Why ESPN Points Leagues Are Wildly Unpredictable (ITL Ep 846 Review)
If you’ve spent your entire fantasy baseball career meticulously balancing 5x5 Roto categories, jumping into an ESPN points league feels like stepping into a parallel dimension. Down is up. Steals are suddenly an afterthought. And those high-upside power hitters who strike out a ton? Absolute roster poison.
That’s the exact flavor of chaos Bogman and The Welsh navigated in episode 846 of In This League. They boldly waded into the murky waters of Mock Draft 4.0—a 12-team ESPN points format. Honestly, you could practically hear Bogman holding his nose through the mic. They aren’t shy about preferring traditional Roto. But as Welsh pointed out, they're a podcast "of the people," and the people need to know how to exploit these scoring settings.
Here's the truth about points leagues. They strip the romance right out of the game.
The Strikeout Penalty Paradigm
Standard fantasy baseball is an art form. You punt a category here, chase a specialized closer there, and balance your lineup like a delicate ecosystem. Points leagues? Pure, ruthless arithmetic. You are simply acquiring raw statistical mass.
The single biggest revelation from their draft room banter was just how violently the "-1 point for a strikeout" rule reshapes the player pool. Suddenly, guys you'd normally sprint to draft in Roto become massive liabilities.
- Elly De La Cruz: He still went in the first round, but the hesitation from the room was palpable.
- James Wood & Teoscar Hernandez: Fell off an absolute cliff. Wood, despite his massive prospect hype, plummeted to the 6th round.
- Christian Walker: Basically undraftable for Bogman in this format due to the swing-and-miss.
Conversely, if you just put the damn ball in play, you are a points-league deity. Nico Hoerner and Steven Kwan see their stock shoot to the moon. And Jose Ramirez? As Welsh noted, J-Ram gets a massive boost here simply because he avoids the K. It’s a fascinating mental pivot. You stop looking at the name on the jersey and just start looking at the floor of their contact rate.
Golden Nugget: "It takes the names kind of out of it... you're just looking at the numbers. You're just accumulating points." — The Welsh
SPARP Hunting and Innings Eaters
Pitching in points leagues is notoriously overpowered, and this ESPN setup is no exception. Three points per inning pitched. Three points for a Quality Start. Win a game? Two more points on top.
It creates a frantic, sweaty run on workhorses. Bogman locked down Kevin Gausman purely because he's a boring, reliable innings-eater. But the real cheat code they highlighted—the holy grail for points formats—is the SPARP.
For the uninitiated, that’s a Starting Pitcher As Relief Pitcher. If you can plug a starter who logs six innings and grabs a Quality Start into a relief pitcher slot, you essentially break the math of the platform. The problem? ESPN is notoriously stingy with those dual eligibilities. It forces you into weird tactical corners, like Welsh begrudgingly grabbing Aroldis Chapman in the 12th round just to secure raw strikeout volume from a reliever.
Filtering the Noise
What makes ITL such a staple isn't just the raw ADP crunching. It's the vibe. Between dissecting the impending doom of a potential MLB lockout—which Welsh is clearly, reasonably stressed about—and randomly debating the merits of running out of a movie theater because you're laughing too hard at Bridesmaids, it’s just an authentic hang.
They also took a well-deserved shot at ESPN's draft interface. You know the glitch. The one where it flashes a draft pick across your screen for a microsecond and then aggressively dumps you back to the top of the player pool, totally losing your scroll spot? Yeah. Infuriating. Glad I'm not the only one throwing my mouse over that.
Ultimately, the episode proves why you can't just copy-paste your standard draft prep into a points format. The values warp entirely. If you're playing ESPN points this year, ditch the Roto rankings. Worship at the altar of contact hitters. And grab those high-volume starters before your league-mates realize what's happening.
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