Some people love following prospects from the time the players are in high school and college to when they make it to the majors. I am not one of those people. It is important to have some idea of which prospects may have a impact in an upcoming fantasy baseball season. To keep the process simple every year, I create a combined ranking of different prospect rankings and merge them into one composite ranking. This year ranking ended using 7 different lists (I waited until Baseball America released their list to make it complete). Seven minds are better than one, especially if the one mind is mine.

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Last night, the FanGraphs Staff League II finished up its fantasy auction. Starting at 6:30pm EST, we plugged away until our eyes became blurry, our muscle coordination began to fail, and we became so delirious that even Chone Figgins and Ryan Roberts started to look damn attractive. Staring at a computer screen intensely for 5 hours — stressing out over fringe major-league players — is a recipe to make anyone go insane.

Now that our draft is done, I figured I’d share with everyone a nifty resource that I put together: a tiered ranking for every position, based on players’ projected points according to ZiPS and CAIRO. As I explained in my first post:

I took ZiPS projections for hitters (from the Baseball Think Factory) and CAIRO projections for [starting] pitchers (from RLYW), and then converted these projections into an expected point total for each player. I then broke these players up by position and tiered them, allowing me to see at a glance which positions were deeper than others and which might hold unexpected value.

Well, here is my spreadsheet (right-click, “Save As”). I’ve included the prices that players went for in our draft (minus some of the later round selections, when I couldn’t keep up). This is obviously most helpful for FanGraphs Points leagues, but it’s not a bad proxy for other leagues as well. I’ve included my tiers, and then also included the larger ZiPS and CAIRO projections so that you can find points projections for other players not included in the tiers.

Please keep in mind that these spreadsheets are far from perfect. The projections don’t account for issues like playing time or injuries — Notice how Victor Martinez is highly ranked? — and projection systems are notoriously rough when it comes to rookies. I have not tampered with these rankings in any way, though, because I wanted to present them to you relatively unbiased (you still have to deal with my somewhat arbitrary cut-off points for tiers).

Based on these rankings, there were a couple players that I targeted coming into the draft, since I thought they might be underrated by most people. I didn’t end up with all of these players, but they all did end up being pretty good bargains:

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The trouble with writing up any type of offseason primer or plan is that, inevitably, something changes with a player, rendering the writing useless. For example, Edinson Volquez and Yonder Alonso were traded the morning after I’d written up their player caps for FG+. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that mere hours after I wrote a section on David Aardsma as a free agent and possible midseason pick up, he would sign a two-year contract with the Yankees. Oh well, C’est la guerre.

Spring Training is a time for small stories to become huge stories simply because there aren’t really good things to talk about yet. Yes, pitchers and catchers finally reported, but unless PFP is the kind of the thing that really revs your engine, good stories are still few and far between. This is how something minor like Tim Lincecum’s tight back briefly becomes a serious concern. Another of these tempest-in-a-teapot spring stories is Mariano Rivera hinting that 2012 may be his last season. I get that for Yankees fans, it means a storied career coming to an end and there’s always some sadness with that, but the man is headed into his age-42 season. This was going to happen sooner or later with sooner as the early favorite.

It’s with an eye toward the post-Rivera future that Yankees GM Brian Cashman has signed Aardsma to be an option for the possibly vacant 2013 closers role. Unlike Rafael Soriano in 2011, however, Aardsma won’t be spending his 2012 racking up  innings as an uncloser and waiting for his chance. The 30-year-old right-hander is still working his way back from the Tommy John surgery that was performed in late July of last year. That means there’s virtually no way Aardsma comes back before August 1 and while one year is the commonly accepted timeline for return from Tommy John, newer research suggests that the figure is probably just a little longer than that, which would push Aardsma closer to a mid-August return.

This makes him unusable in redraft leagues, and to be frank, I don’t even see him as a waiver option this season. He’ll be facing major league hitters for the first time since the end of 2010 at the end of the fantasy season and beginning of the fantasy playoffs, which introduces an awful lot of risk for a player who may need 3-4 low leverage outings to get his feeling back. I think there’s every reason to believe he’ll be more valuable for the Yankees than he is for fantasy players in 2012.

For keeper and dynasty players, however, the calculus is a little different. Is Aardsma worth stashing in a DL spot for most or all of 2012 to have the potential Yankee closer on your roster for 2013? The short answer is that I doubt it. The way Aardsma’s deal is structured is such that it’s not actually a two-year deal, it’s a one-year deal with a team option for 2013. So, if Aardsma looks good in the minors and pitches well down the stretch, the Yankees will retain his rights and put him in the mix for the closers job next year…if Rivera does retire.

