Monday night, we got some people together in a virtual room to pick real players for a fake baseball game — hopefully for your tangible benefit.

I struggled with how to present this. I’m unsure anyone wants to read through words on top of words on top of words for each round. So I’ll give you the participants, and the draft, and let you make the comments. This mock will help us in our analysis, and we’ll refer to it in future pieces. But to award a best and worst pick in each round just tells you what I think.

And the beauty of this mock is that it’s about what all of us thought late Monday night, February third. What do you think about what we thought?

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From time to time, I’ll hear reference to BeerGraphs as if we’re trying to legislate which beers are actually the best with our numbers. I don’t really think that’s the aim — we research beer trends and report what the numbers say, and we try to offer different ways to slice available numbers so that you can make more informed decisions. There’s no way to analytically prove which beer is the best.

There’s no way to analytically prove which settings are the best for your fantasy league. It’s fantasy, it’s not real, and so whatever settings you decide are just the rules for the game you are about to play. Different settings do beget different styles of analysis, though, so it’s worth a little thinking to get it right, especially if you are about to start a league that you hope will be around a while.

I’ve got 15 leagues. I’ll just write about the pros and cons of each. Maybe that’ll help.

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I’ve seen it said that bullpens win championships, but I think it’s probably just the last piece of the puzzle for a contending team. That’d be hard to tease out in the numbers, but it certainly doesn’t make sense for a team like the Astros to spend resources on their bullpen. They’ve taken it to the extreme in some cases, by trading any and every reliever that had any interest on the market.

That’s how you get an Astros bullpen that was by far the worst in the league last year. By a large margin. At 5.09, their FIP was almost a full run worse than second-worst (Cubs, 4.23). And they ‘accrued’ -5.4 wins. The other four teams with below-replacement pens lost .2 wins or less to their relievers as a group. So, yeah, it was a really bad bullpen.

Two thoughts come to mind about a bad bullpen. The first is that there’s always opportunity in situations like those. Bad teams make for sleepers, since the traditional media focuses on better teams and those players get more name recognition. So don’t ignore the team. But! Bad teams — especially those that don’t score a lot of runs and have bad bullpens around the closer — bad teams do not provide a lot of save opportunities.

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Equal parts infuriating to fantasy baseball players and exciting to forward-thinking baseball fans, this Rangers bullpen has it all. Instead of some boring free agent acquisition to fill the role, or a lucky prospect turned into dominant reliever, the Rangers have turned to a collection of quantity (all with quirks). And quantity is always the best option in the bullpen, where quality usually costs too much money. Deciding which guy saves the most games for the Rangers this year will be tough though.

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Think about the Giants’ infield, and inevitably you wonder if the large mound at third can rebound from a disastrous year at the plate. Of course, there’s a breakout candidate at first base, and two deep leaguers up the middle, but you can’t help thinking about Pablo Sandoval first.

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Hey! Let’s get all of these depth chart discussions in one place, right?

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There’s been some talk about the ideal auction budget mix on twitter recently. Perhaps, if you click this link, you can see some of the conversation between Chris Liss, Mike Gianella, Steve Gardner, Peter Kreutzer, and Jeff Erickson upon which I was snooping. It’s a fairly complicated conversation, and far-reaching. Let’s jump in.

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Steve Cishek was a top-ten reliever this year. Steve Cishek! He’s supposed to be selling seashells by the sea shore, and here he is providing valuable stats for a low cost. Provided what we know about relievers on bad teams, why were fantasy owners nervous about Cishek going into the season? And did the last 70 innings solve those problems? If so, why not take Steve Cishek as a top-tenner this year?

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Today on the front of the site, I wrote about Bronson Arroyo, and how he’s been better than his peripherals for five years now. The two-second version of the piece is that he’s played in front of a defense that was tops in the National League over that same time frame. The longer version led to a few more questions that I’d like to explore here.

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In 2012, the prospect world was down on James Paxton. He was still getting strikeouts based on his curve, but his velocity was down and his control was terrible. Then he got his knee fixed, and suddenly he’s a desired commodity again. His story might remind us: as every baseball manager will tell you, it’s important not to get too high or too low. An even keel provides the best foundation for honest appraisal.

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