If you ask us here at Fantasy Hurler, maybe the one thing we can all agree on is that fantasy baseball is far and away the best of the fake team-building offerings. It can be a grind as the season wears on, and those not equipped to handle the day-to-day upkeep get left behind. The inverse is also true; owners who stay tenacious are the ones most often rewarded come season's end. Besides staying up to date with all the newest transactions, injuries and other miscellaneous happenings, you also need to be constantly evaluating performances as the season progresses. This will allow you to properly buy low and sell high in trades and make better decisions when it comes to waiver-wire transactions. Luckily, baseball has plenty of stats to help guide your way. The trick is determining which stats are best to look at and then seeking them on the Net. Without delving too deep into the craziness, lest we get over our heads Lost-style, here are three stats you should use to evaluate performance as early-season numbers start to roll in ...

K/BB Ratio (for pitchers)

It's been said before by people much smarter than myself that the only things a pitcher can control when on the mound are strikeouts, walks, and home runs. It just so happens that one of these things is a category we need for our teams (Ks) and another correlates to a second important category we need to win (BB, one half of WHIP). If a guy is striking out many more batters than he is walking, he is doing what's in his power to minimize damage while on the mound. This will lead to lower ERAs when everything else is equal -- most advanced ERA metrics have K/BB as a foundation of their formula -- so we've essentially just helped you solve half of the pitching puzzle in your standard 5x5 league.

So what's a good K/BB ratio you ask? While it can vary depending on what else a guy does, anything over 2.5 strikeouts to every walk is probably a good baseline to work from. Among pitchers with at least 180 IP last year, 27 managed this feat. Of those 27, only six put up a WHIP above 1.25. Every pitcher who struck out more than 160 batters last year is on that list save for four (Gallardo, Jimenez, Burnett, and Garza), and they, for the most part, weren't too far off. (All put up a K/BB better than 2.) It's a huge reason most every fantasy expert recommends Ricky Nolasco as a great sleeper candidate this season. (He was one of only seven to have a ratio better than four; yet he still managed an ERA over 5 last season).

The best part of this stat is how readily available it is and how infrequently your league mates may be checking it. You can find last year's list (and this year's, once the season starts) on ESPN under Expanded II Pitching Stats (or pretty much anywhere that has a large database of pitching stat leader boards).

EqA  (for hitters)

EqA = \frac{H+TB+{1.5 \cdot (BB+HBP)}+SB+SH+SF}{AB+BB+HBP+SH+SF+CS+\frac{SB}{3}}

Well that's how you calculate that. (**Claps hands in a dust-off fashion and begins to walk away**) Oh wait, a little more help is needed you say? Alright. EqA was developed by Clay Davenport over at Baseball Prospectus, hopefully a site that some of you have access to or, at least, have heard of. EqA takes everything a player does at the plate and ties it nicely together by cranking out a number similar to the batting average scale. (EqA over .300 = good.) Over the years, EqA has actually proved to be a better predictor of future batting average than past batting average itself. Many of us who have played fantasy baseball for a while know that average can be a fickle stat, varying widely from year to year with even the most consistent producers. Ichiro, known as a great average guy, has seen his averages fluctuate anywhere from .303 to .372 in his career and witnessed a 40 point swing from 2008 to 2009. His EqAs? .274 to .303. Take out his best and worst seasons as possible outliers and his range has been somewhere between .276 and .296 every year.

Now that's not to say that a player's batting average is likely to be his EqA, or that a player's average will regress/improve toward his EqA. And as you can see in the formula above, walks and a few other things that we don't usually care about in fantasy are included. What it does do is take more things into account besides how many hits per at bat a player gets, a place where it's tough to show consistency even among the best hitters. Though it's possible you won't be able to access an EqA leader board throughout the season (unless you're a BP subscriber, which would be a very good allocation of any dollars you'll spend in fantasy ball this year), we'll be using it to make player comparisons during the year so you can always check back here to find bits and pieces or you can ask one of us for some help in this regard.

WPA/LI (for relief pitchers)

Most MLB managers aren't the best when it comes to managing a bullpen. It's one of the main reasons fans end up losing their hair or their voice screaming at the TV during the season. They stick with closers when they aren't anything more than a "guy who's done it before" and can render their best RPs useless to us by not giving them save opportunities. It's also the main reason why most fantasy junkies have learned to not pay for saves. Bullpen turnover/misuse is something that simply cannot be counted on.

That's why it's great that FanGraphs keeps up to date their WPA/LI leaderboards which can be sorted to only include relievers. Here we're able to see which guys have been the most effective late-game options. The definition, from FanGraphs: "WPA/LI (context neutral wins/game state linear weights): How many wins a player contributes to his team with the Leverage Index aspect removed, invented by Tom Tango. Calculating WPA/LI: WPA is divided by LI for each individual play attributed to a specific player and then the WPA/LI for the individual plays is then added up to create WPA/LI for an entire season. This is considerably different then taking a player’s WPA and dividing it by pLI."

If that sounds like gobbly-gook, that's because it's all nerdy and involved. On top of that, the effects of it as a predictive measure are yet to be fully proven or decided. But glance at the leaderboards from last year and you'll see top RPs such as Broxton, Bailey, Nathan, Street, Hoffman, Papelbon and Rivera all firmly within the top 15 in this stat. Also the some of the best setup men are here, such as Hughes, Wuertz, and Thornton. If a closer is continually blowing leads there's a good chance his stupid manager will continue to run him out there (see: Lidge, Brad). But by keeping up with this stat as the season progresses, it will give you an idea of who is best poised to take over a closer job when it becomes available.

Sometimes you have to dig a little deeper, and that may not be more true than with closers in competitive leagues where everyone knows turnover will happen and is constantly waiver-hawking. WPA/LI will enable you to pick up effective relievers prior to them being named closer. In some leagues, that will make all the difference.

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