DRAFT DAY APPROACHETH....WHO IS IN YOUR LEAGUE

Pitchers, catchers, and would be non roster invitees are preparing for the 2010 season so that means your draft day preparation begins as well. As you prepare, you need to know who is in your league and how they may be preparing. Each league is made up of different components. See if you can identify who may be in your league this year.

1. LAZY GUY If you are drafting online, do not use the rankings the queue gives you. After all, the rankings are from one source and the half of the league that was too lazy to rank their own players becomes incredibly predictable. Don't be part of that half. Since you are going to be working this league for six months take an extra few hours to pre rank your players.
2. EXPERT GUY Refrain from the mantra of, "I did alot of research so I want to show everyone how smart I am." These player are the king of the reach. They draft players earlier than most everyone has them rated and has to comment on every pick with a brush off or stamp of approval. These guys are annoying.
3. PRESEASON GUY Pre-draft standings are the most worthless piece of information ever invented. Immediately after the draft, their is software that will tell you who will win your league based on projections. Hey Roto breath, let's play the season first before we anoint a champion. Do not fall into that trap
4. SABER GUY Sabermetrics is a crutch. Saberheads will justify every pick with some obsure stat that comes from another language. I get it, you mathmeticians can read numbers and apply them. I also get that if I put twelve sabermetrics guys in one league one of them will finish last. Sabermetrics stats are a great tool, but only that, a tool for success.
5. HOMER GUY Before every online draft, I like to find out where everyone is from or who their favorite team is because invariably the hometown guy will tip his hand. When a guy names his team, Yankee Fanatic 26, he might as well say, man crush.
6. ROOKIE GUY There always seems to be one guy who drafts all rookies and young players early so he can be the guy that says, "I discovered Gordon Beckham when he was a rookie." In reality you are the guy who drafted him seven rounds earlier than anyone else. We all know about him, just didn't want him that early.
7. NO RESEARCH GUY This guy shows up and after every pick says, "Man I didn't have time to do any research." I never believe these guys except when they ask to borrow my notebook of information!"
8. SCOUT GUY This guy drafts every player on a hunch...they are a dying breed. Whether the scout guy wants to admit it, he still is using WHIP for pitchers and on base percentage for hitters. Stats and scouts are not mutually exclusive.
9. GIMMICK GUY These guys are fun to be in a league with because every year that show up with a draft strategy that is off the wall. They show up and draft nine pitchers in a row or the next year they take all hitters who only steal bases and hit for average. The next year they only draft relievers. Heaven forbid they win your league because from that point on they will be bragging about their league title in 1993 when they won with one of those crazy strategies.

Obviously, I am taking the most extreme cases here. Most importantly, don't fall into one of these catagories. Best of luck in your leagues this year.

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Fantasy Baseball Draft Strategy: Batting Average and Saves

Ok, 2009 has arrived for fantasy baseball and your draft is probably coming up. If you play in a 5x5 rotisserie league then you know you need a very good draft strategy in order to out draft your opponents .This year isn't that much different from last year for me. Last year I keyed on players who hit homeruns and stole bases along with closers. This year I'm keying on batting average and saves while keeping the power hitting, base thieves close by. I want you all to note that the draft is not everything. It isn't the end-all-be-all of your season. There is still lots of work to do and decisions to make during the season. However, it is important to get off on the right foot.

Batting Average
In every draft strategy, you have to decide on what angle you want to attack the draft from. As I mentioned above, last year I focused on players with certain skills like power and speed and it paid off. This year is a tad different, but rather than focus on homeruns/steals (there is just a plentiful supply in 2009), focus on batting average. I love batting average in 2009 because it covers the field when it comes to 5x5 scoring and gives you the greatest advantage during the draft. You might ask, how does targeting one category give me the greatest advantage? First off, you need to come out of the draft dominating a category if you can. There are 10 categories, normally 12 managers. Someone has to be the best team for each category, right? If you draft more focused instead of targeting across the board it will give you an advantage going into the season. The first key is getting players with high batting average potential from the start and throughout the draft whenever possible. A player with a good batting average tends to have other qualities. I mean if he's getting lots of hits, can some of them be homeruns? If he is getting lots of hits, then he is on base allot and being on base means more steals and more runs? Finally, if you are getting the hits, there has to be guys on base at some point, so RBIs come across.

