I am going to finish my fantasy ranking series today (Part 1 and Part 2). Today, I am going to look at how I set up my draft ranking.  It is a little unique, but indispensable for finding draft day values, but I first need to clear up one issue from yesterday.

I am going to go over one problem people are noticing which is how high catchers are in my rankings and the lack of Robinson Cano. Well here are my projections for each. If you disagree, that is a different discussion, I am just looking at the difference in replacement level values:

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About four times a season, Eno unleashes the shocky monkeys and a few of us slow-footed writers are forced to enjoy ranking all the players. For the next few days, I am going to go over how I prepared my rankings.

Note: I am trying to keep the amount of math to a minimum. If somewhere you get lost in the procedure let me know and I can explain the procedure in more detail.

The first item to remember is all leagues are not even close to being the same. In my three keeper leagues, two are points based and the other is an AL only league with one pitcher category being Wins+Saves+Holds. Additionally, some leagues have keepers. How the keeper’s “salary” is set determines a their value. Other league options have innings pitched limits (good rates stats needed) or as in the case of my league with W+S+H, an IP minimum is set to keep owners from only using relief pitchers. Catcher rankings can vary quite a bit from a one catcher to  two catcher leagues or even two catcher slots with a 162 game limit as in Ottoneu. For my rankings, I did them off a basic 5×5 12-team league with 23 positions (14 position players, 9 pitchers).

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Fellow RotoGraphs contributor Howard Bender was kind enough to allow me to participate in a mock draft yesterday afternoon. What follows is pick-by-pick breakdown of the team I ended with. I’m a pretty tough critic on myself, but I really do think this team would not have played out very well for me had this been a real draft. It was a standard non-keeper 5×5 roto league. It had 2-catchers, no bench, but corner and middle infield instead, making them 23-man rosters. The full draft results can be found here.

Round One, Pick Five
Carlos Gonzalez

Gonzalez has gone 20-20 for four straight seasons, which is even more impressive given that he has averaged just 130 games per season. Health is always a question mark when it comes to fantasy baseball, but with CarGo, that question mark is in bold, italics, and underlined size 72 font.
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With early ADP data somewhat unreliable this early in the spring, most of us have been leaning on the numbers coming in from recent NFBC drafts, both real and mock. However, the draft value of certain players and positions in those leagues is often skewed due to the inability to make trades and the ADP numbers aren’t necessarily a true reflection of how drafts go in the “everyman’s” world.

That is why I have created something called the Mock Draft Army.

For those who haven’t heard of it, you can click the link for details, but the sum up is this — with a need for better ADP numbers and early mock drafts lacking in full, reliable participation, I have put together a series of mock drafts made up of a rotating group of 20-30 fantasy writers who participate alongside their readers, Twitter followers and fantasy radio audience. Each draft has anywhere from 6-10 writers and not only do they provide us with some new-look ADP data, but the chat rooms offer a nice, open forum for player discussions, debates, and a chance for readers to ask some of their favorite writers for some personal insight on both players and draft strategy. Thursday night was the Mock Draft Army’s second draft of the season, a 12-team mixed league for a standard 5×5 roto league, and here’s how it went down… Read the rest of this entry »

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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Chris Davis owners are experiencing an unexpected surprise this season. Instead of a possible corner infield or injury replacement, they have one of the top players in the league for pennies on the dollar. On the other end of the spectrum is B.J. Upton who Ron Shandler picked to have “40/40 upside”, but is in the discussion has the worst everyday player in the majors. Going into the 2013 season, Davis and Upton were projected to have similar production because of a uncertain skill set and the similarities ended then.

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Before you go thinking this is just another mock draft column, read the next sentence — your mouse will practically click “more” by itself.

At a time when every fantasy owner and their sister is prepping for the upcoming season by doing mock draft after mock auction…what if we threw a curveball at that concept by selecting only prospects for a mock dynasty league?

That, friends, is what the fine folks over at Fake Teams came up with, and they so graciously asked FanGraphers Mike Newman, J.D. Sussman and me to participate as part of a panel of a baker’s dozen’s worth of prospect pundits. What comes next are the results.

But that’s not all! To help keeper and dynasty league owners everywhere who get to partake in the always-exhilarating, often-painstaking process of drafting prospects, I’ll present my approach and strategy to this enlightening exercise — which when you think about it, was really just a make-believe draft of non-major leaguers for this made-up fantasy game we all love to play.

Yeah, like you’re not gonna click.

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Not to long ago Jason Catania, Mike Newman and I took part in Fake Teams’ Expert Mock Prospect Draft. The rules contemplated a thirteen team league using the traditional 5×5 statistics. I followed my strategy, detailed below, and wouldn’t change a single pick. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, if there’s one thing you can say about doing a lot of mock drafts, it’s that practice makes perfect. And when the world throws you a series of curveballs and you suddenly realize that time has flown by and you haven’t been able to properly prepare for your draft, you already have a pretty strong grip on what you need to do to put together a solid team. You know which players are bucking the typical ADP trends, who the guys are that tend to slip through the cracks, and where some of the popular sleepers are going. Now obviously I don’t recommend being ill-prepared for the biggest day of the fantasy year, but if you start your work early enough, then when life does give you lemons you say, “^%!# the lemonade, I’m turning this into champagne!” Read the rest of this entry »

After being lucky enough to have our friends and colleagues over at The Hardball Times invite me in for yet another mock draft (courtesy of Mock Draft Central), I jumped at the chance to take a new approach. You can find the full results of the draft here.

In my previous “expert” mock draft, I expressed my intent to go for power, even to the point of burning myself in areas of batting average and pitching. In one regard, last night’s draft was similar to the first: once again pitching took a back seat to my hitters. Rather than focus on big power and RBIs, yesterday I strived to go the opposite way and aim for average hitters with lesser power but had the chance to steal more bases. The draft was set up identical to a standard ESPN 5×5 rotisserie redraft leagues with  the exception of having a second catcher and thus 27 roster spots. Read the rest of this entry »