This article is part of our RotoWire Roundtable series.
The start of the Major League Baseball season will be delayed by at least two weeks as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic.
RotoWire President Peter Schoenke said it best: the fantasy sports implications of this crisis pale in comparison to the real world events. Stay safe, everyone.
Jared Diamond of the Wall Street Journal reported that the current thinking inside Major League Baseball as of Friday was still to try to play all 162 games in 2020.
For this installment of the Roundtable, we are going to assume a full 162-game season, with a two-week delay. This seems like an unlikely outcome to many, but we are going with that here, and we will adjust for future installments as we get more clarity from Major League Baseball.
A two-week delay helps the fantasy value of currently-injured players, especially those that were projected to miss time at the beginning of the regular season. Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander, Mike Clevinger, Michael Conforto, Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, Eugenio Suarez, Oscar Mercado and Alex Verdugo will all have more recovery time than expected before games begin and have received a notable bump in their ranking as a result.
If the start of the season is pushed back further, it could drastically change valuations. Those big, 200-plus-inning workhorses would no longer be as appealing from a fantasy standpoint because they will not have the opportunity to rack up the innings necessary to be the massive strikeout