There are four options regarding Aardsma’s 2013 status based on his performance in 2012. If he doesn’t pitch well or doesn’t get healthy, the Yankees won’t retain him and his fantasy value going forward is virtually nil. If he pitches well, there are still three options. First, the Yankees choose not to retain him anyway because they feel confident with their younger bullpen options and let him go back to free agency. Second, the Yankees do retain him, but either Rivera comes back for 2013 or they choose to give the closer’s job to David Robertson, Joba Chamberlain, or some other reliever, who may not even be on the roster at this point. Third, Aardsma pitches well in 2011 and gets the job for 2013. So, that’s three potential negative outcomes compared to just one potential positive outcome, which to me seems too risky, even with the upside of having the Yankee closer stashed away at a low cost. As always, your mileage may vary.

I’ll be interested to see how Aardsma looks after watching Joe Nathan struggle a little bit coming back from Tommy John last year. We know that relievers fatigue differently from starters and, at least according to the Journal of Anecdotal Medicine, seem to be prone to less predictable returns from surgery. If Aardsma does return to pitch well in 2012, he’ll definitely be on my radar for 2013 drafts whether he’s with the Yankees or not, but there’s enough ambiguity in his future that I’ll be watching from afar this year rather than taking him on as risk.

The consensus around the fantasy industry seems to be that John Axford is a top tier closer while Joel Hanrahan is more of a second tier guy. Among closers, Axford has been drafted third in standard mock drafts on Mock Draft Central and fifth in expert drafts, while Hanrahan sits at eighth and tenth respectively. To me, there seems to be a bit too large of a gap between their draft positions.

Hanrahan has posted two consecutive sub-3.00 FIP seasons, though his ERA dropped almost two full runs from 2010 to last season. The drop in ERA had a lot to do with Hanrahan’s pitching approach, as he threw his fastball over 15% more than his career average. This resulted in a 10% increase in ground balls and only one home run allowed compared to his yearly average of six long balls given up.

While his career BABIP of .318 and 8.2% HR/FB ratio point to a regression, — he posted a career best .282 BABIP and 1.9% HR/FB ratio last year — his new approach seems to be a good counter-point against his numbers reverting back to career rates. Even if you do expect a regression, he should maintain similar success on batted balls with his new fastball heavy method.

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The newest out of Reds camp — other than the completely unsurprising fact that noted veteran-lover Dusty Baker won’t declare Devin Mesoraco his number one catcher yet — is that the team might try Aroldis Chapman in the rotation. From a team value standpoint, it makes all the sense in the world. From a fantasy standpoint, however, his prognosis is mixed.

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As flawed as ADP analysis may be, you have to admit it’s a boatload of fun to dissect, right?! And heck, when games aren’t yet being played, what else are we going to write about? So today I am looking at the players whose ADP has changed the most over the last two weeks during drafts conducted at Mock Draft Central. I only looked at the top 276 players, since that’s how many players are selected in standard 12-team leagues.

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After finally having somewhat of a breakout season in 2010, after showing little progress over the previous three seasons, Delmon Young disappointed once again last season, actually posting the worst wOBA of his career. He dealt with injuries to his oblique and ankle, which limited him to 473 at-bats and likely hurt his production. With the addition of Prince Fielder, let’s see if we should expect a rebound.

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We rely on mock drafts to help guide us on trends without necessarily acting as the definitive voice. They’re somewhat like exit polls in politics — we’re just trying to get a pulse on public opinion before we see the actual results, with the exception that in mock baseball drafts, we can’t be entirely assured that a human being actually made the pick.

The problem being of course, is that mock drafts across formats is a lot like exit polls in Wyoming versus New York. So much depends on context. For instance – if you’re targeting Ian Stewart for any particular reason, Yahoo would suggest that you should expect to see him taken in the 20th round. If you trust Mock Draft Central, he is drafted at roughly 442, should anyone ever get to that round awake.

Stewart is an extreme case but it’s worth pointing out the differences in systems. As you well know, how a player is ranked in the draft room almost inevitably impacts where they are ultimately drafted — and some of the differences are so big that it could dramatically alter your draft approach.

Focusing solely on third base — here are some of the players that have a pretty major difference between Mock Draft Central and Yahoo’s current ADP. For the heck of it, I threw in any notable percentage changes in trend at MDC in case recent news has them moving up or down, and I tossed in the rankings of Eric Karabell over at ESPN (those that made his top 100 anyway).

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Yu Darvish isn’t baseball’s only super-hyped, high-priced international import this year; the Athletics also made waves when they signed Cuban outfielder Yoenis Cespedes. There has been some speculation that he could begin the season in the minors just to get acclimated to the best pitching he’s ever faced (as well as shake off the rust after such a long layoff), but it doesn’t sound like that will happen after signing for four years and $36 million.

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Yesterday, my colleague and fantasy competitor, Steve Slowinski, broke down day one of the inaugural auction for the Second FanGraphs Staff League, with an eye towards how his strategy played out. Today we reconvene to finish our bidding marathon, but before we do so, I wanted to take a more general look at part one.

First and foremost, despite Mr. Slowinski’s kind words, I am not sure I am as well positioned as he thinks, nor am I sure my attempt at patience was as smart as it seemed. And that is due to what I would consider some oddities in the bidding.

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