Another AL-LABR draft is the books, and after finishing top half in 2014, and then at the very bottom in 2015, I figured I should change my strategy a bit going into this year’s draft. In some ways, I built the same team I always do for the League of Alternate Baseball Reality — I hate dollar players, and hate spending for the most expensive players, and I dive for the middle — but my preparation was different. You can’t completely change your stripes, in the end. You can only hope to tweak em.

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On Thursday I participated in my first ever industry mock draft, organized by Nick Mariano of RotoBaller (who reviewed it here) and which included our own Brad Johnson (who reviewed it here) and Justin Mason filling in for the ever-busy Paul Sporer.

Per FantasyPros’ playbook, which taps the site’s player projections, I — with a thousand air quotes — “came out on top.” Of course, a good draft is but one part of a championship season — thus, the many air quotes.

I never expected to do so well and had all sorts of excuses lined up for when I would rank dead last.

• I didn’t have my cheat sheet. (True, although I have my first six-or-so rounds memorized at this point.)
• I’m terrible at snake drafts. (Also true, at least in my obviously glowing opinion of myself. I adhere pretty strongly to the Studs and Duds strategy, and snake drafts, by their nature, tend to prevent it.)
• It’s my first industry mock draft. (Still true. My heart was racing, which made me feel pretty embarrassed as I sat in my office, alone, eating microwavable pad thai out of a pouch, waiting for the draft to start.)

But, shoot. I pulled it off.

Except… I didn’t actually want to.

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Last night, my friends over at RotoBaller hosted a 12-team industry draft. Nine major fantasy providers were represented including me, Paul Sporer, and Alex Chamberlain for RotoGraphs. Justin Mason provided the assist for Sporer who was also drafting his #BeatSporer league.

While we talked a big game about preferring auction drafts, we did a snake because they take half the time. And the league isn’t even real. As somebody said, it’s a fake fake baseball league. We picked 23 players – 2 C, MI, CI, 5 OF, and all the normal stuff. No bench. We didn’t use RTS so no pretty auto-generated table. Here is the team I drafted, and you should be able to view our league.

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The worst kept secret in the fantasy sports industry is that the people in it are amazing. A little over a year ago, with the help of some friends (with fantasy benefits), I entered the industry with a silly little podcast, a website, and no real expectations that it would ever turn into anything more than a hobby. I was pleasantly surprised to find out how helpful and encouraging the majority of the fantasy industry is. No one ever said no to an appearance. I was given a ton of advice on what works and what doesn’t in the industry. You read what these people write and listen to what they have to say, but what you don’t realize is that they are just as cool in real life as they appear to be from the outside. Read the rest of this entry »

That headline is not the slogan for Twitter, but it could be!

I got home from softball last night and really wanted to draft a baseball team. I wasn’t sure if anyone else was feeling the same, but figured I’d see if Twitter could fill up a mock draft over at CouchManagers and I was surprised when it filled in minutes. I was just doing their default setup which I didn’t realize was a non-standard roster construction of 18 rounds: C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, OF, OF, OF, UT, P, P, P, P, P, and Bench x4. To be honest I was a little bummed by that because I don’t play in any leagues with that format making it tough to draw much from the exercise.

So I decided to set up a second draft to run concurrently that ran a standard 23 rounds with the usual C, C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, CI, MI, OF, OF, OF, OF, OF, UT, P x9. I figured the first draft would be just a feeling out of where players are going very generally while the other draft would offer a better idea of team construction and give a bit more info about the market. By the way, I’ll be doing more evening (and even some midday) mocks over at CouchManagers during the winter so stay tuned on Twitter for info.

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As part of some midseason RotoGraphs shenanigans organized by Brad Johnson, the Birchwood Brothers (aka Michael and Dan Smirlock) invited me into the Birchwood Derby, a midseason re-draft league. A post-draft recap seems appropriate, mostly because this was my first midseason re-draft ever.

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Here, let me bare my flaws to you. Let me be your guinea pig. Here, laugh at me for my mistakes. I’ve made a few. Here, please let’s point and smirk at my final player on my American League LABR squad. He deserves multiple question marks and perhaps a few exclamation marks. Here, let’s learn from this. So we don’t do it again.

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I’m a dweller in general. In slow drafts, I am the ultimate dweller. In the past, I would have ten+ tabs open at a given time when my draft slots were approaching: FanGraphs player profiles; RotoGraphs consensus rankings; Brooks Baseball Player Cards; BP’s PITCHf/x leaderboard; Rotoworld player news; the list goes on.

Then, prior to draft season, Jeff, Eno and I worked on these Arsenal Scores so that you can compare pitcher repertoires. You now have a go-to pitcher matrix if you’re dwelling on a cluster of pitchers.

Last week, Jeff Zimmerman furnished this glorious Hitter Analytics post, which provided us with a go-to hitter matrix when we’re dwelling on a cluster of hitters.

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Last Sunday, the FanGraphs Ottoneu League #2 did our auction. Chad Young, Brad Johnson and Scott Spratt have each given their thoughts on it. It was a unique auction (most are in some way) and by making a few early adjustments I was able to come away from it better than I expected.

To begin with, I hate to start any fantasy season in complete rebuild mode. I want to have a chance to win if everything goes right. Before last season was half way over I had about zero chance of winning so then I started a rebuild. I had the most free agent dollars, I picked up some $1 players (Harrison, Petit, Boxburger, House) and waited for a team to drop a high dollar player to free up some cash. The plan worked great by getting Joey Votto and Brian McCann. Also, I like prospects, even if they have limited upside, near the majors and picked up players like Matt Wisler, Carlos Rodon and Ty Kelly.

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Last week, we came out with our Top 300. The outcomes looked excellent and I would not hesitate simply using the presented composites for your drafts.

CoolWinnebago asked if we would present our approaches. I provided a high level summary under bago’s comment, but I’ll summarize and then embed my personal rankings (without all the highlighting of my targets of course).

Feel free to skip toward the bottom for my embedded rankings, but here is the context/approach:

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