Archive for mock

It’s draft season, which means it’s also draft recap season. Last year, I partook and subsequently recapped a few of my drafts. Folks seemed to enjoy them and/or find them beneficial. That’s good!

Incidentally, and unfortunately, all the drafts I recapped turned out terribly, and all my good teams (my league-winning National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC) Online Championship team, my 3rd-place Tout Wars team, etc.) I let slumber. One of those terrible teams was my Great Fantasy Baseball Invitational (TGFBI) squad. I’ve returned to fight off my demons.

I will say: I feel much more well-prepared than I did last year. I feel more cogent, more lucid. Last year, I barely prepped. I was overconfident because of my 2018 success, in part, but primarily I was overwhelmed and burned out. I held firm convictions about hardly any player, which goes against every fiber of my fantasy baseball being.

This year, the opposite. I’m eager to correct my flaws from last year, starting, first and foremost, with actually preparing. Doesn’t mean I won’t totally botch this draft. I don’t fancy myself particularly good at 15-team leagues, excelling instead at 12-teamers, especially auctions. But, hey, no excuses. At least this time, someone else, instead of my own damn self, will have beaten me.

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The past three years, our Justin Mason has organized too-early mock (#2EarlyMock) drafts ahead of the next fantasy baseball season. The 15-team snake drafts have taken place each September, which means I’m recounting this about two months too late. However, with some early offseason developments and the release of Steamer’s 2020 projections, the wait at least offers the benefits of both hindsight and foresight.

There’s no such thing as average draft position (ADP) data in September, so we rolled into these drafts blind to everything but our own recency biases. The dynamic is compelling, if frequently odd, and can be difficult, frustrating, but ultimately enthralling to endure. Ideally, my commentary here will not painfully boring and might provide insight into my “process” on a microcosmic level.

My draft was not without fault, but I do feel good about it. I’d like to think that means something, as someone highly critical of his drafts and rarely feels truly “good” about a roster I’ve compiled. I don’t play in many deep leagues, so 15-team drafts routinely jack me up. Somehow, I feel like not having ADP information actually benefited me; I feel like I scripted my draft more cogently than usual. But also, it’s fairly clear where I made suboptimal decisions. Overall, I don’t think it turned out half-bad, especially for a 15-teamer.

The results of my draft follow, and the minimum (“Min”) and maximum (“Max”) pick information comes from Smada’s ADP information compiled from all six #2EarlyMock drafts.

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For the fourth consecutive year, my friends at RotoBaller invited me to participate in the RotoBaller Friends and Family mock draft. The draft room was, in a word, terrifying:

1. Vlad Sedler, Guru Elite
2. Nick Mariano, RotoBaller
3. Pierre Camus, RotoBaller
4. Todd Zola, Mastersball
5. Tim Heaney, RotoWire
6. Heath Cummings, CBS Sports
7. Howard Bender, Fantasy Alarm
8. Nando Di Fino, The Athletic
9. Scott Engel, RotoExperts
10. Alex Chamberlain, RotoGraphs
11. Ray Flowers, Guru Elite
12. Real Talk Raph, RotoBaller

I drew the #10 pick (as shown in the draft order above), immediately understanding I might have a difficult decision to make very early in the draft.

This doesn’t need much preamble, but I do want to say one thing: I maintain that a good way to improve as a drafter (for lack of a better word) is to try something you might not ordinarily try or force yourself into an uncomfortable position you might not normally get into. I embraced this discomfort with my first two picks, assembling a base from building blocks I might not normally use given the options available to me. As you’ll see in my concluding remarks, I think I did pretty well.

Also: we were all on a 30-second clock. I don’t know about everyone else, but I was stressed. My internal monologue was utter chaos.

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A month ago, I compared “name-brand” and “generic-brand” players using blind résumés, an exercise we’ve reiterated across several authors and years at RotoGraphs. A few years ago, you’d never find me in a mock draft, let alone several in one preseason. (More a matter of blocking out three hours on a whim, but also I probably (very foolishly) thought I didn’t need to partake in such trivialities.)

