The Anatomy of a Ottoneu Dynasty Rebuild: Part 2, The Draft

So, you’ve made the difficult decision to start rebuilding in your dynasty fantasy baseball league. Maybe you’re coming off a competitive window but salary inflation and arbitration have conspired to prevent you from running the same roster back again this year or you had a really unlucky season and need to tear everything down. Whatever the case may be, you’re here now and need to start somewhere. Last week, I walked through that decision-making process and how to start evaluating your roster, now you need to start making things happen.

The draft is one of the highlights of the fantasy year. It marks the beginning of a new season and provides an opportunity to infuse your team with new talent. I’m here to tell you that the draft is not the most efficient method to rebuild your team. It’s definitely important, and you certainly can’t just blow it off, but you shouldn’t expect to turn your team around through the draft alone. In League 32 – Fantasy Field of Dreams, I made the decision to rebuild too late and I went into the draft last year looking to fill too many holes on my roster and not enough cap space to fill them all. If your team is anything like mine, you’re probably heading into your draft with the same problem.

Last year, I went into the draft with $170 in cap space and needed to select 16 players, which comes out to a little over $10 per roster spot. That’s not that terrible of a position to enter the draft in except I needed to pick up a starting shortstop, third baseman, first baseman, and a ton of pitching. I had resources, but not enough of a solid core already established on my roster to make effective use of those resources. Of the 16 players I drafted, I wound up cutting 13 during the season, I traded two of them, and didn’t end up keeping the final guy this offseason. That’s a pretty terrible draft result, and some of it’s due to my mistakes in player evaluation, but it was also caused by me trying to do too much to lift my roster through the draft.

The biggest problem while drafting for a rebuilding team is that it’s incredibly difficult to find surplus value, and that’s the one thing you need to find to really turn your team around. The draft is the one avenue where every team has the ability to bid on players near, at, or over their market value. You can try and find sleepers or undervalued targets, but those guys rarely carry your team. The highest-value players in the draft are the superstars teams need to provide a chunk of points on their rosters and they’re very rarely getting drafted below their market value. Even the mid-tier options end up going around their projected price and sleepers are so very rarely actually sleepers in this information-rich era we live in. If you try to play the same game as the teams who are looking to compete, you’re bound to leave disappointed and no closer to actually rebuilding your team.

So who should you be targeting in the draft? There are a few key groups of players who are consistently undervalued at the draft. The first group is pretty obvious: injured players or players coming off injury-plagued seasons. It’s really difficult for teams to spend a chunk of their salary cap on a player who might not contribute during the coming season. As a rebuilding team, you should have no qualms about stashing a player for a season while hoping he returns healthy after a year. The trick is identifying players with the right ceiling when they are healthy and trying to acquire them at a salary that has room to grow so you’re not forced to cut them after the season. I benefited from a $5 Justin Verlander last year in another league because I had stashed him for $3 the year prior. For the most part, these stashes are going to be pitchers because hitters usually don’t have the kind of long-term injuries pitchers deal with. Here’s a short list of potential targets you could be looking for in your draft:

Bryce Harper and Walker Buehler are the big names above but there are plenty of other guys who could make good stashes for a rebuilding team. A return to form after a major injury isn’t guaranteed so if any of these guys have a setback in their rehab or have a hard time reintegrating back into the league after their injury, you need to be quick to cut them. They’re not worth keeping around while you hope they find their previous level of production. In League 32, I have Conforto ($6), Maeda ($4), and Baz ($3) from the list above and will be targeting a handful of these guys during our draft.

The other group of players who are often undervalued are established players coming off injury-plagued or downright bad seasons. That’s your opportunity to pick up productive players below their market value while hoping to get a lucky bounce-back season from them. These players probably aren’t going to be key pieces on your next competitive roster after your rebuild cycle unless you’ve picked them up for an incredibly low salary. Instead, they’ll be used to trade during the season so you can keep bringing in new talent for your rebuild. These types of players can be extremely risky; past injuries are the number one predictive factor for future injuries and there’s no guarantee these guys will return to their previous levels of production. A few guys who might fall into this group include Brandon Lowe, Kris Bryant, Nick Castellanos, or Max Muncy. The ceiling for these guys is high enough that they could be key cogs on your next competitive team, but they’re more likely to be traded midseason for a nice haul of talent if they’re producing.

You could also try and target veteran players coming off down seasons as well. Everyone is keen on trying to figure out when aging players are hitting the downslope of their careers and no one wants to be stuck paying for Angels-era Albert Pujols at his Cardinals-era salary. That usually depresses the salary of these players, providing you with an opportunity. They fit the same kind of criteria as those two groups above: high risk if they continue to slide, high reward if they bounce back. These players are definitely not going to be part of your future core, they’re only on your roster to churn through for younger talent at the trade deadline. Guys who fit this mold would be J.D. Martinez, Nelson Cruz, or Michael Brantley. You’re really hoping these guys have one more great season in them, and if they don’t, they should be easy cuts.

In general, when you’re drafting for a rebuilding team, you should be a lot more open to taking on risk with the players you acquire. These high-variance players could all flop, but if you hit on a handful of them, they could pay dividends later on, either by becoming keepers into next season or by acting as trade bait at the trade deadline. You’ll also want to have a solid set of projections and rankings so you can know if you’re overpaying for any of these players. Grabbing one of those injured players above to stash them only to be forced to cut them after the season is just a waste.

I’ll get into this a bit more in-depth in the next installment of this series, but you’ll also want to leave your draft with a healthy amount of open salary cap space. You’re going to need to churn through players during the season and the waiver wire is going to be one of your best avenues to infuse your roster with new talent. This depends on your league context, but you really should try and have the most cap space available in your league when leaving the draft so you can control the early-season waiver wire. I’ll also discuss the first few trades you should be looking to make during your rebuild.