Is drafting relievers worth it? This is a tricky question to tackle, and its answer involves detangling a number of sub-questions. In my opinion, the value of top relievers is not materially declining over time. However, ADP is not especially reliable for relievers, relative to other position groups. Relievers are the worst performing bunch in the earliest picks, but also have the flattest rate of decline throughout the rest of the draft. Personally, I think there is still a needle to thread with relief pitchers, and we can identify some traits which can reliably predict higher-value relief pitchers out of those drafted in later rounds. If nothing else, it represents an incentive for future research to optimize the buckets a bit more precisely, or more accurately account for "big" hits. This framework could easily be replicated for different league or scoring settings, could springboard a better quantification of the expected dollar value of a given draft choice, or provide the opportunity to apply a decision tree framework to more than just relievers as we think about draft strategy. What makes this particularly fascinating is that we can spend half the draft capital on a mid-round reliever and still exceed the odds of finding a good one than you would have earlier in the draft. This raises a deeper question: What are the chances? At this point, we have most of the puzzle put together. We’ve determined that relievers are in all likelihood worse investments, both in terms of realized value and the opportunity cost relative to other positions, and also identified a few very straightforward filters that can be introduced into projected data to meaningfully improve your chances at finding a good reliever later in drafts. In my view, this is quite literally free real estate.
