Fantasy Baseball Strategy & Tips

Fantasy baseball is a highly entertaining sport or hobby.  In my opinion, it's much more enjoyable than the more popular fantasy football, namely because your draft can actually be a major factor in your success and I believe there is more strategy involved.

You can use excellent online providers such as ESPN, Yahoo!, CBS Sports, MLB, and more.  The systems now allow incredible functionality such as keeper leagues and more.

Your strategy will be determined by a few factors:

1. What type of scoring format is your league? Rotisserie vs. head to head match-ups?
2. How many teams are in your league?
3. Is it AL or NL only or a mixed league (both AL & NL)?
4. What are the categories that your team scores? The standard 5 x 5 format is 5 offensive categories (R, HR, RBI, SB, AVG) and 5 pitching categories (W, K's, ERA, WHIP, Saves).

Typically, I play a standard 5x5 mixed league with ten teams that uses head-to-head scoring. Much of the strategy that I will be putting forth will be based on such a setup. You may need to tweak what I say based on your specific settings.

Winning Head-To-Head Leagues

Such a setup requires you to beat your opponent more often than everyone else vs. perhaps being the best team over the course of a season. If you can play your match-ups each week, you might be able to win the league despite having a lesser team than another member of the league.

I recommend against punting categories in such a setup. Punting a category refers to not attempting to win a category like saves and instead trying to dominate the other 4 pitching categories. I believe a more balanced team approach is better suited for picking up points and doing well in your league.

One point that I've tended to pickup over the years is that pitching tends to be more important in a rotisserie format since your pitchers' performance varies so much on a week-to-week basis. In a rotisserie format, having better pitchers will usually end up helping your team significantly because the top pitchers will typically end up where they should in terms of stats. On a week-to-week basis, it's far too easy to get beat with lesser pitchers based on bad (or good) outings by your staff.

Pre-Draft Preparation

The weeks (maybe for you months) leading up to the draft seem to take forever for the seasoned fantasy baseball participant. The anticipation and excitement builds and your productivity at work is probably taking a massive dive during these days. Studying the various rankings put forth from the usual suspects like ESPN and Yahoo is taking up good chunks of your day. Custom spreadsheets on your work computer are being re-worked and re-worked. Face it, you're obsessed.

Mock drafts can be very useful tools in getting a feel for the average draft position (ADP) of various players. Note that if you're in a keeper league, it's tough to get a good mock draft that is similar to what you're likely to expect because you can't factor in the keepers. Even so, you can still gain a good bit of knowledge and more importantly, hone your strategy prior to draft day.

Specific Drafting Strategies

The following strategies are some basic strategies and a few that I've created myself.

1. Power Focused - This strategy has you drafting offensive power as much as possible grabbing as many of the big guns as you can. These players are folks like Albert Pujols, A-Rod, Ryan Howard and also guys like Adrien Gonzalez. These are the high HR / high RBI guys. As you move later in the draft, fill in your pitching holes with some middle tier starters and also pick up a speedster or two like Juan Pierre.
2. The Well Balanced Team - This strategy is typically one I have executed in that you're aiming to build a well balanced team. I typically will draft some five category studs early to attempt to get all categories going - think David Wright, Hanley Ramirez. Some guys who aren't true five category guys (maybe four) also work like Grady Sizemore. You're going to need quality pitchers, which I typically go after an ace or two after nabbing a few balanced offensive players.
3. The Contrarian Strategy - This strategy attempts to move in the minority direction from the rest of your league. This means you need to know what most of your other teams are going to be focused on come draft day. For me and my league, most of the guys in the league tend to load up on offense. I take the opportunity to grab a few pitching aces and maybe cause a panicked run on pitchers leaving me more offensive options then you'd think.
4. Position Scarcity - This is a popular strategy that aims to pick up players that have little depth at that position. For example, if there is a huge drop off in production at a position like 2B, it means you grab one of the top guys even above a better player at another position. This strategy has worked well for me in the past.

The reality is that in order to have an effective draft, you might have to pull strategies from each of the above methods.  Put them together, customize it for your league and tweak it over some mock drafts.  See what comes of it.

When it comes to approaching the 2010 season which is just days away, there are a few things I've noticed that might help you.  The following points assume you're in a mixed league - if you're AL/NL only, sorry folks.

1. 1B is extremely deep - Unless you grab a top first basemen like Pujols or Teixeira, you can probably wait until a later round and pickup great talent.  Another option to consider is a player like Kevin Youkilis who is eligible at both first base and third base.
2. There are great number of second tier pitchers - Getting decent starting pitchers is probably easy this year as there are a huge number of guys following the top 7 or 8 studs.  Pitchers like Kershaw, Hanson, Vasquez, Billingsley, etc. are all guys you can grab in middle rounds of the draft.
3. Third base is weak this year - In my opinion, this is one of the weakest positions this year.  Consider Aramis Ramirez this year as a come-back candidate.  After him, it's a long drop until Chone Figgins.  Although Gordon Beckman is a hot pickup this year.

1. Aramis Ramirez
2. Billy Butler
3. Carlos Quentin
4. Chad Billingsley
5. Jon Lester 
6. BJ Upton
7. Robinson Cano