Today's Fantasy Rx

As we discussed Friday, FSRU.com invited us to the inaugural season of The Fantasy Sports Invitational Challenge last Saturday. It's a straight snake draft, NL5x5, with 23-man rosters and four reserve slots; there are also no AB/IP max/mins, so while we considered a non-traditional strategy, we settled upon a standard LIMA variation. As we only picked one pitcher(Scott Strickland) in the first eleven rounds, we'll discuss the specifics of that variation tomorrow. First, I want to give you an idea of how we drafted our offensive players.

Now as I've previously mentioned when discussing how we value players, our spreadsheet, designed around the Category Dollars' formula, incorporates Category Inflation during the draft. We usually have to remove saves as a category after 14 closers are gone because it unfairly biases our rankings. The sheet's usefulness also deteriorates in the endgame, but you should already be choosing players based on their solid skills late in the draft, so specific values mean far less at that time.

To maintain the spreadsheet during a straight draft with approximate values, all first round picks receive a $23 salary, second rounders $22, etc. down to 23rd rounders at $1. Each team has $276 to spend under this system, so the dollars are quite close to book values. After half the money is gone, we switch from a 65/35 split to the actual draft hitting/pitching split; in straight drafts, this occurs in the middle of the 6th round. While relatively early, we then have a good feeling for how owners are allocating their money and automatically adjust our values according to those guidelines.

Note: Since every owner represented their website, I'm just going to refer to site names to simplify the discussion.

We drafted 8th of 12 teams and the first seven picks went exactly as I theorized in Friday's article. Roto Times selected Randy, who we had ranked first overall at $42. Insider Baseball selected Sosa, fourth overall among offensive players at $34 but a sure source of power. Fantasy Insights took Schilling, the best remaining pitcher at $35. Baseball Guru selected $38 Todd Helton, Sporting News took $37 Vlad Guerrero, and Addict Fantasy Sports took $33 Barry Bonds. Fantasy Sports R Us surprised us by taking Mike Piazza, only 24th on our offensive draft board at $23.

Now this is where position scarcity comes into play. When making each pick in a straight draft, we compare people across positions to judge the actual level of talent. Chipper Jones only had a Draft Value of $31 at this time, but that was $5 better than Scott Rolen, the next best third basemen, which gave Larry a Temporary Draft Value(TDV) of $36.

I have to stress that this was not his real Draft Value in any way. We also don't see any application for this philosophy in an auction. However, when in a straight draft, you must consider that you might not have a chance to draft solid players at certain positions. The basic formula for maximizing your advantage by position is:

TDV = DV + (DV - DV of the Next Best Player at a Specific Position).

At the time, we had the following choices:

3B: $36 Chipper (31 + (31 - 26(Rolen))
OF: $38 Juan Pierre (36 + (36 - 34(Cliff Floyd))
2B: $41 Luis Castillo (34 + (34 - 27(Roberto Alomar))
1B: $33 Ryan Klesko (30 + (30 - 27(Jeff Bagwell))
C: $24 Paul LoDuca (23 + (23 - 22(Jason Kendall))
RP: $33 Robb Nen (32 + (32 - 31(Trevor Hoffman))
SP: $31 Greg Maddux (30 + (30 - 29(Kevin Brown))

We had decided the night before that we wanted to grab 5-category hitters for as many rounds as possible. As Chipper has far more power potential than Pierre or Castillo, and is moving to a less strenuous defensive position, we had decided ahead of time to take Larry if available. Now we seriously considered Shawn Green($32), but concluded that Chipper was in the superior lineup, and therefore more likely to provide better RBI and Runs.

After we took Chipper, Baseball Think Factory took Pujols, Roto World took Bagwell, Sandlot Shrink selected Alomar, and Fantasy Ref grabbed LoDuca and began the second round by drafting Aurilia. Jimmy Rollins, Greg Maddux, and Jose Vidro were then picked, returning the selection to us in the second round.

This situation presented with a rather interesting dilemma, as Pierre led the board with a $37 DV, Castillo had a $47 TDV over Eric Young, Klesko had a $37 TDV over Sean Casey. However, Shawn Green was fourth overall with a $32 DV, and as we couldn't believe he had fallen back to us, we decided to add another 5-category hitter instead of drafting Castillo. Our original plan was to grab Chipper and Castillo as we thought Green might go as high as 7th, although we had also hoped to catch LoDuca in the 4th or even 5th rounds.

I'm not going to get into the specifics of most of the other players drafted other than to briefly mention them when relevant as I don't have the time to discuss every team's strategy. Not only did we lose out on Castillo and Klesko(who we had targeted for Round 3 at this point), we also missed Abreu, Nevin, Luis Gonzalez, Larry Walker, Drew, Berkman, Floyd, Giles, Nen, Sheffield, Morris, and Griffey.