There is one more advantage for going for batting average and that has to do with what I said earlier about dominating a category. Having the best overall team average coming out of the draft gives you a foundation to work from and it sets you up nicely in the other categories as mentioned. For example in the first round, if you can avoid players like Ryan Howard, Jose Reyes, or Grady Sizemore that would be great. Getting a Hanley Ramirez, Albert Pujols, even AROD would serve you much better. Say you get Albert Pujols. With Pujols you get average, homeruns, RBIs, and runs. The key is you get average. Later in the draft say you get Jacoby Ellsbury. We assume he will get to the .300 mark, steal 50 bases, and score 100+ runs. So when your pick comes up for offensive players and YOU HAVE to choose between a few similar players, lean towards the high average potential (HAP for acronym lovers) guys.

Saves
The save category is just as important as batting average only for the pitching side. Good closers always tends to carry a low ERA, decent WHIP, get 60-80 strikeouts, and notch a half a dozen wins or so. So in fact having a strong bullpen really gives you a strong pitching staff. We have always advocated drafting closers early as they hold as much value as some of the top hitters. Lets consider the two top closers for 2008 Francisco Rodriguez and Jonathan Papelbon. If you drafted Rodriguez early last year than you has a huge advantage in saves, which as far as I remember counts as one category or 10% of the categories. However, he also added 77 strikeouts to your totals and with the average starting pitcher getting 155 strikeouts that is allot of strikeouts to make a difference on your total. Finally his ERA was 2.24 and 2 wins. Papelbon was nearly the same only less saves. He had 41 saves, 77 Ks, 5 wins, and a microscopic .95 WHIP. Both closers pitched roughly 69 innings. Regardless of what some people think of closers, if you have enough of them they will make a tremendous impact on your pitching rotation and give you the 12 points in the saves category. They will also move you up the ladder in ERA, strikeouts, and even wins and WHIP.

So by dominating those two categories you can effectively dominate the draft and go into the season the front runner. Now, it's hard to come out of a draft on top of two categories, but those are often the two most overlooked categories during a draft as they are overshadowed by homeruns and steals. We do recommend that the secondary categories you should get are homeruns and steals, especially gem players who score well in both catyegories. If you have to give up average for a pick, do it for a 20/20 or 30/30 type guy. Clearly the best player you can get in a draft is a power hitting, base stealing, high average player. That is probably obvious, and that is why guys like Hanley Ramirez, Matt Holiday, David Wright, Alex Rodriguez, etc... make the first round. There are players later in the draft who will impact homeruns and steals as well, so never fear you will get your numbers.

Just a note, last year I won the 2008 Fantasy Baseball Search Expert League. Now, this was a 5x5 H2H format, but when the rotisserie numbers were totaled at the end, I won the league in a standard roto format as well with 96 total points. Tim Dierkes of Roto Authority finished the next closest at 91 points. Now, I'm not mentioning this merely to show off or brag. I'm telling you this because I scored the best in team average and the save categories netting me 24 points and a clear advantage across the board. Having those two categories wrapped up, I managed to also score big in Homeruns (10), RBI (12), ERA (11), WHIP (11), and wins (9). My worse pitching category was strikeouts (8). I'm not saying that dominating saves and batting average did all that for me. What I am saying is it setup a strong foundation for my team to excel across the board and limited slumps and absolute weakness in 90% of the categories. I did score poorly in SBs (4), but we all can't be perfect.



To see more on the 2008 Fantasy Baseball Search Expert League, http://www.fantasybaseballsearch.com/2008_expert_league.asp