Today's Fantasy Rx

In each of the last two years I've spent a couple articles discussing The Fantasy Sports Invitational Challenge, a relatively new league for inter-site competition and bragging rights. While we added an AL team this year, we also remained in the NL contest for our fourth season.

We participated in the inaugural NL draft in 2002, although we unfortunately only managed a 10th place finish in 2002 thanks to a lack of starting position players and few saves other than two good months from Vlad Nunez. Two years ago we moved up to 7th place thanks to finishing first in steals, ERA, and WHIP. Last season we properly executed a solid strategy from our first pick in the draft day, punting wins and strikeouts while assembling a solid bullpen and offense. We finished in a solid second place thanks to a poor BA finish that resulted from rostering almost the entire Expos' lineup. The largely unreported changes to Hiram Bithorn Stadium in Puerto Rico largely ruined their offensive numbers in the first half, and rather than provide us with solid trade bait, we needed to keep our roster intact just to avoid further slippage in the standings.

As I mentioned earlier in these articles, drafting two weeks closer to Opening Day than previous FSIC drafts reduced the risk of selecting players a month early as rosters appear largely set right now, but we still opted to retain our existing strategy from the last two years. As both FSIC leagues employ a straight snake draft, NL5x5, with 23-man rosters and four reserve slots, along with no AB/IP max/mins, we decided prior to the draft to take no starting pitching at all. We instead targeted only relievers with good skills or a high chance of seeing several save opportunities, and as many of those pitchers always fall to the later rounds, we concentrated on offense throughout the first half of the draft outside of solidifying our bullpen early. The goal of this strategy is to finish no worse than third place in saves, ERA, WHIP, and every hitting category, likely insuring we finish among the top three teams.

Since the league rules still include an interesting twist that stipulates the 11th and 12th place finishers are not invited to return the following season, our goal remains relatively simple: again execute our strategy in the hope of finally finishing first while benefiting from the negligible risk of a second-division finish and our belief that no other team will adopt a similar plan due to the limited upside of dumping 22 points upfront.

Today's Fantasy Rx: While we remain rather concerned regarding our team's production of HR/RBI, we also obtained plenty of upside by selecting players with potential increases in playing time without overdrafting them. Along with our sink-or-swim pick of Lance Berkman, we expect several currently projected part-time players to approach 500 at-bats, including Morgan Ensberg, Brad Hawpe, Adam LaRoche, Alex Cintron, Felipe Lopez, Antonio Perez, and Michael Tucker. Eric Young, Todd Greene, and even John Mabry also quality as quantitative sleepers, so although we still expect to need mid-season deals in order to secure a high finish, selecting largely youngsters with AB upside offers intriguing possibilities to offset our most significant current deficiency, a strategy easily adaptable to almost any standard league.