Before the Draft

            With Spring Training just around the corner its almost time for the most important time in baseball, fantasy draft day!  Yes fantasy baseball is one of many things that gets me excited me for the baseball season and one of the most intense times of the entire fantasy league is the draft.  The draft is possibly the single most important time of the year for fantasy players since this is what’s going to shape your year and give you sleepless nights thinking “if only I was able to get Kris Medlen in the 10^th.”  While I plan on give my personal rankings position by position I think it’s prudent to start any fantasy article by throwing ideas and hints for those new to fantasy baseball.  These are things that I have learned in the 7 years of play and taking my many lumps making the mistakes or getting lucky and coming out on top.

Pick a league: I’m going to start by saying that many of my suggestions are things you’ll first go “no duh you moron!”  So after reading the name hear me out and let me explain what I mean.  Fantasy leagues come in all shapes and sizes and it’s very important to know what kind of league your comfortable with.  The smaller the league the more “stacked” the league is going to be and it will to have a team full of star players.  On the other hand a 12 or 14 team league is going to test your skill since players will be taken earlier and the addition to 2 to 4 teams means more players will be gone in the end of the draft changing the value of certain players.  For new players I suggest sticking to a 10-team league since it’s considered the standard sized league and it gives a good balance of challenge.

Know the stats: This is linked to picking a league since it’s the determining factor on who and how you draft.  The most basic fantasy league is a 10-team 5x5 league where the 10 stats are split evenly between batting and pitching.  Batting average, homeruns, runs, RBI’s, and stolen bases for batting and pitching’s you have ERA, WHIP, strikeouts, saves, and wins.  For new players this is the stats you should go for since they’re the easier to find and easiest to draft for.  More advanced leagues do change the stats you play for and it changes how you draft and play.  For example I play all my leagues in that same 5x5 style but I don’t use batting average I use OBP. How does this change the draft you ask?  Well for starters it makes the middle picks and end picks drastically different from what you’d see on cheat sheets, something we’ll be covering shortly, and makes the value of players change.  Adam Dunn was always a go person to look at in an OBP league since his .220 batting average always made him a liability but his .330-.340 OBP made him one of the more underrated players in the game.

Pick your team name: This is a silly yet fun part of fantasy since it’s going to become how your league is going to refer to you during the season.  Have fun with it and make something clever.  Me I like to show off my thoughts of the Astros in my team name calling myself the Depressed Astros Fan and depending on the level of confidence in my team I add a word to describe it.  Last year I was the Slightly Less Depressed Astros Fan since I liked the team more than I had previously…but in the end I’m still and Astros fan.  What?  Did you think everything on this list had to be serious?  You can stress over the season when it comes up so might as well have some fun now.

Come in with a strategy: Ok back to being serious and lets talk about getting a strategy down.  For the causal fan this isn’t going to be an issue since they’re likely to pick their favorite players early and just wing the rest of the draft.  More serious players come in with a plan on not just who but when they’re going to draft.  This comes with experience and it comes with practice.  Another thing to consider is the strength and depth of talent in any one position since that will give you an idea of who important it is to draft that position.  While no plan will survive contact with the enemy its best to know what stats your gunning for early and instead of drafting for players draft for numbers and players you are certain will get you there.

Mock Drafts are your friend: So how do players who aren’t experienced in fantasy drafts get an idea of how to draft and who to draft or just when to draft what position?  Sort answer is mock drafts and you do a lot of them.  Besides being fun, I do my fair share of them just to see how I would do and to try out other ideas; it gives you a great idea of how the draft will play out.  Mock drafts are where you put plans and strategies into motion and see how they fair against other players that have their own ideas and plans.  You’ll be surprised on how often your plans will go a stray because someone drafts out of slot, drafting a player out of the expected position, and your stuck scrambling to get your picks back in order.  Since there’s no penalty to mock drafts you can learn from mistakes and see how your plan worked.  Tweak it and start planning for those times that it went wrong.

Make a cheat sheet/pre-draft rankings: Now this is the first one that I don’t find super important since in the end of the day places like ESPN and Yahoo already set their draft board set to their rankings and your welcome to use that.  But a cheat sheet can be important for keeping an eye on players your trying to keep secret or just to help track everything that happens in the draft.  The option that I choose is to go to the editing section of the pre-draft section and make your own rankings.  While this is time consuming and can be confusing when you see a player you hate go above someone you love since you ranked them differently than ESPN did it is a good way to track the players YOU want.  This works very well when your down on players since they wont show up on your board and other players will draft them so there’s no mistakes, trust me I’ve seen it happen.  This also works well for players your high on and want to take early; this is closer to the end of the draft since this is where you’ll grab your sleepers and other players you don’t expect to get drafted.

            I think we’ve covered the basics of getting ready for your fantasy draft.  Next time we’ll discuss the actual strategies to look for and ones that are commonly employed.  As for now I’d like to hear your team names and names you’ve had in the past.  Maybe next time I’ll post them in the article: funny ones, serious ones, clever ones I like them all so lets see them in the comments!