Fantasy owners usually feel good about their rosters after a draft or auction. They got most of the players they wanted and/or needed. All is good. A nice core lineup is set. A couple of players with several qualified positions are waiting on the bench to fill in for a starter’s off day. Rookies were selected that should be called up soon. A pitching staff that is second to none is ready. The first waiver period expires and the guy that auto-drafted then places a player on the waiver wire you desire. Now, a owner must figure out which player they should drop to pick up the desired player.

Once a fantasy manager has completed their draft or auction, a owner needs to immediately designate the first player to be dropped. Finding a player to drop for a better player should be easy, but many owners struggle with it. It should be known at all times which player is the first to go on the team if an opportunity arises. It gives an owner flexibility to make moves while others are holding onto their preciously drafted team.

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Charlie Saponara of FantasyBaseball365.com got a bunch of experts together for a mock draft last night. Yours truly may not have acquitted himself as well as he’d hoped. He blames the fact that his eyes are permanently crossed after editing 1083 player caps for the Second Opinion this weekend, but no-one wants to hear his excuses — especially now that he’s talking about himself in third person. The. Worst.

What had happened was: a little wobble, one botched pick, and you end up looking at a few spots on your roster with the stank eye. One wobble can bring the train down — and in this case Martin Prado might have been the one-man wobble, or maybe not. Maybe it started earlier.

Since I had the turn, let’s just assess the draft by every two picks.

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At the request of you, the readers, we are covering the early Average Draft Position (ADP) results by individual position  Over the past week, you’ve seen results for Second Basemen and AL Starting Pitchers, so now it’s time to cover the boys behind the plate.  Here are some early ADP results for the Catchers with a few thoughts added in. Read the rest of this entry »

On MockDraftCentral.com, there have been more than 450 drafts completed to date, while there is plenty of disagreement on who should get taken when, there is a clear break between the top five and everyone else. The five guys atop the list are the only five to have garnered a number one overall pick (other than an over-aggressive Robinson Cano selection) and the only five who haven’t fallen outside the top 10. All five have an average draft position (ADP) below 4.75 and no one else is below 8.5.

Matt Kemp, Albert Pujols, Miguel Cabrera, Jose Bautista, and Troy Tulowitzki have established themselves as the top options in the minds of the populace. I am not one to argue with the populace, and if I had a top five pick, I would use it one of these five – but I do think the masses have drafted these five in the wrong order.

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Prince Fielder. Dude is big and powerful and it’s not surprising that the Tigers’ signing of the younger Fielder made a large splash in the wading pool that is the American League Central right now. The splash actually covered much of the first round of next year’s fantasy drafts and impacted leagues in three key ways. Let’s enumerate.

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While projecting a player without any experience in the Major Leagues is difficult enough, we do have processes that help us come to a reasonable estimate of the player’s current talent level. Use some major-league equivalencies to equalize his Minor League numbers, weight the years, add a little boost, take a little off — whatever the details are, we’ve made progress in this arena. Not a ton of progress — a simple Marcel monkey of a projection is still just about as good as any other projection — but some progress.

What’s missing is a way to project playing time. Or at least, a commonly accepted and readily available process for projecting playing time. It’s difficult to do — there are so many moving parts. What will his manager think? How much will a small sample outburst in Spring Training (by the player or his competition for playing time) mean to his front office? Who will get injured? How much does his team value his arbitration years — will he come up with the team because they need his bat now, or will he go to the Minor Leagues to preserve years of control down the line?

All of these are factors in playing time. And, with a rough look at the schedule and at the team, we can actually try to put a number on these possibilities. Let’s try it out with Bryce Harper.

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We started doing these hypotheticals earlier in the offseason as we were discussing potential keepers.  Well now as we get closer to people’s drafts, our own Dan Wade has turned it into a game of Would you Rather Draft.., so I’ve decided to play along.  Second base dilemma here again — Rickie Weeks or Danny Espinosa?

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If we can assume relative health of the available third basemen heading into 2012, the position isn’t such a black hole as it appeared to be going into 2011. But taking an early look at the average draft position (ADP) on Mock Draft Central of those qualifying at the hot corner, it seems you’ll have to strike early or pay dearly if you want anyone who occupies the first couple of tiers.

It’s likely no surprise that Jose Bautista is the highest on the list, and among third basemen, he’s very much in a class by himself. But as it stands, Evan Longoria is even sniffing the first round with an ADP of 12.6. Coming off the board in rounds three and four are David Wright, Adrian Beltre, and Ryan Zimmerman, in that order. In standard leagues, that’s very much your first and second tier — gone by the end of the 4th round.

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In this edition…

How a Japanese pitcher could push back the No. 2 pick’s ETA, why F-Mart landed in the right place and whether a former first-rounder has any hope in a new org.

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Back in July, the man behind the scoring system for ottoneu FanGraphs Points leagues made a modest proposal for an update on pitcher scoring. Justin Merry was generally happy with the scoring system but found that the scores for a few random games made no sense.

To fix those, he recommended adding hits as a category, penalizing pitchers for each hit they allow, and reassessing the value of each of the other stats in accordance with that change. As we head towards 2012, the decision was made to accept his proposal and update scoring for pitchers. By looking back at 2011 stats, we can see the impact this scoring change will have.

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