Reader Mock Draft: Catchers ADP Analysis

If you’re using ADP to help guide you through your draft, it’s always good to see it in action.  The lists you see on Mock Draft Central are great because of the aggregate data, but you know how a lot of mocks go — sometimes you get guys that stay for the first 10 rounds and then leave, putting it on auto-pick the rest of the way.  That just skews the data towards the site’s rankings and becomes less helpful.  So while the sample size is tiny, let’s look at the RotoGraphs Reader Mock Draft and see how a group of informed and dedicated fantasy baseball citizens did with their catchers in comparison to the ADP data we see.

Now as we’ve discussed before, the catcher ADP can be tough to break down because it doesn’t differentiate between one and two catcher leagues.  This draft was a two catcher league, so you would have to think that some of the draft positions would be higher than the basic ADP for just that reason.

Some interesting developments, no?

A couple of different preferences in the early goings as Brian McCann was taken ahead of Mike Napoli and Matt Wieters went ahead of Joe Mauer.  The picks weren’t too far off from their ADP ranks, but as you can see in the differentials, grabbing a top five/six backstop was a serious priority for some.

Not only was that jump for Wieters pretty substantial, but The Drew Henson’s had already grabbed a catcher three rounds prior.  Hard to believe that having both of them is going to give any kind of substantial advantage overall.  Yes, if you’re just comparing backstops, but that’s slighting the rest of your team quite a bit seven rounds in.

Once the top six were off the board, there was a serious play for catchers that ran ahead of the usual schedule.  Again, perhaps it was the two catcher need that lingered in the back of people’s minds, but the jumps for J.P Arencibia, Wilson Ramos, and Geovany Soto were pretty big.

Once the top 12 catchers were off the board, the rest of it, ADP-wise, was just a free for all.  The Lucky Strikes made a major jump to land Devin Mesoraco in the 17th round, nearly 40 picks higher than where he usually goes, while middle-of-the-pack talent like Nick Hundley, Jonathan Lucroy and Jarrod Saltalamacchia became afterthoughts in most people’s eyes.

Now I certainly wouldn’t want to dismiss using ADP when determining where to draft your catchers, but this league, as an example, shows that it may be useful early on, but the deeper you go into your draft, the less reliable it is.  Obviously, personal preference takes the wheel here.  Hyped youngsters like Mesoraco and Arencibia will go way ahead of schedule, the less sexy options (Lucroy and Salty) drop like a stone and old veterans (Hernandez and Soto), regardless of their drop in overall production, will still get by on their names.