (and he makes it look kind of easy, even though it definitely is not). Here is Al in his own words.

Matt Modica: Matt has won several NFBC titles and brings an angle that is underrepresented in the fantasy prognosticating world — that of the high-stakes player. You’ll get deep, stats-and-charts-based analysis from Matt and a peek into the world of how the high-stakes player thinks a little differently from what you may be accustomed to. His position previews are massive; here’s his SP column.

Michael Salfino: The first syndicated fantasy columnist, Michael blends stats and analysis with a relatable writing style. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, 538.com and Yahoo Sports. For the fantasy football players, Salfino will also be doing a regular offseason football column (as will Jake Ciely, David Gonos, and the excellent Emory Hunt).

Eno Sarris: When people asked if we were doing fantasy baseball and we’d say yes, the next question was, “Will Eno be a part of it? Because I love Eno.” So here is your answer! He’s an award-winning, beer-loving analyst who has written for ESPN, FanGraphs, MLB.com and makes regular appearances on MLB Network. He’ll chat live on Fridays, as well. And his first column, on reinventing the way we rate park factors, is incredible.

Ron Shandler: An FSWA Hall of Famer and multiple Tout Wars title-winning analyst, Ron just won FSTA’s “Best Print Publication” award for his Baseball Forecaster. Here’s Ron in a nutshell: he invented a Roto strategy (the LIMA Plan) that was so effective, it was copied and aped to the point of ineffectiveness. That’s when you know you’ve made it. Here’s Ron’s intro in his own words.

John Sickels: If you’re looking for knowledge and insight on prospects, there are few better than John Sickels, who started his career with Bill James and whose name has become synonymous with soon-to-be stars. John spent several years at ESPN and SB Nation. Here’s his introduction. And here’s his Top 100 prospects list.

We hope you will enjoy this group as much as we have over the past few months as we edited, worked out topics, and figured out who was going to do what. We believe we have a product that cannot be beat.

What can you expect this season? Intelligent analysis. Innovation. Accessibility. A ton of personality. If you check out our draft kit, you can click through to a variety of columns and topics — we’ll be adding to that over the next six weeks until the season begins.

We wanted to make it a point to let the writers write without the burden of restrictions or too-specific topics. We (Brandon and Nando) came up as writers, we know how much it sucks to have topics we don’t like thrown at us. So what you’re seeing is almost like a hippie commune of fantasy writers — we supply the housing, they have the freedom to do what they do best. That’s why they’re here. You don’t bring in Al Melchior and say, “write about third basemen.” You bring in Al Melchior and say, “write.”

We’re all here to answer questions and give as much personalization as possible. We’ll have at least three live chats a week, a mailbag, and we’re going to test out a new preseason concept called The Request Line. Give us a topic you want covered (from “Will Billy Hamilton steal 70 bases?” to “Can Clayton Kershaw regain his form?” and everything in between) and we’ll pick one and write a piece about it. Stay tuned for how to submit that. And, as always, feel free to drop questions in the comment section of the columns.

We also plan on incorporating our local team writers as much as possible. Fantasy players depend on beat writers — and we have direct access to the best of the best. We’ll scan their articles and pull relevant information, ask them questions fantasy players want to know the answers to, and basically take advantage of their kindness until they stop replying to our emails.

Keep in mind that you aren’t just paying for a fantasy baseball draft kit — you get all of The Athletic, including NBA, NFL, college hoops just in time for March Madness, you’ll get our award-winning fantasy football, hockey, and hoops coverage, and everything else this lovely company has to offer. Do you like, sayyyy, Cincinnati’s Major League Soccer team? We cover them.

Anyway, enough about us. Go and explore the draft kit. Enjoy the variety of formats of our position previews. Soak in the information from two fantasy Hall of Famers (Ron and Brandon), and get fired up to argue with Salfino in his comment section.

We truly hope you enjoy this, and we’re excited to help provide the tools that will lead to victory.

Yours in fantasy baseball,

Nando Di Fino and Brandon Funston

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(Photo: Rob Tringali / MLB Photos via Getty Images)