To help you prepare for your Fantasy Baseball draft, our Scott White has constructed a list of five guidelines that often help him in his. He's released them in a series of columns called Draft Day Do's and Don'ts ( Part I / Part II / Part III ). Consider incorporating them into your own draft strategy to get a leg up on the competition.
No. 4: Let your competitors make the big decisions for you
On my first day on the job, we held one of our many mock drafts here at CBSSports.com, and I sat with Senior Fantasy Writer Dave Richard, who input my picks for me as I called them out to him. At some point during the middle rounds, I had an approaching decision to make between two similar players at a position of need. As the draft snaked back to me -- sitting nervously, fretting over which direction to take -- another owner took one of the two players I had in mind, allowing me to breathe a sigh of relief.
"I love when I can let the other people make the decision for me," I said, turning to Dave.
I'm not sure he understood what I meant, but he agreed, and I felt like I had accomplished something. See, as self-destructive and backward-minded as this approach sounds, it carries some clout in Fantasy circles. And if you've paid attention to my previous columns, you'll realize I've hinted at it all along.
Remember those tiers I had you establish in Do's and Don'ts No. 1? If not, go back and read the piece. If so, thanks for reading. Pull them out and have them handy because they go hand-in-hand with this latest demonstration.
In short, you don't want to find yourself in my position during that draft, trying to differentiate between two virtually indistinguishable players -- or, worse yet, three or four.
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Are you smart enough to be able to differentiate between Alex Rios and Nick Markakis?
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And what do we call such a series of players at one position? Oh, that's right: Tiers.
But I don't mean to rehash the same Fantasy argument under a different guise. What I aim to address here is not so much the formation of tiers, which I already covered, but the application of them.
Ideally, after you've established your tiers and determined a "target tier" for each position -- you want a first-tier catcher, a second-tier second baseman and so on -- your goal is to select the last player available in each of those tiers. And I mean the very last one.
Note: I say ideally.
In doing so, you accomplish two things. One, you never have to live with the regret of making the wrong decision and taking the wrong player -- that feeling of "I can't believe I picked Vernon Wells over Matt Holliday" (think 2007) that sticks with you through the end of the season. Two, you allow yourself to orient your picks around the tiers that deplete the fastest (by taking, for example, Grady Sizemore as the last first-tier outfielder instead of Brandon Phillips as one of five second-tier second basemen).
I know what you're thinking. You're wondering how you can win if you take the worst player at each of your targeted tiers. But I didn't say worst; I said last. That's the beauty of tiers: If you establish them correctly, there shouldn't be any best or worst players. They could realistically rank in any order by season's end.
You purposefully want to allow your league mates the luxury -- no, the extravagance -- of preference because, in truth, you just don't know. Nobody does. And as a Fantasy writer, that's a tough resignation to make because people always come to you for answers. Who will have the better season between Alex Rios and Nick Markakis? Shoot, I don't know. I'd guess Rios, but I wouldn't bet anything of real value on it.
Fantasy Baseball is an unpredictable game, but instead of pouting about it, saying you shouldn't even try because it's all luck anyway, you want to take advantage of that unpredictability, using it against your opponents. By allowing them to decide between several players in the same tier and then swooping in later to scoop up the remains, you place the burden of prediction on them. Meanwhile, you gain a one-round advantage on your competition by taking a self-proclaimed equal player at the same position one round later -- and you don't have to stop and wonder the next day if you made the right choice.
Obviously, a certain degree of risk comes with drafting this way. You might wait too long for the last available player to emerge within a tier and get shut out of that tier altogether. The concern is legitimate, of course, but I have two points to counteract it.
One, I said you ideally wait until the last player at a targeted tier. If you go into the drafting knowing you want a first-tier shortstop, for example, you pretty much have to use your first-round pick on him, and if you pick second, third or fourth, you'll likely have to make a decision between Hanley Ramirez, Jose Reyes and Jimmy Rollins. But once the draft reaches that point in the second or third round where it loses its predetermined script, then you can start monitoring tiers.
(Also, if you pick first or last in a traditional snake draft, you can't allow your targeted tier to whittle down as much as if you pick in the middle. Because so many draft picks separate your own when you pick first or last, you might have to pounce on your targeted tier when three players remain in it as opposed to two, or four as opposed to three. Just remember that the more players available when you pounce on a targeted tier, the more vulnerable you leave yourself to Fantasy Baseball's unpredictability.)
Two, even if you do get burned at one position, no big deal. It's just one position. Because your opponents didn't follow the tier approach and grabbed players early at positions where you waited, they undoubtedly left themselves weak at more than one position and, thereby, worse off than you.
I do occasionally deviate from the tier approach at one position and one position alone: Starting pitcher. Like many Fantasy writers, I strongly prefer hitters to pitchers for all the same reasons you've no doubt heard before -- they have more predictable statistics, they don't get hurt as easily, enough out-of-nowhere pitchers emerge during the season that you can build a winning staff strictly via free agency ... blah, blah, blah. (If you want tips on unearthing potential breakouts at starting pitcher, see Do's and Don'ts No. 3.) But I realize that in order not to bury myself in the pitching categories right out of the gate, I can't totally ignore the position. For that reason, I like to grab a starting pitcher whenever I have a lull in my targeted tiers, when none look on the verge of depletion in between my current pick and my next one. Using this approach, I managed to snag Roy Oswalt and Aaron Harang in one draft this offseason, Erik Bedard and John Smoltz in another, and Smoltz and Ben Sheets in a third. I think most Fantasy owners could survive with any of those pairs leading their staffs.
Look, I know a lot of this "targeted tier" and "burden of prediction" talk sounds like a bunch of theoretical hocus pocus -- I wrote the dang thing, and when you find yourself reworking sentences three or four times to get the wording just right, you know you have a highly technical discussion on your hands -- but it works. So many people want a step-by-step flow chart to use during Draft Day, and with a little preparation before the draft and a little attentiveness during it, you have one. You don't have to make a single decision for yourself.
And before you make a final decision on these Draft Day Do's and Don'ts, tune in later this spring for the fifth and final installment of my series, when I reveal the one tip that, admittedly, I have to beat into my own head over and over and over and over again: Be flexible.
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.
