One of the pleasant surprises of the 2011 was Jeff Francoeur who earned a career high roto value of $27, which was driven by 20 HR and a career high 22 SB. While the 20 HR weren't completely out of line for him (he had hit 29 HR in 2006), the SB seemingly came out of nowhere, after posting a previous high of just eight SB in 2011. Even in hindsight, there's no way we could have seen this outburst coming. Right?

It has long been a dictum of fantasy baseball that groundball pitchers are to be sought and flyball pitchers avoided. In this R&A essay, we’ll look at some high-level stats to see if there’s any validity to any of it.

One of our favorite annual pre-season exercises is to take our player projections and see what they can tell us about our expectations at a team level. By looking at the races on a division-by-division basis, we may find some teams (and players) that are not being properly valued in the preseason analysis.

Teams that win fantasy titles often have players on their rosters that deliver more value than either their draft round or their auction price would predict. Often these are players who have breakouts in one or more scoring categories that weren't anticipated. Three players who exceeded expectations in SBs last year were Emilio Bonafacio (SS, MIA), Jason Bourgeois (OF, HOU), and Ben Revere (OF, MIN). We can target players in drafts who have a possibility of returning significant profit in the SB category by developing a profile of players who have had a SB breakout in the past.

Platoon splits are a key part of the in-game management—but do they have any fanalytic value?

We continue our review of some pressing early spring questions, this week covering the National League.

Sergio Romo knows how to get Ks and weak contact. It's a powerful combination.

In our 2012 debut, we speculate on eight interesting spring questions from around the American League.

Many fantasy owners target elite performers in scarce statistics like SBs. If you can draft one or two top base stealers, you can focus on the other categories as you draft your remaining hitters. In 2011, eight of the top ten base stealers in the AL had appeared in the top ten at least one time before, and six of the top ten in the NL had a previous top ten performance. Can we increase our chances of drafting one of these elite stolen base performers ?

With the introduction of the unbalanced schedule just over a decade ago, Major League Baseball introduced a system where teams face divisional rivals for a greater number of games than teams outside the division. From a fantasy perspective, one has to wonder what impact this macro-level divisional factor might have on player performance over the course of a season and how it could be leveraged to positively effect draft strategy.

If you use Standings Gain Points to value players, you'll know that the denominators are the key to the whole thing. Here are estimates of the denominators, culled from league standings for the past three years.