When considering your options for fantasy baseball in the regular season, many owners seek to value the performances of the players during spring training games. Pitchers often trail behind their hitting counterparts to start camp and often spend time working on developing or refining pitches. Also, the big names on the mound often only throw a few innings per outing in an effort to warm up as spring begins. As a result, lesser hitting talents often get a chance to shine, and as a result, they can put up stats that are a bit out of the ordinary.

In addition, there is the issue of a relatively small sample size. At any time during any regular season, if you were to take a portion of the games and analyze the stats, you would undoubtedly find some oddities. Baseball has a long regular season and the stats often return to average. In other words, be careful not to put too much focus on spring stats as an outlier for regular-season performance. There have been a few examples of spring training stats being a poor indicator of regular season success.

During spring training in 2005, promising Toronto Blue Jays outfielder Gabe Gross set the franchise record with 8 spring home runs. After this impressive display, Gross managed to get into a grand total of 40 games for the Major League team, racking up 102 plate appearances and hitting just one home run in the regular season.

What is more important than statistics are the battles for positions in a particular baseball club. For example, during spring training in 2011, Michael Morse of the Washington Nationals drove playing time during spring games and ended up making the team and racking up impressive fantasy numbers. He increased his role from platoon player to big producer.

For deep fantasy leagues, another key aspect of spring games is the back-of-the-rotation battles between starting pitching candidates. A player like Boston’s Daniel Bard will have a significantly different fantasy impact in the starting rotation compared to a relief role.

Having the opportunity to see players in new roles is another benefit of spring games. A newly anointed closer like Houston’s Brett Myers can be watched during March to see how the adjustment is being handled and if there’s a good opportunity to benefit his fantasy owners.

Keep an eye out for spring training games. Just try to focus on individual roles rather than stats and you should be in a better position to be successful heading into the regular season.