Tuesday, March 24, 2009

My 2009 Fantasy Baseball Draft Cheatsheet

I've already outlined an SP-heavy strategy here, and an RP-heavy strategy here. In our money league, however, The Sinkhole used neither of these strategies. Instead, we generated a cheatsheet of players that we wanted to target in each round and used it as a guide during the draft. Sometimes our targets were unreasonable—like there was no way Carlos Lee was going to fall to round five—but that just meant we didn't draft that player. And sometimes we completely ignored our cheatsheet and let our emotions get the better of us, which is the only possible explanation for why we drafted Wieters three rounds ahead of the round we were targeting him in.

So here is the cheatsheet for our Yahoo 12 team mixed keeper league H2H roto (not points) draft that uses standard 5*5 categories (except Quality Starts instead of Wins), daily lineup changes, five bench spots, 7 pitchers (SP, SP, SP, RP, RP, P, P), one catcher, and four outfielders; we had the 8th pick. Perhaps it will help you make your draft cheatsheet. (Note: our cheatsheet underestimated the speed with which SPs would be drafted in rounds 9 through 15, so you might want to adjust accordingly.) Our actual picks are highlighted in bold (although we didn't always get the players in bold in the rounds we were targeting to get them in, and sometimes we picked players not found on our cheatsheet):

1.Pick #8 Braun, MCabrera, Sizemore, Hamilton (pictured above)
2.Pick #17 Utley, Rollins, BUpton,
3.Pick #32 Kemp, ARod, Markakis, Holliday
4.Pick #41 Halladay / Hamels, Alexei
5.Pick #56 Markakis, Soriano, CarlosLee, Grandy, Rios
6.Pick #65 Chris Davis, Tulo, McLouth, Bay, Hart, Pence
7.Pick #80 Votto? Pence, JShields, Lackey, Cano,
8.Pick #89 Votto
9.Pick #104 Gallardo, Nolasco
10.Pick #113 Nolasco, Soria, Marmol, Broxton, Joba, KWood
11.Pick #128 Nolasco / Greinke, Wieters
12.Pick #137 Price, Wieters, MBradley, VWells, Milledge
13.Pick #152 Morrow / Scherzer, Baker
14.Pick #161 Capps, Qualls, Bell
15.Pick #176 Sandoval
(Emerg 2B: JLopez)
16.Pick #185 Hawpe, JUpton, NCruz, Tavares
17.Pick #200 Slowey, Bedard, RandyJ, Francisco
18.Pick #209 Smoltz, Taveras, AJones, Kershaw
(Emergency SS OCabrera)
19.Pick #224 Kuo, Carpenter
(Emergency 3B: Gordon, Cantu, Beltre, Reynolds)
20.Pick #233 Balfour, Putz, Andrus
21.Pick #248 Maine, Dukes, Butler, Motte
(Emerg C: Shoppach)
22.Pick #257 Lind, IStewart
(Emerg 3B: Lowell, Blalock, Kouz)
Drafted players not on cheatsheet: Guthrie, Maholm, & Atkins.

(If you are interested, the actual final outcome our draft can be found here and here.)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Maholm has been Cy Young winner of Spring Training...if such a thing existed. I hope he keeps it up when the stats count.