Love it or hate it, the best way to prepare for the fantasy baseball season is with player rankings. It’s an antiquated system that can often be handled all wrong, but it remains a vital thing to have at your fingertips while you put together your team.

One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that most people when doing their rankings, will start with a copy of someone else’s rankings. This can result in a lot of bad ranks due to the anchoring bias. If the first person wildly mis-ranks a player, that will tend to carry through as more people start with those rankings and tweak them. The first number they see on a player creates an “anchor”, and their brain resists taking that player too far away from the original number.

For that reason, and just to get me through the winter months, I like to do my own rankings with no input from anybody else. I do this with the insertion method. I start with an empty list, and then go player by player, inserting each player into the ranks one at a time.

I’ll randomly choose a team, and then make a post on this blog for that team with notes and rankings for each player I feel is viable for fantasy purposes. It will be quite easy early on, but as the list grows it will be tougher and tougher to insert new players into it. At the end of it all, I’ll have my own rankings completely without anybody else’s input. I’m not saying this is a better way of doing it, because I’m probably not the best fantasy baseball ranker in the world, but hey it’s different, fun for me, and you as the reader will get a lot of good player notes out of it.

I appreciate you joining me on this journey.

JonPGH MLB Data Warehouse

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