Imagine our surprise when Juan Pierre, originally ranked 5th overall on our entire draft board, came tumbling back to us on pick #32. We gave no consideration to any other player as Pierre topped both the draft board at $42, and TDV at $57 over Preston Wilson, so quickly added Pierre to our team, securing us a great foundation in BA along with great speed between Pierre and Green.

After we took Pierre, Cedeno, Wilson, Andruw Jones, Dunn, Hoffman, Edmonds, Benitez, and Wagner were selected. We were left with the choice of joining the closer run or jumping in at another position. While Smoltz topped both DV at $36 and TDV at $41 over Isringhausen, we wanted to stay with offense at this point.

Top five offensive Draft Values on the board were Scott Rolen at $29(Aramis Ramirez at $24), Tony Womack at $27, Sean Casey at $27(with Sexson at $20), Jason Kendall at $27 with Javy Lopez at $13), and Edgar Renteria at $27 by a buck over Juan Uribe.

As we had third covered with Chipper and we have little interest in someone with a horrible OBP like Womack, we skipped right to Kendall, giving us a large advantage over all but the two owners who took Piazza and LoDuca. Both Rolen and Smoltz were taken before our next pick, but Casey fell to us in the 5th round and Renteria lasted all the way to the 6th round.

Both Renteria and Uribe were available in Round 6, but we went with the former player as he's a much more proven player who also seems poised for a breakout season. Uribe might be great, and we would have taken him for MIF in Round 7 if he'd fallen back to us, but we wanted a certain commodity who would provide help in five categories.

We now owned Chipper, Green, Pierre, Kendall, Casey, and Renteria, leaving us with only one major offensive hole to fill at 2B while closers were going at a rate of about 2 per round. By the time the draft had returned to our 7th round pick, the only remaining secure saves on the board were Strickland, Danny Graves, and Mike Williams, along with the messes in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Los Angeles. Strickland easily has the most potential of those three, and as we were pleased with our offense at this point, we decided now was a good time to grab saves.

Our first major error occurred in the 8th round. We were looking at Brian Jordan for our third OF spot as he was nicely nestled behind Green in a potentially productive lineup slot. However, I convinced Jess we should take Tino Martinez and a likely minimum 20/80 season, thinking Jordan was more likely to fall to our next pick than Tino, the top player left on our board.

Jordan was picked up by Addict Fantasy Sports only two picks before our Round #9 slot, and we also missed out on Jeromy Burnitz, Fernando Vina, Marcus Giles, and Todd Hollandsworth, our third choice after Jordan and Burnitz, who went in the pick immediately prior to us. We then watched Derrek Lee fall past our 9th round selection, and Travis Lee plummeted all the way to Round 12

We settled on Mark Kotsay for our third OF slot as he should give us decent 5-category numbers, going 15/15 along with solid Runs batting in front of Klesko and Nevin. While we would have rather drafted Jordan and a Lee or maybe even Lee Stevens, we also don't regret taking the more reliable players over the relatively injury-prone Jordan.

Most of the solid catchers had been taken by our Round #10 pick, so we were left with picking either 2B/MI or OF as we wanted to wait on pitching until all but a couple offensive slots were filled. We lost out on Ishii, Nomo(who we might have considered), Astacio, Millwood, and Wolf, any of whom we would have happily picked in Round 13.

However, with middle infielders flying off the board, we wanted to insure that we grabbed decent players. In Round 10 we picked up Delino DeShields for 2B, who should give us at least 20 SB even if he spends most of the year on the bench, and then we added Marlon Anderson, who hopefully will hit second in a still developing Phillies' lineup. We could have grabbed Reese, Larkin, or even Jose Hernandez with the first of these two picks, and players like D'Angelo Jimenez, Julio Lugo, and Damian Jackson also slipped further down the board. Given these somewhat meager pickings, we decided to pick the two players likely to hit high in the order, reach base relatively often, and offer either consistent speed or power, leaving us with DeShields and Anderson over the potential BA drags of Reese and Hernandez.

We began selecting starting pitching in Round #12, and that's where we'll resume this review tomorrow.

Today's Fantasy Rx: Consider employing Temporary Draft Value when conducting your straight drafts. While it doesn't replace Draft Value or even Total Category Dollars for direct comparison of players and accurate dollar values, TDV allows you to make a quick determination as to which player would give you a bigger position advantage for any given pick. For your reference, here's the formula for TDV again:

TDV = DV + (DV - DV of the Next Best Player at a Specific Position).