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Draft Day -- it's such a pivotal time.
It's that one day of the Fantasy Baseball season when you need to know the most about a player, but instead, you know the least.
But while we so often focus on individual players through projections and side-by-side comparisons, sometimes we lose sight of the bigger picture, the reason we have Draft Day in the first place: To assemble the best team in the league, top to bottom.
Over the next few weeks, I plan to share with you some of the guidelines I use every Draft Day, every year. I'll keep them as generic as possible, hopefully making them applicable to every standard scoring format. Do they work? Usually. Can you win without them? Absolutely. But when forming your Draft Day strategy, every dissenting opinion helps. And mine, although certain to evolve over the years, at least have a steady paycheck backing them.
So take a timeout from your stat crunching this spring to read over these guidelines that we, in our overly authoritative way, dubbed Draft Day Do's and Don'ts. Decide which ones work for you and which ones don't. You have nothing to gain but a little heads-up on your competition.
No. 1: Tier up before the big day
No, I'm not suggesting you go into the draft runny-nosed and puffy-cheeked, blubbering like you just watched The Journey of Natty Gann. Believe me: No one gets more emotional about Draft Day than I do, but I have yet to cry tears of joy the moment the first pick goes off the board.
I have, however, wept in sweet triumph afterward, when upon surveying my roster after the final pick, I noticed I had snagged every player I targeted entering the draft.
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| Chase Utley is a one-man tier at second base. (US Presswire) |
First, let me clarify what I mean by "tier." A tier is a group of players at a particular position who project to perform so equally to each other that you hardly know in what order to draft them.
Let me put it another way. Ask yourself who will put up better statistics this season between Lance Berkman and Justin Morneau. Not sure, right? Yeah, you could venture a guess one way or the other. You might even have a subtle preference, pointing to a better track record for this guy or more encouraging peripherals for that one, but if you ask yourself honestly, in your heart of hearts, if you'd be surprised to see either ranked ahead of the other by season's end, you'll probably find yourself -- like me -- answering "no." Hence, Berkman and Morneau belong in the same tier.
And tiers vary in size from position to position and layer to layer. The first tier at second base, for example, stands at a whopping one player, as I can't imagine anyone at the position, barring an injury, unseating king of the hill Chase Utley by season's end. By comparison, my first tier at first base includes two: Albert Pujols and Prince Fielder. Some might throw Ryan Howard in there. I wouldn't -- not in most scoring formats, anyway -- but that's not really the point. The point of establishing tiers is to map your own level of comfort. I can't tell you your level of comfort, and you can't tell me mine. But I can tell you that Howard doesn't make me nearly as comfortable as Pujols or Fielder do, so I place him in a lesser tier.
(And since I pulled out the all-too-convenient qualifier of "not in most scoring formats, anyway," let me take a moment now to interject another Fantasy guideline as it relates to tiers: Know your league's format. It sounds obvious, but some people seriously operate under the presumption that changes in rules have no bearing on player rankings. They do -- sometimes significantly. Specifically, check your league to see if it factors walks or strikeouts. Together, those two statistics have the potential to drop Howard from the first tier at his position to the third -- no joke.)
So where am I going with all this? Yeah, Utley comes first at second base. We all know that. So if one of the other 12 teams in your league takes him, then what? That's where the second tier comes into play, and mine consists of a solid five: Brandon Phillips, B.J. Upton, Brian Roberts, Robinson Cano and Ian Kinsler.
So knowing that the second tier, the one "in play" for second base once Utley goes off the board, runs five deep -- with each option, in my mind, supposedly equal to the others -- I know I can ignore the position for a while. I don't have to be the guy who reaches for Phillips in Round 3 because I know I'll be just as happy with Kinsler five rounds later. Instead, I can turn my focus to other positions, to taking a leftover first-tier outfielder, like Grady Sizemore or Carlos Beltran, or targeting a position whose second tier doesn't run nearly as deep, like first base's Berkman, Morneau or Mark Teixeira.
And I realize not everyone will define the second tier at second base the same way. Some might include Dan Uggla in that group. Others might exclude Kinsler. Others might form a separate tier of Phillips and Upton and rank everybody else behind them. Whatever, it's your team. You should be happy with it, and if you imagine yourself equally happy whether you draft Roberts or Mark Ellis, there you go. You have your tier.
But you can't lie to yourself. When establishing your tiers, you must use this exact phrasing: Could Player 1 realistically finish the season ahead of Player 2? If you wimp out and try to hedge bets by saying "would I rather have Player 1 than Player 2?" you end up assigning each player his own separate tier and defeating the purpose altogether.
For example, at shortstop, I know a lot of people would rather have Hanley Ramirez or Jose Reyes than Jimmy Rollins. They think the two have room to improve on last season while Rollins likely had a career year. I agree, but you won't see me making a separate tier for Rollins. Could he finish 2008 ranked ahead of both Ramirez and Reyes? Absolutely, he could. He did last year in standard Head-to-Head leagues, after all. Could the guys who follow him -- Derek Jeter, Troy Tulowitzki and Miguel Tejada -- do the same? Not on your life.
And maybe that line of questioning presents an even a better method for fine-tuning your tiers. I might, for instance, go ahead and combine my first and second tiers at first base because I realize the drop from the second to third tier -- from Morneau to Adrian Gonzalez, Paul Konerko and Nick Swisher -- is much steeper than from first to second, from Fielder to Teixeira. The larger you make your tiers at a position, the longer you allow yourself to wait at that position and focus on others.
The idea, in case you haven't caught on yet, is to give yourself a blueprint for your draft -- a guide to knowing which position to target at what time in order to leave yourself without a hole anywhere and as well-fortified across the diamond as possible. If you establish rigid tiers and closely monitor them throughout the draft, your picks, with a little bit of luck, should become obvious.
So go ahead. Pull out your rankings, plug in Old Yeller and cry me a river -- though not about your chances in the upcoming draft, of course. And tune in later this spring for Part 2 of Draft Day Do's and Don'ts, when I pass on the ancient mariner's warning of avoiding the Siren's song of the C's (catcher and closer).
You can e-mail Scott your Fantasy Baseball questions to dmfantasybaseball@cbs.com. Be sure to put Attn: Draft Day in the subject field. Please include your full name, hometown and state.
