There is a debate in the fantasy community about various closer strategies, and two of the prime combatants are two of the experts in the Fantasy Baseball Search Expert League, Todd Farino and Lenny Melnick.  Both are friends of this site of course, so I wanted to put my $0.02 in.  Both have valid points.
This is an interesting debate going on, though the strategies are not new or novel in any way. I do not think there has really been enough cogent analysis of the two closer “positions.” The “Melnick” position is that one should never draft closers in early rounds, and often times one should be willing to eschew drafting any closers at all, choosing instead to scrounge in the waiver wire.

The “Farino” position is that the risk associated with the lesser closers as compared to the Papelbons and Riveras is so great that they best guys are worth the early selections. He also thinks that the Melnick position ignores the fact that save accumulation is not the only goal of drafting a closer, and the best guys help in ERA and WHIP so much as compared to the Todd Joneses and Joe Borowskis that the earlier pick is worth it.

I think both positions have merit and both exhibit the same flaw; namely that any strategical concept of this sort depends wholly on how good one’s judgment and skill is compared to one’s league mates.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will freely admit that in my big money leagues I generally take the Melnick position. There are a few reasons for this. The first is that once dollars are put in to the equation, along with contracts, the opportunity cost is the MOST important factor, far more important even than how good the closer is. 

Secondly, it may occur that because of draft dynamics the best closers present an opportunity in terms of the dollars that they go for.  General Finkelstein and I are in a new high stakes league this year that I previously discussed. We were taking the Melnick position as part of our strategy, but for unknown reasons even our price enforcing bids were enough to snag Mariano Rivera and Jose Valverde. One owner was crowing about setting the market on J.J. Putz, getting him for $27.  Yet the more seasoned and more expert owners ended up with Bobby Jenks for $18, Rivera for $19 and a few others all for under $20.

What happened here was that flexibility and ignoring these hard and fast rules is what detemined the best strategy. Not some debatable maxim like you should draft closers early, or not at all.

In mixed leagues the opportunity cost issue is muted a bit because you cannot control what players you acquire. Here the Farino position gains some ground.  The dynamics of the draft mean that if you want a certain player you may have to reach for him because he may not be around. In addition you can get stuck at the end of a run and only have dregs. So depending upon the depth of the pool you may be fully justified or even mandated in drafting a closer earlier than expected.

The problem with the Melnick position in draft leagues can be summed up by the following story.  The great physicist Richard Feynman once made the following statement, illustrating one of the epistemiological issues at the heart of scientific inquiry:

You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won’t believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!  

The issue is one of assigning significance to an event only after it has occurred. You can read more about it here. This fallacy is known as the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. It is so known because what it shows is that one can shoot hundreds of bullets at the side of a barn and then go circle one of the hits after the fact as evidence that he is a sharpshooter.

This is what happens with closers and fantasy analysts; they succumb to the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. They say “Because George Sherrill has eight saves, therefore I should not draft closers early because they can be found later.”  This is somewhat similar to the problem presented by the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.  The analyst says after the fact that X occurred and as a result decides that Y is true.

The example is not 100% applicable since a closer’s success is not 100% random, which is one of the parameters of the fallacy, as it deals with stochastic processes.  A particular analyst may well have said that Sherrill would be the save leader at the end of April and targeted him and only him among the lesser closers because of his supreme judgment.

However, the principle that the Fallacy illustrates is relevant. One should NOT take the advice of someone who selects five or six closers in waiting, then when five fail and one succeeds says that the success of the one proves the validity of the strategy. The analyst that does so exhibits fallacious reasoning.

Now to be fair, the Melnick position can and will work if you do have better judgment and skill than your opposition because you are counting on being able to make a better judgment than your opponents. However, if you think that this is true, then ask yourself what you thought of Manny Corpas when considering the Melnick position.

Our site was one of the very few out there that predicted a flop for Corpas, as well as here, but if your daily reading sites did not, or mentioned a whole slew of possibilities and are now crowing about how the principle is true then clearly they should not be taking the Melnick position. Their skill and judgment is questionable, and their logic is undeniably wrong, falling victim to the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.

So my view is that BOTH positions are  two sides of the same coin, both can work or not work. As usual it depends on what your opponents do, how skilled you are and your opponents are, the type of league and the overall plan. So can we stop now with other “experts” touting these hard and fast rules that are supposedly the panacea to all your fantasy ills? There is far more to fantasy success than following a set of rules.

Both positions are colored by their individual experience. Melnick is a seasoned and highly respected auction player who is a past winner of Tout Wars, and Farino is a mixed league, draft expert. So their views are colored by their own successes.  Readers of this site know where that will get you.