GUEST ARTICLE - Chris Torrey
An Economic Approach to Draft Prep (Getting the Most Out of Your Time) - Part One
By: Chris Torrey
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There are an overwhelming number of fantasy baseball resources available to consumers today. Whether they are
websites, books, magazines, podcasts, cable programs, or anything else that competes for your limited time, their message
is unified and clear: “You can’t win without my information!”
While it seems that we all play against someone who reads and knows everything, the key for the rest of us is maximizing
the use of our limited time, especially when we have families and jobs to prioritize over our hobbies. Although most of your
fantasy baseball seasons are currently underway, it is fitting to start thinking about this while preparing for your draft.
Most people agree that no matter what kind of league you are in, the draft is the single most important part of the fantasy
baseball season, not to mention the most fun. You can certainly help and hurt your team with transactions throughout the
season, but the course for your ultimate victory or defeat is set at the draft. While the theme of this column is how to win
without letting it consume all of your time, if there is any point during the year to put the extra time in, it is to get ready for
the draft. The goal is to use that time well.
Ranking Players - Creating a Draft Sheet
Unless you are doing an online draft and are content to use the website’s default rankings (you won’t win that way), you
need to come to the draft with some kind of list of ranked players by positions, as well as any other materials that may help
you make quick decisions to implement your chosen strategy. The best way to prepare your rankings is to have statistics.
While some people use the prior season’s stats or the last three-years’ average, you can only get so far using the past to
determine future outcomes. Those past statistics do not take into account factors such as players’ expected roles on their
teams or injuries, and they tend to undervalue young players who might not have spent the full season in the majors. It’s
best to find projected stats.
Many bright people earn a living putting these things together (though they may debate the “earn a living“ part), so there is
no reason to reinvent the wheel. Knowing where to quickly obtain free information is the key to doing well in fantasy sports
without spending a burdensome amount of time and effort. You should still be very selective. I could not overstate this, but
do not use the player rankings in magazines. Fantasy baseball magazines are fun and informative (Athlon does a nice one
every year), but the player rankings and stat projections are chronically out of date. In fact, the main criteria you should
use to determine whose projected stats to utilize is how current they are and how often they are updated.
Some league websites include sortable projected stats. Sometimes this requires premium (paid) service, such as CBS
Sportsline, but in some cases, it may be worth the investment. However, there are some free ones available, such as Sport
Fanatics Fantasy Sports (http://www.sportfanatics.
net/Fantasy/Baseball/2008/Player_Rankings/2008_Cheat_Sheet_Player_Rankings.htm). These are good starting points.
In most cases, you can copy or export the rankings into Microsoft Excel or another spreadsheet application, where you can
either keep the rankings as-is or further customize them.
Understand the League Rules and Settings
You should really do this before you even find your rankings and projected stats, but one of the first things to do when
preparing for a draft is to make sure you fully understand the rules and settings for the league.
If the league has a low maximum number of add/drop moves or trades, you may want to make sure that your bench is deep
with players who can play multiple positions to step in if someone gets injured. If the league has a low maximum number of
innings, you probably want better pitchers right out of the gate with high strikeout per inning rates, so you don't waste
innings with mediocrity. 4 x 4 leagues place greater emphasis on stolen bases and saves specialists than 5 x 5 leagues.
As you start to read articles and research information, be very aware of what their league settings are and how they relate
to yours. You should be wary of any website or article that doesn’t set up the context of their argument or strategy.
Here’s a personal story of how understanding the league settings and using them to try to gain an edge helped me
dominate a league last year:
I joined a points league as kind of a last minute thing where I wouldn’t have a ton of time to prepare. Before the draft, I
noticed something interesting with the pitching points system. Wins were worth 10 points, Losses -5, Saves 8, Holds 5, but
no negative points for Blown Saves. I immediately had a pretty good idea of how that was going to pan out, so I used my
spreadsheet of projected stats and calculated them through the league's points system using simple formulas in Excel.
This quick analysis confirmed my guess that relievers, whether closers or top setup men, were far more valuable than
starters. Relievers had more appearances, thus more opportunities for saves or holds which were nearly as many points
as wins, with far less risk for negative points, since starters are far more likely to lose per appearance than relievers.
My strategy going into the draft was to gamble on the possibility that few others would pick up on this (a big gamble, but
one I thought I could recover from by recognizing it quickly and joining in if there was a run on relievers). Sure enough, the
draft played out like any typical 5 x 5 draft, rather than one fitting of the highly customized league settings. I drafted all
hitters in the first few rounds, including rounds when people started taking the first tier of good starting pitchers. Then
starting around the sixth round, I drafted closers. I tried to be subtle, so no one would catch on, and soon enough, I had
good relievers to fill every RP (relief pitcher) and P (any pitcher) slot, plus relievers with SP (starting pitcher) eligibility. I
had relievers on my bench that I had no room for, and after the first month of the season, my lead was growing and people
finally caught on to the fact that their starting pitchers weren't racking up many points and that my team was full of relievers.
At that point, I was able to trade my surplus relievers to other teams for upgrades to my offense, and it was off to the races.
Out of respect for my former league mates, I won't say how much I won that league by, but to be sure, I accomplished my
goal of winning fantasy baseball with relatively little time and effort.
In subsequent installments of “An Economic Approach to Draft Prep (Getting the Most Out of Your Time),” I’ll discuss how to
augment your rankings sheets with useful shorthand notes that will come in handy when making quick decisions during the
draft, which statistics to focus on depending on your league settings, tier rankings, minimizing risk, filling out your bench,
and how to deal with player news that occurs between the time when you set your rankings and when your actual draft is
held. All of this will be in the context of winning fantasy baseball leagues with a reasonable investment of time that allows
you to focus on more important things in life without conflict.
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A side note to our readers: We were introduced to talented writer Chris when he contacted us after discovering the site for
the first time. While we may eventually reach a limit in the number of columnists that we can feature here at
Fantasybaseball101.com, we encourage interested participants to contact us by going here.
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