Welcome to Rates and Beryls.

It is Monday, January 13th, the best time of the year.

It is position preview season here on Rates and Barrels.

Smash the like button if you're watching us on YouTube.

Tell a friend because this is a great time to jump in as we get ready for the upcoming fantasy baseball season.

Now, the preview format for our show, it's pretty much unchanged.

We've found something that we really like. What we do is we take a look at a position, usually one per episode. We dig in in order of average draft positions. So we take a look at the NFBC's results from the last 14 days at the time of each episode, get a snapshot of what's happening at the position. Talk about the players that we think might be a little high, a little low, guys we really like, guys we're kind of trying to avoid. They're longer episodes, but they're a lot of fun. We love doing it. We've got one new thing we're doing this year. Thanks to John, I believe it's Acuna Matata in the actual Discord logo. We have hive rankings we're going to try to put together this year. So what it is, it's an opportunity for you as listeners to submit your positional rankings. We're going to do about 20 per position. We'll do more for outfield and starting pitcher and some of the deeper ones. But you can go in. There's a link to a form. It's in the show description. It's also going to be in the Discord. You can rank players. And then we're going to compile all of those rankings together to get like a group

rank for all of us as listeners. So that's another thing we're doing this year. That's new. Thanks

to John, Ryan McLaughlin for putting that together. Chef Ryan is the way we go Ryan. Yeah, we.

We are science. We are science. Yes. I really think that's going to

happen. Together, we can be science. We are science. So that's how it works. And it's a lot of ground

to cover, but we're going to do the best we can to get as much information out as quickly as

possible. Again, join the Discord.

The link is in the show description.

You'll see it right alongside the link to the form

where you can submit your hive rankings for the shortstop position.

We begin at the very top.

Pretty simple at shortstop.

There is a nice group of guys that go inside the first two rounds by ADP.

We got Bobby Witt Jr., who is an option really at pick one overall. If you have concerns about the shoulder of Shohei Otani, you have Ellie De LaCruz and Gunner Henderson as clear first rounders, Mookie Betts, a late first rounder, Francisca Lendor, a guy that in a 15-team league you're going to find maybe at the back of the round, early round two. And then Trey Turner gets kind of lumped into this tier for reasons we'll discuss here in just a couple of minutes. And I look at this group and I say, you know, it's really more about picking nits. These aren't necessarily players that you're going to build an entire strategy around because, like, they're just such good foundational players.

It's what you do later that's going to matter more than which one of these guys you end up

getting.

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