Offseason Notebook - Early Draft Thoughts
A look at an early NFBC draft and some key takeaways for 2025 fantasy baseball drafts.
Recorded two podcasts yesterday, my first two in almost three months! First, I talked to myself for a while and went through the two team previews that I’ve published already. You can check that out here.
And then I went on the Draft Champions podcast and talked to Zack Waxman about a bunch of dumb stuff, including these Gladiator drafts that I’ll talk about.
It’s a pretty insane thing to do, drafting a fantasy baseball team in November, especially when you’re paying a large rake to the host website and competing against mostly players who really know what they’re doing.
But this is what we do, right? This is a fantasy baseball blog. Am I supposed to just sit on my freaking hands until February?
So, I have done one Gladiator draft already, and I will do at least one more before the new year. They are fun, if nothing else, and you do learn a good bit about the player pool. Here’s a possibly unreadable screenshot of what it looks like, although there is a round and a half left to go.
In this NFBC Gladiator format, you draft 23 rounds, and then you’re done. There are no benches, no waivers, no trades, no moves, nothing! You just let those 23 players accrue their stats and see who wins at the end of the season.
My team looks like this:
C JT Realmuto
C Sean Murphy
1B Josh Naylor
2B Ozzie Albies
SS Dansby Swanson
3B Josh Jung
CI Tyler Soderstrom
MI Luis Rengifo
UT ???
OF Julio Rodriguez
OF Jackson Chourio
OF Taylor Ward
OF Garrett Mitchell
OF Daulton VarshoP Yoshinobu Yamamoto
P Shota Imanaga
P Gerrit Cole
P Shane McClanahan
P Michael Kopech
P Drew Rasmussen
P Jordan Romano
P Orion Kerkering
P Walker Buehler
The thinking went like this:
Take the best available in the first round; I found that to be J-Rod and Chourio
Get a second baseman early. That position is disgusting this year, so I was happy to get Albies in round three
Load up on the second and third wave of SP; there is a lot to like between SP10 and SP30
Take advantage of these early discounts on players who missed time due to injury last year (Cole, McClanahan, Jung, Buehler - in this case)
Fill out the offense with boring but reliable playing time
I really liked the start I had. I felt like I caught up at SP in a hurry with those four arms I took consecutively.
If I could change something, I would have taken Robert Suarez or Jhoan Duran instead of Imanaga. I didn’t really think I would land both Cole and McClanahan, but they both made it back to me so I couldn’t pass up on it. Having a strong closer option would have made this team a lot stronger.
That’s clearly a weakness there, and I can say that even five months in advance. I don’t have a single reliable source of saves, although I do think there’s some upside with Kopech/Kerkering and maybe even a chance of getting some saves from Rasmussen. But every single RP I drafted could be a total disaster, so it’s really not a good situation.
My next draft, I will be grabbing a reliever in the first three or four rounds.
Here’s what the reliever results from this draft looked like:
Clase (round 2)
Diaz (2)
Hader (2)
Williams (3)
Helsley (4)
Miller (4)
Bautista (4)
Iglesias (4)
Suare (6)
Duran (6)
Walker (6)
Munoz (6)
There’s your clear top 12. Alexis Diaz was next, but not until the very end of round eight. In these early drafts, where you can’t make any in-season moves, the elite closers get pushed the board a ton. It’s a lot easier to find help in other categories late in the draft, but to find saves after the first 20 or so guys are gone, you’re just totally guessing and hoping for good luck.
The top tier is pretty clear to me: Clase, Diaz, Hader, Williams, Helsley. Those guys have all been consistently dominant and have firm grips on the closer job on their teams. You could include Miller in there, but there’s still the injury history, and his team is bad, so I’d like to ideally get one of those five names in the rest of the drafts I do.
The other lesson I see here is there is real pitching value early on. Some of the picks that surprised me:
Cole in round 6
McClanahan in round 7
Fried in round 7
Schwellenbach in round 7
Peralta in round 7
Steele in round 9
Sonny Gray in round 9
Gausman in round 11
And keep in mind that this is a 15-team league. These guys are going very late. I’m pretty sure this Cole/McClanahan thing won’t last long, I imagine they both end up in the top 60 picks, but I’m here for the discount now.
