Justin Mason’s 2022 Apology Tour: Draft Champions #1

2022 was the worst year I have ever had as a fantasy player. I played in 16 leagues and did not cash in a single one. The hard part is that I don’t even know what went wrong. I had teams I really liked coming out of the draft and some that were doing very well throughout the season. Over the next few weeks I will deep dive into each team in a series of articles to examine what went wrong and what the common threads were. This is my 2022 Apology Tour.

The fourth team I am covering in my apology tour is my second draft of the year. The draft was a slow draft that began on November 28, 2021. This was a 50 round draft and hold league. It is 5×5 roto with 15 teams. The league had a number of great industry and non-industry players in it and I finished 15th.

The Draft
With the league being a draft and hold, the draft is clearly the most important part of the league. The third spot in the draft which I was fine with because I felt like there was a clear top three early in draft season with Trea Turner, Jose Ramirez, and Fernando Tatis, but this was long before Tatis fractured his wrist.

Spoiler Alert: I ended up with Tatis which is how this team started off so poorly.

In retrospect, the Tatis pick was just bad. Of course I didn’t know he would break his wrist or get suspended, but we all knew about the shoulder woes and in a league like this, you can’t invite injury onto your team because there are no in-season pickups and taking zeros is killer.

The rest of my top five were kind of a mixed bag. Hader clearly didn’t return value but I did get a boatload of saves from him. I overpaid for Mullins and Castellanos, but Mullins was still good enough at that draft spot. Realmuto was a steal in the fifth round.

In spite of not taking a starter until the sixth round, I didn’t do too bad with my early starting pitching. Trevor Rogers was obviously a huge bust, but I got great value from Chris Bassitt, Luis Garcia, and Cal Quantrill. The problem was that I didn’t get enough of it in the middle rounds. Steven Matz got hurt, Bauer never pitched, Carlos Hernandez was awful and then demoted, Daniel Lynch was awful. I also didn’t secure another closer. I got too cute thinking I could get more pitching later on and didn’t.

As far as my offense goes, I had very few great picks like Anthony Santander and Jose Trevino, but I had too many disappointments and not nearly enough at bats. I only had five hitters on this team that registered more than 500 at bats and there is no way you can be competitive like that. Draft and hold leagues like this are battles of at bats and innings pitched and I did not get enough of them.

The Conclusion
Like I mentioned above, draft and hold leagues are about volume. The back half of my draft was pretty atrocious, getting few guys that contributed at all. I am not even including the fact I overslept one day and was autodrafted Dinelson Lamet and a retired Buster Posey. It is possible to overcome early mistakes like Tatis and Rogers, but harder to do if you don’t hit in the second half of the draft.

Ultimately, looking at this draft in retrospect I don’t know what I was doing. Unlike other drafts and leagues I have already looked at, there are no redeeming qualities or apparent strategies that just didn’t work out. I use early drafts like this to learn the player pool and see how drafts look like they are going to fall and it is clear there was no real strategy or plan to this draft. It was a complete garbage fire and I don’t know if there is anything other than bad execution to blame on this early draft.