Draft Day Recaps & Lessons Learned

Draft season is over for your boy JA. I provide a fun-filled recap of all of the goings on.

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The offseason is officially over. I am completely done drafting and there is a regular season game in the books.

I wanted to go ahead and get some thoughts out about my two big drafts that happened in the last few days. This will be more for entertainment purposes than fantasy help, but we’ll do that along the way.

I talked my way through all of this in this podcast version. It’s probably better:

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Home League Draft

This is a ten-team head-to-head categories league:

R, HR, RBI, SB, AVG, OBP, QS, W, ERA, WHIP, SV, K/9

We keep two players each and I was coming off of a championship meaning I was picking tenth. I was really behind the ball going in. I kept Ohtani for a third-rounder (not great) and Michael King for a 12th (fine). Most of the big bats and the two top SPs were kept, so by the time I got to join the party at pick ten, the scene was pretty dried up.

Is that me making excuses? One time, I remember my dad yelling at me for making an excuse, but in my head, I was just trying to give him the reason why I did the thing I did that I was getting in trouble for. I have no idea what the details of that actually were, but I remember thinking I had a pretty good case and was really frustrated that my dad wouldn’t hear me out. But he was probably right. I’m calling this a reason and not an excuse, but my offense looks pretty lame.

C: Willson Contreras
1B: Nathaniel Lowe
2B: Jordan Westburg
SS: Matt McLain
3B: Jazz Chisholm Jr.
MI: Ezequiel Tovar
CI: Max Muncy
OF: Yordan Alvarez
OF: Luis Robert
OF: Josh Lowe
UTIL: Shohei Ohtani
UTIL: Tommy Edman
BN: Carlos Correa
BN: Victor Robles
BN: Byron Buxton

There are daily lineup changes and daily (immediate) adds in this league, so it’s pretty easy to patch up problems during the season. For this reason, I like to draft a bunch of upside hitters and hope I get 3-4 guys that really crush the value I got them at. That was the thinking behind me drafting a bunch of guys I did not recommend at all during draft prep season (Chisholm, Robert, Correa, Buxton).

It is not a team I would build in a normal league situation where you are more stuck with the guys you draft.

That league is mostly about the comradery and fun of it, and man, was that draft some fun.

My buddy’s dad has this massive deck that you can see there. We were once again able to get the whole league there for the 8+ hours it took to complete the draft. There were many moments of pre-pick confidence followed by absolute freeze jobs. Pish was completely shook the whole time, and Mitch took an inordinate and uncalled for about of grief for drafting Gleyber Torres.

Producer Lee dove into the first base pool real early to snag Triston Casas. That foiled my plans at first base. I saw that Yandy Diaz projected extremely well in our league settings this year, so I was just going to wait until the 19th round to grab him, but Stupid Ass Clint (that’s his legal name) ruined that for me in the 17th round. That was the big mistake. I didn’t have a first baseman until very late, so I just fell back on the walk rate of Nathaniel Lowe, and we’ll figure it out later.

Catchers went late, but I didn’t know that was going to happen, so I grabbed my favorite guy for this league, Willson Contreras, in the 10th round. He feels like a bit of a cheat code this year playing first base, especially in an OBP league.

My lack of offense is hopefully buoyed by a strong pitching staff:

SP: Michael King
SP: Yoshinobu Yamamoto
SP: Roki Sasaki
SP: Joe Ryan
SP: George Kirby [IL]
SP: Clay Holmes
SP: Drew Rasmussen
SP: Kumar Rocker
SP: Jackson Jobe
RP: Andres Munoz
RP: David Bednar

The Sasaki pick was mostly for the fun aspect. I don’t really expect a phenomenal season from the guy, but the arm and team context are certainly exciting, and I wanted some extra reason to pull me out of bed at 6am for these two Japan games.

We have a new four RP max, so I just decided to take it easy on closers and grab the two RP cheat codes (Holmes and Rasmussen). I’ll lose steals for now, but I should get the leg up on QS and W with the extra arms. That has been my strategy in this league for a while, but it wasn’t until this year that I had to sacrifice saves to pull it off. There will be a ton of saves to be had on waivers, so I’ll go there if I need to. I’m also considering just punting the thing altogether, it’s one of 12 categories. If Holmes and Rasmussen are both looking like long-haul arms for me early on, I’ll probably look to ship off Munoz and Bednar (although Bednar might prove to just be a drop).

The guys I really wanted but didn’t get:

Wyatt Langford (went in the 3rd)
Seiya Suzuki (5th)
Triston Casas (5th)
Christian Yelich (6th)
Spencer Strider (8th)
Shane McClanahan (9th)
Bryan Woo (11th)
Cristopher Sanchez (13th)
Gavin Williams (16th)
Kerry Carpenter (21st)
Ryan Weathers (22nd)
Tyler Soderstrom (27th)

It went fine. I think I have one of the better pitching staffs and a ton of upside offensively, and I usually succeed in this league with in-season management rather than a pristine draft.

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MLB DW Auction

This draft was last night, and it is a completely different story than the home league. Here’s the team:

For how little I knew about doing an auction draft, it turned out okay. If I could redo it, I would not have bought Pablo Lopez for $29. That was still a good price (per the projections), but it really limited what I could spend when filling out my offense, and Lopez wasn’t a specific target of mine for these league settings.

There is a fine line in an auction draft between spending too much early on and too little early on. One guy didn’t buy anybody early and ended up with great late-round values, but no real studs on his team. And one guy bought a ton of players too early and ended up with a full roster and like a fifth of his budget still left.

I would definitely trade that $29 for Pablo for 3-4 hitters around $8-$12 a piece (or maybe just a stud $30 hitter…), but I think I was able to put up a competitive-enough hitting lineup with all of those hitters under $5. Swanson ($3), Thomas ($5), Mullins ($2), Shaw ($2), Jung ($1), and Lowe ($1) are fine with me in a 16-teamer. And unlike a categories league, it doesn’t matter where the production comes from. You don’t want to be starting losers by any means, but if 70% of your points come from pitching, that’s okay as long as the total points is more than everybody else. You don’t have to balance the team.

You definitely need experience to refine the auction draft strategy, and I look forward to doing more of them in the future.

There’s a lot more detail on my picks and other auction thoughts in the podcast version of this. I recorded it right in the middle of writing this. So check that out if you’re into this kind of content.

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That’ll do it for now, and I’m not entirely sure what to do on the Substack for the next eight days until we reach real Opening Day! So let me know if you have any ideas.