I’m super, super into the whole slow draft mock thing, though; I’ve completed a few this preseason, and I think they have already helped me understand the kinds of market inefficiencies (i.e., differences between perceived and actual values) that will arise on draft day. One of the easiest ways to identify said inefficiencies is to compare similarly skilled players, then assess their other pros and cons — the intangibles, if you will, such as health and age — to determine who’s the better value.

Here are a couple more pairings:

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Fantasy owners participate in mock drafts to practice for their actual league drafts. Without the internet, neither mock drafts nor average draft position (ADP) data would be possible or available to us. The union of the two allow owners to understand approximately when they can expect players they plan to target and devise an appropriate plan of action.

What ensues when you draft for the next baseball season before the current season has ended and without ADP data and having not refined/run your 2018 projections yet? Chaos, namely. For the second year, the Honourable Justin Mason organized the Too-Early (#2early) mock drafts for me and a few dozen other analysts, the final ADP “data” (in air quotes, because a sample size of four drafts is not particularly strong data, and, as aforementioned, it is way too early to be mock-drafting) for which can be found here.

I drafted out of the 11th spot (of 15) in draft #4. I made a concerted effort to draft a good team, but I also deliberately avoided certain players just to see where other owners would draft them. (Had I drafted these players for my team, I would have a weaker understanding of how other owners valued them.) The lack of ADP data made it incredibly difficult to implement this plan. In a nutshell, my plan consisted of drafting the best player with a track record still available on the draft board (mind-blowing, I know), with a strong preference for hitting. There’s an objective basis to this that, rather than trying to explain, I’ll let reveal and define itself as I go. This plan served me admirably in all rounds of the draft.

Here’s my team, by round. “Rk” indicates a player’s draft rank within his assigned position. Columns labeled “All” and “Pos” depict players’ end-of-season values overall and by position, respectively, each of the last four years. These ranks come courtesy of Rudy Gamble, who concocts them for Razzball. If you’re concerned that these might somehow be inferior to ESPN’s Player Rater, know that Rudy won this year’s Tout Wars Mixed by a landslide, so I thoroughly trust his process.

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Masahiro Tanaka and Jeff Samardzija had perplexing, enigmatic, and ultimately bad seasons. Many attempts were made to ascribe reasons or causes for their struggles. I think both will bounce back for very simple reasons; accordingly, I think both will be undervalued in 2018 for equally simple reasons.

Masahiro Tanaka

Travis Sawchik and Eno Sarris discussed his various ailments, so to speak, long after I gave up trying to diagnose him. The heat maps are interesting, and the splits are interesting, albeit a bit of an archaism.

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A little while ago, a bunch of industry dudes participated in a way-too-early slow mock draft aptly dubbed the Too Early (#2Early) Mock. On Tuesday, I dissected the team I drafted with some limited analysis for each pick. Some people find this helpful, entertaining, what-have-you. Personally — and while a particular owner’s strategy is certainly interesting to ponder — I prefer a more macro characterization of the draft.

There are several ways to approach something like this, the most prominent of which, in my mind, being to comb through each round or to comb through each position. I’ll take the latter route here, identifying a “reach” and a “steal” (or plural) at each position.

I rely heavily on my own projections and rankings come draft day. Alas, I must apply a caveat to this analysis: these reaches and steals are more of, uh, feelings. Like, it feels too late or it feels like a great price. I hope I can support some of these feelings with evidence. I typically hate relying on feelings, given I’m all about doing away with emotion, biases, and impaired thought processes to exploit market inefficiencies. But, hey. Let’s give this a shot.

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I’ll lead with a series of questions: What’s the preferred way to analyze a mock draft? Would you rather read about the writer’s breakdown for his or her specific draft results? Or breakdowns by position? Of each owner’s team?

I plan to take the former-most approach here in regard to the Too Early (#2Early) Mock Draft, as curated by Justin Mason and graciously hosted by Couch Managers. A 15-team slow draft that began as soon as the season ended, I did not hesitate to vocalize my discomfort in drafting, even in the spirit of mockery, with absolutely zero planning.

Alas, that’s the fun of the Too Early mock (or so David Wiers tried to convince me): just wing it. Or see what happens.

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