On the shallow second base thing I mentioned earlier. Here’s how it went:
Marte (round 2)
Albies (3)
Altuve (4)
Semien (7)
Luis Garcia (9)
McLain (9)
Westburg (9)
Turang (10)
Hoerner (11)
Bogaerts (11)
Stott (13)
Gimenez (13)
How many of those guys can you feel really good about? I’d say three, max. Semien is 34 now, and then after him you’re taking serious risks about health and performance. We don’t know for sure that guys like Garcia, McLain, Westburg, or Hoerner can consistently put up fantasy numbers, and there are health concerns in a couple of those cases as well.
So, my early lessons learned for these early draft-and-hold leagues:
Get a top-five closer
Get a top-three second baseman
Now, you could also play the angle that well only a couple of people are going to feel good about their second baseman, so I’ll just take my chances like the rest of the league, I can’t get put too far behind the pack since there are so few 2B options.
I’d say that strategy works better for a league with a bench. I might wait on 2B, and then take 3-4 shots at it to give myself better odds of one of them proving to be a start-worthy player.
But in these Gladiators, I want to be pretty solid across the board and take as few risks as possible.
Some of my favorite values at each position, from looking at this draft board:
Catcher: Will Smith (7), Willson Contreras (7), Tyler Stephenson (11)
I don’t actually like that specific price for Contreras, but I think he’ll go later than that on average. The move from catcher to first base is so nice for him. He will play every day and not have the wear and tear of playing the catcher position, and I’m confident the guy can still hit.
First Base: Michael Toglia (15), Yandy Diaz (17)
The first base position isn’t all that great, either. I had a bunch of value picks to like last year, but I’m not seeing much now. You have Vlad/Freeman/Harper/Alonso in the first three rounds, and then a tier of Casas/WAlker/Naylor/Pasquantino, and then not much else after that. I like Toglia a bit; I think the playing time should be there, and his power is no joke - but he could potentially be a .220 hitter. Check out the Rockies preview for more. And I just throw Yandy on there since you can at least get a full year of PAs out of him for very cheap.
Second Base: Marcus Semien (7), Bryson Stott (13), Gleyber Torres (16)
Again, there’s not much here, but I do like the prices + playing time on all three of these guys.
Shortstop: Tovar (8), Bichette (10), Winn (12)
There are so many elite guys at the top of the list that I’d really like to get into the SS position early. You have Witt/Elly/Gunnar/Betts/Turner/Lindor all going in the first 35 picks, and they are all extremely good fantasy bats. After that, you lose a ton of upside, but I’m okay falling back on one of these three names or even a super boring pick like Dansby Swanson or Jeremy Pena.
Third Base: Burger (9), Bregman (11), Jung (11), Lewis (10), Rengifo (14)
A lot of the Bregman takes, and projections will rely on where he lands. Given his lack of raw power and pull dependency, his home run projection looks wildly different if you compare Baltimore vs. Philly. But he could land somewhere that gets him back into the mid-20s in homers, and that would be a smash at where he’s being drafted right now. I also think we’ll get a 25-homer season from Josh Jung. He wasn’t healthy at all last year, and he’s very cheap now because of it.
I don’t love Rengifo, but he has shown the ability to hit homers and steal bags while in the lineup, and he has a clear path to be an everyday player for them, so I’ll take some shots.
Outfield: Greene (8), Happ (9), Yelich (11), Meadows (14), Profar (15), Springer (17), Evan Carter (20), Varsho (21)
A 15-team, five-outfielder league is stressful. You can really jack your team up by not filling out at least four strong outfielders. One team in this draft currently sits with this as their outfield:
Spencer Steer
Lane Thomas
Kerry Carpenter
Heston Kjerstad
And he has to take one more in the final round. He could easily end up with only two or three outfielders not being in the real-life lineup, and that probably ends any chance he has of winning.
In a three-outfielder league, I’m happy to take a shot on an injury risk like Mike Trout, but not here. There are 75 outfielders drafted in this league, so I want to be in there early and often. The late playing-time savers I’m seeing: Edman, Soler, Nootbaar, Springer, Friedl, Varsho, Jacob Young
So there you have some thoughts. You can join a Gladiator draft for $50 here. I don’t really advise it, and they aren’t paying me to tell you that or anything, but they are enjoyable if you have some extra fun money lying around.