Position eligibilty

[rauluga]

How do you deal with the position eligibilty of a player with no MLB experience?

This is a major debate going on in our league right now as we draft for the 1st time in 10 years before the season starts.

If using minor league position in 2001, where do you find?

[cwebb]

As always, Arlo found a way... too bad he always drafts his guys three years too early!

When drafting minor leaguers, you should already know what positions they're playing, and you'll see where they play when they finally arrive in the majors.

And if you decide to draft Mark Prior you know about his fastball...

[Arlo]

This is a good question, and depends on how you're running your league. If you're using a website or stat service to do your bookkeeping for you, I'd simply stick with whatever positions they assign these players. This'll save you work and is equally fair toward all players, and you usually won't sacrifice much accuracy.

If you don't have this kind of default setting to fall back on, I'd choose one source (either by vote or commissioner's decision) and abide by it. I'd recommend the following site: http://www.baseballamerica.com/today/Stats/playerfind.html.
Just enter a player's name, and you'll find a player's games played by position (without needing to know a player's team, as with several other sources out there. Note however that games played in the outfield are not differentiated by left, center and right field.

Another way to do this would be to have the commish of your league assign positions based on a player's most likely position in the majors. This involves some guesswork however, so I don't really recommend this.

Hope this helps. And whatever you do, make sure that everyone is informed of these positions well before your draft.

[rauluga]

Thanks, everyone will be drafting based on Baseball America's position list.