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January is absolutely flying by, and we’re rapidly approaching draft season. If you don’t already have your leagues locked down, you’ll be doing so shortly. Tout Wars and LABR both set their league rosters this past week—of note to BP readers, I’ll be leaving Tout Wars NL and moving back to Mixed due to the Astros-related roster contraction while Jason Collette will be moving from LABR AL to Mixed, where he’ll team up with Paul Sporer. This expert league movement reminded me of a request I received from reader Robotey back in August that I was waiting until the preseason to address:

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While just one notable name was moved in yesterday’s three-team trade—despite the usual flashy nature of these kinds of trades, this one can hardly be called a blockbuster—the trade has created a ripple effect to alter the values of several household names (at least in households that play in deep fantasy leagues).

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Back in October, the Seattle Mariners announced that they would be moving the fences in at Safeco Field—a notorious (justified or not) pitcher’s park. As a result, fantasy analysts and players are sure to be bumping Mariner hitters up their draft boards and Mariner pitchers down. And, in all likelihood, they’ll be overestimating how much to move those players.

The day after the change was announced, Colin Wyers ran a study to estimate how many additional home runs the change might create. He found that the Mariners and their opponents would likely combine for an additional 22 home runs. Seattle’s internal studies reportedly found that number to be somewhere between 30 and 40. That leaves us with a range of an additional 11 to 20 home runs that the Mariners, as a team, will hit in 2013. Over at the The Book Blog, MGL translated Colin’s numbers to estimate that Safeco’s home run park factor would change from 0.90 to 0.93 from the fence shift.

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Yesterday, for just the sixth time in MLB history, the Baseball Writers Association of America failed to elect a single candidate to the Hall of Fame. While I certainly disagree with this result, there was one player in particular for whom this result was an absolute travesty. No, not Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens. While I don’t agree for a number of reasons I won’t bother getting into, I can see why many elected not to cast votes for these two. Their case is about more than performance. Looking strictly at the numbers, they would have been unanimous first-balloters, but the steroids issue prevented such an occurrence—and I’m more or less okay with it, if for no other reason than because there is a bigger fish to fry.

Mike Piazza was the best catcher in the history of baseball. There, I said it. But if you saw how the voting unfolded yesterday, you may think I’m crazy for it:

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After today, we should be all caught up on players moving teams this offseason. In case I missed anyone, just let me know in the comments and I’ll circle back to give my thoughts.

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Happy New Year, everyone! Let’s catch up on some of this off-season’s moves and their fantasy ramifications.

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A couple weeks ago, a discussion arose in the comments section of Paul Singman’s Keeper Reaper article about the relative value of keepers in leagues that have a salary system. Given the polarity of the responses, I thought this deserved a thorough look in an article of its own. To catch you up, here’s how reader abskippers began the discussion:

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I spent Thursday catching up on the speedsters that were on the move this offseason. Today, I’ll put all the major pitching deals under the microscope.

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On Monday, I discussed the managers that have the greatest impact on stolen bases—an important topic for fantasy owners to understand. To keep with that theme, today I wanted to examine the major speedsters who have found new homes this offseason and how welcoming those homes stand to be. Spoiler alert: four of the five most passive managers in baseball have shiny new speedsters to play with (or, you know, not play with).

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