Strategy for drafting OF in 5OF league

[spark0901]

So I'm in a league that starts 5 outfielders and I'm trying to determine when to start drafting outfielders. Given that we have to start so many OF, this format creates sort of an artificial position scarcity and certainly enhances the value of quality outfielders. I'm just wondering how much people feel this should affect draft strategy. Contrary to popular opinion, it seems like going after one of the stud outfielders in the first or second rounds is a good idea to me given how far of a drop off there is going to be once an OF 4 and OF 5 is drafted. Any input would be greatly appreciated.

[Skin Blues]

It's all relative. If you also have CI and MI then it evens out the extra OF spots and you likely only have scarcity at C and SS, and even then the SS scarcity is next to nothing. The amount of teams in the league also plays a big part.

[spark0901]

It's a 12 team league with an additional MI and CI spot. I guess those additional infield spots do serve to minimize the difference between the demand for OF and IF in this format.

[Grounded Polo]

Once you add 5 OF or just expand the rosters from standard settings in general, position scarcity becomes less valuable. I have no problem reaching on someone like Tulo in a shallow settings 12 team league because it's not hard to dig up quality OF options for peanuts and you can take advantage of everyone else throwing out crap. I took Tulo #5 in a midseason league last year and it paid off huge.

5 OF normalizes position scarcity, I want to fill out those spots with as much production as possible because everyone will be starting junk at MI and with many more outfielders drafted, you can't count on the Jose Bautistas and Andre Torres types to pop up constantly to get elite OF production off waivers.

[Skin Blues]

For a quick idea of scarcity, go to lastplayerpicked.com and use their price guide. There's a column for positional value, and though not perfect, gives a pretty good idea of what kind of positional value you get based on your league settings. In general, C and SS are the only ones that show any actual scarcity. The reason for this is the flex positions, including utility. Pretty much all of the CI and most of the Util spots are filled by 1Bs so the demand for 1Bs is huge, and there really isn't more depth there in the grand scheme.

The way it works, is it finds the best X amount of players that will fill your player pool, and if there isn't enough of a certain position based purely on stats, then that position is given an artificial bump in value until the minimum quantity of each position are in the positive value player pool (ie: $1 or above). It keeps doing these iterations until there are enough of each position, and it shows you how much certain positions were artificially bumped up. It actually tells you how many iterations were done too, which isn't very useful but it's kind of neat that they let you see some evidence of the behind the scenes work.

The issue I have with it is that they don't incorporate this extra positional value into the individual stat categories themselves, and they don't even use $0 as the baseline, they use $11 or some other seemingly arbitrary number. Not a huge deal, it's just different than how I do it, and doesn't seem as intuitive to me.

[spark0901]

Awesome. Thanks for the input everyone.

[Fenris-77]

The move to 5 OF plus CI and MI also changes the value of certain sorts of players, at least as far as the draft goes. When you have those extra slots to play with some guys may tend to draft, as an example, some of the speed freak OFs a little earlier than they would in a 3 OF set-up. The move to 5 OF and additional CI-MI makes some of those specialists more attractive because they doin't 'take up a slot' the same way they do on a smaller roster where balanced prodcution from each slot is probably more important.