The player value series is back again! I run this series of posts every year now. They are a mix of repeats from previous years, which are intended as a resource to help broaden the base of people that know how to run player values, and newly updated entries which provide info specific to 2018. Stay tuned throughout the preseason for the rest of the series! - HWB

Tip #1: Know where player values come from

Tip #2: Set your Hit/Pitch split

Tip #3: Value your Picks and Make Preseason Trades

Tip #4: Customize your Projections

It may come off as odd to say this, as a purveyor of the best draft tool around, but draft tools can't do everything. One of the great subtleties to drafting in fantasy baseball is seeing and exploiting tiers within each position. While the Big Board will help you see them, it's another thing to plan for them and make sure you avoid the biggest drop-offs in each position on draft day.

(If you want to skip the words and get right to the tiers, here they are)

After calculating player values and ranking them, you'd like to think you could just always draft the best available remaining player... but if there were 4 great players and 8 terrible ones at a given position in a 12 team league, you would want to make sure you're one of the 4, not one of the 8. This is one of the main weaknesses of using Replacement Levels to calculate player values. And on top of that, if you can get the 4th of the four good ones, you'll be able to spend time on other positions earlier in the draft without giving up much.

This is illustrated pretty well at SP this year: Kershaw, Sale, Scherzer, Kluber are an obvious top-4 of similar value, and are followed by a HUGE gap before Tier 2 starts with Syndergaard. It's a great argument for taking an SP in the 1st/2nd round, especially if you are near the turn. Conversely, if you don't get one of the top four SP, just chill out, don't panic and grab one of the tier 2 guys immediately. I certainly have favorites among the next 7-9 pitchers after that, but they're more similar than they are different. If I don't get one of the top-4, I'll be shooting for the last guy drafted out of this 2nd tier.

Users of the Big Board will have seen this already, but using the default Big Board custom projections, the distribution of player values looks like this for a standard 5x5 ESPN league: