After reading Patrick’s earlier post on head to head matchups, I couldn’t resist adding my own thoughts on the matter. I completely agree with Patrick’s point that matchups should be a central part of any serious owner’s strategy in a head to head league. Many kinds of arguments can be made for or against the head to head format, but there shouldn’t be any controversy to saying that such a league’s unique feature–the clean slate each week provides a team–should be a central concern to your overall strategy.

I have tended to pursue what Patrick identifies as the Pitching Strategy, and can attest to its viability; coming out of the draft with both Johan Santana and C.C. Sabathia last year, and being the one to pick up Tim Lincecum and Yovani Gallardo when they arrived, I could count on winning the strikeout and win categories most weeks (and, indeed, I finished the season with a 16-3-6 W-L-T (.760 percent) record in Wins and a 23-2-0 (.920) in Strikeouts). When your head to head strategy allows you to consider whole categories “locks” from week-to-week, you are giving yourself a huge advantage in every matchup.

(Similar to the above example, but with batters, the owner in our league last year who held Jose Reyes could count on winning steals for most of the season, and had a 23-2-0 record in the steals category.)

Beyond the obvious advantage to having category-dominant players, they also give you room to pivot. By which I mean that if you can count on winning one or two or three categories most of the time, you can then turn and pursue an aggressive strategy on the other categories. Combining this with your knowledge of other teams can give you a crucial edge on your competition.

To continue the example of my team from last year, in the final four weeks of the season, I realized I had a good chance of making the playoffs if I managed to squeak by without losing any matchups by a wide margin. The top four teams were more or less set by this point, and the last two playoff spots came down to four teams, with mine among the top two. A look at the remaining matchups for all teams revealed that my “wild card” competitors each had one or two matchups against stronger teams, and also had to play each other, whereas I had the luck of the draw to face a few weaker teams. I decided my strategy would be “.500 ball.” The other teams would have to win by wide margins to catch my lead in the standings, and any wins against each other would only help me (because the loser would also lose place in the playoff positioning). Whereas If I could just avoid any blowout losses, I could keep my position.

Anyway, that’s a long set up just to tell you that I knew I could still count on my strong pitching staff for two categories a week; in our 5×5 setup, that meant I only needed to win three more categories for my strategy to work. To that end, I could fill my remaining pitcher slots with good middle relievers, of which there are plenty, and who could sink ERA and WHIP to make my team more sure to win those two. In the end, I went in to every pre-playoff matchup confident I could pick up at least four categories, which put me in a strong place to succeed in my strategy.

I did make the playoffs this way, but, of course, playing for 5-5 ties isn’t the best playoff strategy. What is one of the best strategies, throughout the fantasy season, is to remember that your head to head team only has to be the best against one team, one week at a time–that’s the beauty (or ugliness, if you prefer roto) of the head to head league.