My Perfect Draft - 2024 Fantasy Baseball
I go through my hypothetical but realistic perfect draft for 2024 fantasy baseball leagues
I stole this idea directly from Adam Levitan, who writes this for fantasy football every year. He goes round by round and gives who he would pick in a perfect, but realistic world. Every year I just save that article a few hours before my fantasy football draft and go directly off of his picks. It has turned out to work pretty well over the last few years, although fantasy football is a much simpler game than fantasy baseball.
Baseball drafts are much tricker than football drafts since each pick influences your targets the rest of the way. In football, you just want points, in baseball, we want to fill categories and we have two completely different player types to draft (hitters and pitchers). So this will be tougher to than for a football post, but I’ll do my best.
The perfect draft would just be to have the first 30 picks of the draft, of course, but we’ll make this as realistic as possible using ADP as the guide.
If you read the draft guide and have been following along with my stuff, you won’t find too much new or surprising here, but it’s a fun and worthwhile exercise anyways.
We’ll do this in the context of a 12-team standard roto draft.
Round 1: Mookie Betts
Before the recent Acuna stuff, it was clear that the perfect draft would start with Acuna at 1.1. That’s still probably true, but it doesn’t feel as great now with questions about if his knee will hold up and if it will lower his steal attempts even while he’s playing. So I’ll give myself a middle-round pick here and say I pick #6.
The “perfect draft” this is tough to do in the first round because it’s so dependent on what pick you have. Betts is my #6 overall player, so I would not take him before pick 6. I prefer Acuna, Witt, Rodriguez, and Carroll to him, but let’s just say we have 6th pick and take it from there.
Betts is a really nice get since he’s in a top tier by himself at second base. It could prove to be a pretty big advantage to get elite production at second base, because there just aren’t many big upside names at the position right now.
Betts doesn’t give me a ton of steals, and he is not really a 40-50 homer threat either, he’s elite in runs, fine in steals, and very good everywhere else.
Round 2: Francisco Lindor
Since I started the draft with a guy that is not exactly ELITE in homers or steals, I would like to come back with someone in round two that does a bit of both as well. Lindor went 30-30 last year and performed like a first round pick. I don’t think he’ll do repeat that, but 25-20 feels like a floor for him.
My second round pick does largely depend on who I took in the first, however. My round two rules would be that I’m not taking a pitcher (unless I took Acuna at 1.1), and I’m trying to maximize homers and steals with my first two picks. So if my first pick is Carroll or Witt (better for steals than anything else), I’m looking for a big home run hitter in the second. If I end up with a lower-steals guy like Betts/Soto/Judge, then I’m hoping to end up with Ramirez/Turner/Lindor in the second.
Round 3: Zack Wheeler
This is the round I want to start my pitching staff, and Wheeler is the guy I’d most like. His ADP is 25 and my third round pick in the hypothetical would be pick #30, so maybe he wouldn’t make it to me. At that point I would be looking to go for Luis Castillo. I would feel pretty good about one of those making it. If they didn’t, I think I would go for another hitter and then cross my fingers that Pablo Lopez/Yamamoto/Kirby make it back to me in round 4.
Round 4: Tarik Skubal/Tyler Glasnow
If I were in a five outfielder league without an outfielder at this point (I would be wanting to use Betts at 2B), I’d be panicking a little bit, and I might take someone that I’m not overly excited about like Adolis Garcia or Randy Arozarena. Or I could look for Jose Altuve here and move Betts to the outfield.
But in a standard league with just three outfielders, I’m okay with waiting longer there and going back-to-back pitchers, provided one of these two massive upside names is there. I think either one of these guys could be the SP1 overall this year, so to get them with a safer option like Wheeler or Castillo has me feeling really good about my pitching.
Round 5: Nolan Jones
To take a guy with a 30% K%, a 68% Contact%, and a .396 BABIP last year doesn’t seem like me at all, that’s basically been my #1 type of player to avoid over the years, and it has served me well. So maybe this is stupid, but I need an outfielder bad in this build and I’m still looking to add a lot of homers and steals to the mix.
And it might not be perfectly sound strategy, but I generally have come to not worry so much about batting average anyways. There’s a lot of noise in the stat and there are always cheap guys to add on waivers to boost your batting average if needed, and you don’t find too many 30-20 threats late in the draft, so that plus the skills plus the positional need plus the backbone of Coors Field (the BABIP is very likely to be quite high again for Jones) makes me okay with taking on a little bit of risk here. And really, I’m not sure if the risk is really as bad as it seems like. He’s not going to lose the job, and the homers should be there (16% Brl%, 44% GB% last year), so we’ll take a shot on Jones.
Round 6: Matt McLain*, Oneil Cruz
I don’t known if I would pick McLain here right now, but if he gets back in the spring lineup soon I will start feeling a lot better about him. He missed more than the final month of the season last year with an oblique injury, and the same thing came up again this spring. So that’s a pretty big concern, but if he’s looking healthy he’s another guy that justified the risk. The 2B/SS eligibility is great, and he does feel like a very god floor hitter with the home ballpark, with his launch angle profile, and the upside is a 25-25 bat.
I also am pretty excited to get after Oneil Cruz this year as a guy I think could be a 30-homer, 20-steal, 90-run contributor. I don’t love the idea of pairing him with Nolan Jones since those two could both be pretty big tanks to the batting average, but my general strategy in the early rounds is to rack up as many homers and steals as possible without abandoning my pitching staff, so I like these two names for that purpose. If we’re last in batting average, there are ways to fix that.
And that will be curtains for the free readers, become a paid sub to get the rest of this post and everything else! Check out the about page here for more information on what you get with your subscription.