Archive for mock draft analysis

Fellow RotoGraphs contributor Howard Bender was kind enough to allow me to participate in a mock draft yesterday afternoon. What follows is pick-by-pick breakdown of the team I ended with. I’m a pretty tough critic on myself, but I really do think this team would not have played out very well for me had this been a real draft. It was a standard non-keeper 5×5 roto league. It had 2-catchers, no bench, but corner and middle infield instead, making them 23-man rosters. The full draft results can be found here.

Round One, Pick Five
Carlos Gonzalez

Gonzalez has gone 20-20 for four straight seasons, which is even more impressive given that he has averaged just 130 games per season. Health is always a question mark when it comes to fantasy baseball, but with CarGo, that question mark is in bold, italics, and underlined size 72 font.
Read the rest of this entry »

Before you go thinking this is just another mock draft column, read the next sentence — your mouse will practically click “more” by itself.

At a time when every fantasy owner and their sister is prepping for the upcoming season by doing mock draft after mock auction…what if we threw a curveball at that concept by selecting only prospects for a mock dynasty league?

That, friends, is what the fine folks over at Fake Teams came up with, and they so graciously asked FanGraphers Mike Newman, J.D. Sussman and me to participate as part of a panel of a baker’s dozen’s worth of prospect pundits. What comes next are the results.

But that’s not all! To help keeper and dynasty league owners everywhere who get to partake in the always-exhilarating, often-painstaking process of drafting prospects, I’ll present my approach and strategy to this enlightening exercise — which when you think about it, was really just a make-believe draft of non-major leaguers for this made-up fantasy game we all love to play.

Yeah, like you’re not gonna click.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the two drafts the Rotographs staff has done so far this winter, James McDonald hasn’t exactly been a hot commodity. In the snake draft, he was skipped entirely and he hardly fared better in the auction, where he went for just a dollar. Mike Minor, on the other hand, came off the board in the 15th round in the snake and was one of the intriguing $9 pitchers from the auction. Simply put, were a majority of drafts to happen in this week, Minor would be rostered in pretty much every applicable league while McDonald would probably enter the season as a waiver wire option.

Looking solely at the duo’s final numbers, that wide of a split seems odd. Minor looks the better of the two in this light, but the difference looks like it should be measured in rounds or dollars not drafted or not. Take a look: Read the rest of this entry »

Edit: It should be noted that several players listed below were not drafted with the intention of making them primary third basemen. Mike Petriello grabbed both Headley and Trumbo, and I took Ryan Zimmerman early, then both Freese and Scutaro later on as my CI/MI players. Machado was picked up by Jeff Zimmerman, who already had Hanley who could play either SS or 3B. 

Even after the decline of two staples at third base in Kevin Youkilis and Alex Rodriguez, the position is stronger — not to mention deeper — than I would have imagined. After 15 rounds, there has been a total of 16 third base eligible players taken in The RotoGraphs Ridiculously Early Mock Draft. For the 2013 season, it appears as though the third base position will be offer a wide range of choices for fantasy managers. There are plenty of early round/big money picks as well as more than a few mid and late round options. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Eno Sarris posted another installment of the RotoGraphs Ridiculously Early Mock Draft — Rounds 11 through 15. You had the usual opportunity to comment on picks that you liked or didn’t like and while your silence with regard to my selections tells me that no one thought any of mine were either reaches or wasted picks, I would still like to do a little crowdsourcing here and find out where everyone stands on particular players and where they are going in drafts from now through the start of the 2013 season. Welcome to Bargain or Bust. Read the rest of this entry »