Fantasy baseball draft strategies are seemingly a dime a dozen. Having the correct fantasy draft strategy to fit your league means being flexible and adapting to whatever situations that are thrown at you. After playing in hundreds of leagues over the years, I’ve been able to pick up on several different strategies that you should, or maybe, shouldn’t avoid. See what works for you.
The first piece of fantasy draft strategy advice revolves around keeper leagues that you’ve played in for awhile. In fact, this applies to new leagues as well if you are friends or at least talk with the other guys in your league. The goal is to become familiar with the stats and players that the other managers in your league are interested in. You should be able to spot patterns if they constantly talk about stockpiling certain stat categories, players from a certain team, and so on. For example, I’ve previously talked about my buddy in one of my fantasy football keeper leagues who never fails to draft as many Detroit Lions as possible. He lucked out this year that the Lions actually put a decent team on the field, but you get the point. You can typically rule out a certain manager if he determines his draft strategy this way.
Another example is a buddy who’s been in many of the same fantasy baseball leagues as myself. Sometimes I wonder if he’s ever going to draft a pitcher. He always loads up on batters throughout the first half of the draft and it never fails that he ends up getting crushed in the pitching stats all year long. He can consider himself lucky if he somehow backdoors his way into the playoffs, although he did somehow manage to win one of our leagues last year. I chalk that up to luck.
The funniest draft manager is the pre-season stat scout. It is amazing how some skippers convince themselves that this year is going to be the big breakout year for so and so after the monster pre-season they had. They somehow blind themselves to the years of regular-season futility that have preceded this latest pre-season. I might love these fantasy owners the most as you can officially flush their season down the toilet before it’s even begun. Pre-seasons are like the dress rehearsal at a wedding. The players don’t care as they just want to get it over with as their anxious for the real deal. The veterans are either resting up or experimenting on new techniques, while coaches are auditioning every Joe Blow they can find to see if their roster worthy. The offensive/defensive match-ups are always out of whack and it’s impossible to get an accurate gauge on predicting regular-season success from these few weeks.
