This article is part of our NL FAAB Factor series.
Baseball opens this week. Exhibition games started last week and Opening Day is Thursday. The hope is that the detailed health protocol with the MLB and MLBPA enables action to continue, even if an uptick in COVID cases arise. In addition, the Blue Jays will not play in Toronto, so we could be seeing the Buffalo Blue Jays.
The hope clearly for all of us is that there will be baseball and that the season continued unimpeded to a World Series winner on the field. We will be here weekly until the playoffs to provide FAAB advice for both the NL and AL. Projected bids are included in this week's column. In addition, some of the names highlighted the last few weeks have been included again, this time with bids, to aid you in your drafts.
We have two goals for this article:
1. Identify likely free agents and discuss their strengths and weaknesses.
2. Estimate how much of your $100 starting free-agent budget you should bid on them.
Bids in general are best guesstimates. With so much uncertainty at least initially, those values may be even greater estimates than usual. The FAAB chart below lets users easily see at a glance how certain players stack up against others and how much they should command in a variety of formats.
The chart, which is sortable by column (click on the header), include a very basic "player grade" column. This serves as a reflection of a player's skills and role on