Fantasy Baseball: Need to free up some space? It's OK to drop these 24 players in shallower leagues

Fantasy Baseball: Need to free up some space? It’s OK to drop these 24 players in shallower leagues

Times are tough when everyone is hurt, and tough times make for tough decisions.

The toughest of all is who to drop. So much of our content is geared toward adding players that rarely do we address the other side of the coin, for a number of reasons. One of the biggest is that Fantasy Baseball is a game without a prevailing format, and the standard for dropping a player varies greatly from format to format. I’ve always taken an above-all-do-no-harm approach to this job, and I could do great harm by broadly recommending to drop a player who I’d never dream of dropping in your particular format.

You see where I’m coming from?

Having said that, I’m going to attempt to have the drop conversation here, in part because I’m tired of being a coward but in larger part because we find ourselves in unusual circumstances right now. The number of integral players on the IL is unlike I’ve ever seen before, which makes for a high likelihood that you’ve used up your IL space already and are having to stash some of those injured players on your bench. Even if you’re one of the lucky ones who’s mostly still healthy, you’ve probably struggled to fit that latest starting pitcher pickup on your roster. Like injuries, there have been many more of those than usual.

The goal here is to give you some breathing room by inviting you to drop certain players who you may be reluctant to drop, judging by CBS roster rates. That’s not to say that they’re must-drop or without value, but it is to say … well, tough times make for tough decisions.

Naturally, this discussion is geared toward shallower leagues, meaning those where fewer than 300 players are rostered. Go much deeper than that and basically anyone who’s widely rostered is in fact must-roster, making the discussion over who to drop far less interesting (or difficult). The shallow-league context mostly eliminates Rotisserie leagues, making this more of a Head-to-Head conversation and especially Head-to-Head points, where clearer distinctions can be drawn. You’ll notice that a major determinant for me is impact. A player who’s merely useful isn’t good enough for shallower leagues.

Notice also that all but two of the players featured here are rostered in more than 70 percent of leagues. Players rostered in less than that are pretty obviously expendable, I would say.