2023 Gladiator and Guillotine Contest Strategy

by Greg Fishwick

Note: This article is designed to be read third in a series, preceded by “BABS Points Game Strategies for 2023” and “Using BABS in Best Ball Leagues.”  To minimize repetition, we invite readers to familiarize themselves with the pieces in order.

Gladiator Leagues

SOLD OUT! All 1,500 entries in NFBC’s inaugural 15-team, 5×5, Gladiator Leagues were taken in a matter of weeks. The new format was announced on November 21, 2022, and the final draft was held January 15, 2023. Talk about tapping into a ready market! What are the selling points?

The central one appears to be catching the crest of the wave of preference for reduced workloads in fantasy leagues. Real baseball may be an eight-month daily grind, but more and more fantasy players are looking to reduce daily lineup changes and transactions with smaller bench reserves and less frequent FAAB bidding. Even those who play DFS don’t play every day.

Here’s an excerpt from the Contest Overview page: “The Gladiator is not for the faint of heart. The ULTIMATE draft and hold…and literally do nothing else. You draft only 23 players (two catchers, no bench) and that is your team for the entire season. No FAAB, no setting lineups, no nothing.”

Does that remind you of the old Dire Straits lyrics “That ain’t workin’, that’s the way to do it, get your money for nothin’ and your (wins) for free.”

Outside of a little luck, your draft determines your destiny as a Gladiator. The more men you have standing as other teams lose players to injury and underperformance, the straighter, smoother, and shorter your path to the pennant. Fortunately, BABS’ long-term, large-sample emphasis makes drafting her super power. She’s the only one identifying Skills Liabilities and quantifying Risk Cost.

Four Keys to Survival

Of the four key factors differentiating drafts in Gladiator leagues, by far the most impactful is minimizing your Risk Costs. Once you lose a player, there’s no replacing him. At the link above, Ron Shandler writes: “Keeping your risk budget under $30 can be a feat, but serious contenders might want to set that as a goal. . . . Note that it is possible to build a legitimate roster with a risk cost under $15 . . . .” He calls a $0.00 – $2.50 Risk Cost per player: “The best pool to fish in if you plan a reasonable budget.” Why not start your draft list by sorting BABS’ data base for Full-time players with Risk Costs of $2.00 or less, and go from there?

With the spread of Wins and Saves among more relievers, the second key to Gladiator survival is stockpiling low-risk, high-leverage relievers on good teams and ignoring high-risk, low-K starters on bad teams. This is not to say that you don’t need good starters, it’s to say that you don’t need mediocre ones. And while that’s becoming more and more true in most formats, it’s especially true in Gladiator Leagues, where you may have only six or seven pitchers last the entire season. Drop the dogmatic 7-2 or 6-3 ratio of starters to relievers, and embrace 5-4 or even 4-5. After you get your ace and your closer, use BABS Pitching Effectiveness ratings of (E+/ER/e), combined with her strikeout potential ratings of (K+/KK/k) and her expected chance for saves (SV/sv-) to identify your targets instead of clinging to a strict ratio of starters to relievers. Some 2023 examples of such later-round, low-risk, high-reward relievers are: Alex Lange (ER,K+,sv-), Paul Sewald (ER,KK,sv-), Camilo Doval (ER,KK,sv-), and AJ Puk (ER,KK,sv-).

Besides pitchers, catchers are probably the riskiest position on your roster—and you need two of them. That’s the third key to Gladiator survival. If you lose one, the other must carry the position by himself. And the further down you go on your draft list, the more risk you’re likely taking on. Avoid that scenario. In 2023 ADP order, here are the seven Full-time catchers with $1.25 or less in risk costs: JT Realmuto, Daulton Varsho, Salvador Perez, Willson Contreras, Alejandro Kirk, William Contreras, and Sean Murphy.

The fourth key to survival in Gladiator Leagues is baking OUT the value bump for multi-position players. Sure, they can help you in the draft by creating some flexibility, so you don’t want to ignore them completely—especially early on. But remember, once your roster is set, multi-position players no longer have any extra value because once they’re gone, their roster slot is empty and you can neither move players around to fill it nor acquire new players.

Guillotine Leagues

Here’s an edited excerpt from the NFBC Contest Overview page: “Using a (Best Ball) scoring point system, Guillotine teams score 23 players each week and the lowest scoring team from each two-week period is “chopped” from the contest, with all 34 players going back into the player pool. One team is eliminated every two weeks until four teams are left for the money Championship Round.” One clarification: team scores are not cumulative, so every two-week period starts from scratch.

Points leagues in general and Best Ball leagues in particular—with the NFBC point system used as an example—are covered in this March 9 update at the links above, so let’s concentrate on a couple of exciting nuances from these “cutthroat” Guillotine Contests. To begin with, thinking in terms of two-week “seasons” is quite a twist. Several factors could lead to a team’s demise in that short time span.

The first order of business is to draft a team that can withstand the vagaries of short-term inconsistencies. As detailed in our “Best Ball” article, the point system is heavily weighted toward HRs, so that’s still a top priority. With negative points being your worst enemy and the only source of negative points for hitters being empty ABs, you must double-down on BABS’ Batting Effectiveness asset. Avoid hitters without an (A+/AV/a) asset, and boost up hitters with the OBP *. In the end game, after you’ve exhausted your dual-asset hitters with (P+/PW/p,A+/AV/a) profiles and worked in a little Speed (S+/SB/s), don’t be afraid to roster hitters with only (A+/AV/a) single assets. And never roster a hitter with a (|-A) Liability or an OBP – Liability.

In these short sprints, it’s poor pitching that can kill you. With rainouts, six-man rotations, travel days, skipped/pushed back/short starts, you cannot have empty pitching slots on any given day, and you cannot afford negative outings. As noted in the Best Ball article, this point system has three ways pitching can hurt you: ER (-2), BB (-1), and Hits (-1). You can save your neck by protecting yourself with both quality and quantity.

Roster as many dual-asset pitchers as possible, regardless of role. Middle relievers on good teams can get both Wins and Saves—sometimes more than one per week. SPs can get only Wins—almost always less than one per week. With 11 bench reserve slots, you may want 12-15 pitchers so that you can avoid having to take your three-to-six lowest scores for any two-week period.

If you use 3-6 bench slots for pitchers, you must be judicious with your remaining 5-8 reserve hitters. After making sure you have at least one usable catcher on your bench, the key to that is multi-position flexibility, which means targeting players like Daulton Varsho (C/OF) and Max Muncy (2B/3B) early and Wilmer Flores (1B/2B/3B), Trey Mancini (1B/OF) and Isaac Paredes (1B/2B/3B) later. With CI/MI/UT, that gives the Best Ball scoring program multiple ways to fit in more productive hitters and skip over less productive hitters each scoring week. Ron Shandler’s 2023 Baseball Forecaster lists all multi-position players on page 274.

One final word about Risk Costs in Guillotine. Given that 34 FAs are dropped into the pool every two weeks, some risk may seem acceptable. But consider this: your FAAB is limited to $1,000 and there are no $0 bids. Every two weeks, teams that were already good enough to avoid the Guillotine will be bidding to get better, so the performance bar is raised and successfully bidding for the best new FAs is likely to become more and more expensive. Don’t start out behind the eight ball by drafting more than one high-risk player. Fernando Tatis (P+,S+,AV|INJ) or Joe Musgrove (ER,KK), listed as Full-time with $0 Risk Cost, but now nursing a fractured big toe, may be worth carrying for a scoring period or two, but even that’s taking a chance on living to see the second (or third, etc.) scoring period. Speaking of old lyrics, how about the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive?”