Interesting draft strategy article...

[swarmee]

If you're in my Dash4Cash league, you'll recognize this draft strategy, as I did pretty much the same in our league this season, netting most guys where I expected them to go, and then traded for a couple of them last week. Of course our draft was prior to the writing of the article, but I used a similar strategy nonetheless.

http://www.baseballnotebook.com/essay.a ... hey%20Fall

Even if you don't believe these are the right guys to draft, the formula for determining expected draft position is pretty valuable to everyone here who participates in a snake draft.

The cheap and easy way to do it is to take three "experts" mock drafts or Top300 lists and the list you want to draft with, and then average them. I usually assign 301 to a player who doesn't appear in one of the lists for that list. Then rank them by average draft position.

My main strategy problem was that since I drafted near the end of the snake, I knew I had to "overdraft" Pedro Martinez at #14 since he wouldn't return to me at #35. The other strategy I took into the draft was selecting similar players on the same snake (i.e. 3rd basemen at end3rd/beginning4th, closers at end15,begin16). I did that to try and create runs on certain types of players so that the ones I wanted after the long wait might still be there.

[quicksilver8]

Thanks for the article. Many of these players I had already targeted as undervalued, but this article lends some proof.

[TheYanks04]

I sort of agree with this mehodology, though I do not take it to such a statistical level. Basically you are quantifying what every good fantasy player knows...namely you can draft guys that will produce better numbers than what they are being given credit for by the general community of fantasy players at large. This of course means picking guys you believe are undervalued (like Maddux) and grabbing them at good draft slots knowing that they will generally fall lower than they should. I completely agree with this.

It should be noted that sometimes though, we value the wrong players and stick it to ourselves using this approach. Thems the breaks though. It should also be noted that often the deviation of such players is sort of meaningless. If you play in a league where you know an owner thinks highly of Maddux as do you for instance, then all numbers in the worrd are not going to help you predict when that owner is going to pull the trigger.