Over the last few days, my compatriots four of my compatriots have begun presenting you with an extremely valuable draft tool: consensus positional rankings. But for those of you who play ottoneu, things differ a bit, especially if you are in a 4×4 or Points League.

Starting today, I am going to take a look at those rankings and let you know where ottoneu players should take a different stance.

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It’s time to finish up the infield. Surprisingly perhaps only to me, third base ended up being the deepest position more years than it wasn’t in my FanGraphs+ auction strategy analysis.

There’s probably more agreement at the top of this position than most, at least more than the shortstops. Once you get past the top three or four, the agreement stops, but then you also have a scrum that looks like it could be one single tier, all the way down past twelve. This could be a position you wait on if you miss the top guys in a mixed league. But don’t wait too long in deep league. It gets dicey again in the late twenties.

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You know what? I don’t think I have to link back to the positions we’ve done before. Because David Appelman was kind of enough to revamp the RotoGraphs landing page, and now you can easily access all your draft tools — including our consensus ranks, and later our tiered positional ranks — just by scrolling your eyeballs to the right an inch-plus. Scroll those eyeballs! Enjoy one-touch draft tools! Applaud the dark overlord!

Okay, back to shortstops. Given the health and bust/regress concerns of the other shortstops in the top five, maybe it’s not surprising that we have a new number one shortstop this season. Starlin Castro won’t wow you in the speed or power stats, but he is on the right side of his peak, and he has been slowly building his skillset, so it seems that his risk of regression is low, and he should be healthy, too. It’s in interesting that we agreed by not agreeing — only one analyst had Castro first, and yet it seems fine that he is first. It’s not like we can just wipe away those lost Jose Reyes seasons.

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We know y’all are starting to draft, so we’re going to pump the rankings out two at a time. We even started over the weekend, you might have noticed. The first baseman were first, the catchers were second, and now we get to the second basemen.

I’m partial to these guys — as a bad glove, no-bat youngster, I usually ended up at second base when I played. And it’s one of those positions that teams seem to find. There, among the failed shortstops and slightly athletic former tweener third basemen, they find a guy that works for them. And no, Matt Carpenter is not ranked here yet, (I might put him around 22nd), because you can’t play a guy in a position where he’s not eligible.

No matter where you find your second baseman, though, you need to find one. On to the ranks.

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Even though I personally find two-catcher leagues torture, I did have to pony up and get two guys in AL-LABR this weekend, so we thought we’d go pretty deep to help you out.

If you’re in a mixed league, with one catcher, it looks like you might as well wait until the end of your draft and spend less than your competitors. There’s a decent group at the top. A Mike Napoli / Brian McCann pairing would have plenty of upside and cost a lot less than Buster Posey.

But get down into the dregs of this position, and we know how bad it can get.

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Thing might look a little different this year. We’ve got tools upon tools for your drafts this year, and they should be easier to get to now. But we will still do consensus rankings, and we’ll still do tiered rankings. Because it’s all helpful in different ways.

But it’s time for the consensus ranks first.

It’s also worth putting down on ‘paper’ why we do the consensus ranks the way we do them. We have Jeff Zimmerman, Mike Podhorzer and Zach Sanders submitting their individual ranks alongside mine for a couple of reasons. The first is that four is the minimum ‘n’ we can give you: more of a sample should give you a better ranking. It’s like a mini crowd-source. And the second reason is really the same, in an alternate package: each of us uses projections to a different extent, and each of us uses intuition and research to a different extent. And yes, we have the Steamer projection numbers listed here, but no, none of the rankings is solely based on those projections. In any case, you’ll get five numbers to look at, and you can choose which one you like.

To the first basemen!

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Phew. After a nearly four and a half hour snake draft online, I have officially completed the earliest draft in my fantasy baseball career. LABR stands for League of Alternative Baseball Reality, and along with Tout Wars, is one of the two most publicized “expert” leagues. In the past, LABR has had only two leagues, an AL-Only and NL-Only, with both formats using a live auction in Arizona to select players. Last year, a mixed league with an online draft was formed and I participated in the inaugural season as well. With that background out of the way, let’s get into more league specifics.

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I’m happy to announce the fantasy values have come to FanGraphs+! Based on Steamer projections, these values are for standard, OBP, and “only” leagues based on the following descriptors: 12 teams, 23 starting lineup slots, $260 budget. They will appear on the projections’ leaderboard for FanGraphs+ subscribers ($4.99/yr).

The methodology for these values has long floated around the site, but there are a few minor changes that have been made to better the accuracy and efficacy of these values.

The replacement levels have been altered to cover a full league’s worth of players. In the past, we had assumed that the last round of two contained replacement players, but discarding this assumption leads to fuller, more accurate auction values. Now, the top 276 players are worth a combined $3120, which is the full budgeted amount for a 12-team auction draft.

In the past, we’d limited results to players that met a certain at-bat or innings threshold. This is no longer the case. However, there is still need for a baseline uninfluenced by low counting stats, the league averages and standard deviations were calculated using the players with at least 350 ABs or 40 IP.

FanGraphs+ Giveaway!

Name the player the following player capsule describes in the comments and win free access to FanGraphs+!

The 33-year-old [Player] is past his “prime.” While he used to provide some power ([number less than ten] homers in 2010), he looks to be done. He never hit for average (.232 career), but it dropped to [number less than .232] this last year. Two pitchers, Hamels (.217) and Kershaw (.207), had better averages in 2012 (70 minimum plate appearances). Also, the power disappeared, as he ended the season with only one home run. Finally, he stole two bases which was only one off of his career high. Basically he is not good enough to play and when he does, he produces no value. (Jeff Zimmerman)

The last two weeks we had good discussions about prospects best suited to help you in batting average and stolen bases. This week, we’ll be discussing HOME RUNS. As a reminder, I won’t be talking about draft position, ottoneu, or auction prices and because these discussions are more complex than I initially though, I’m abandoning the rigid No Doubt, Overrated, and Sleeper categories and going with a typical straight ranking from now on. Read the rest of this entry »

After 15 rounds in Rotographs’s 12-team ridiculously early draft, 13 second basemen have been drafted. A few surprises have popped up, but again in 2013, the 2B position has it talent spread out pretty evenly.

Note: Aaron Hill was not included when the article first ran. He has been now included.

To begin with, here are the Oliver Projections for the 2B qualified players who have been drafted from rounds 1 to 15:

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