Rate my team

Like I mentioned in my last post, I got to participate in my Fantasy Baseball draft over the weekend.  Since I’m sure a good chunk of leagues will be holding their draft over these next few days, I thought I’d share with you how our first couple of rounds went along with my draft strategy which I’m very happy how my team turned out.  Of course my thinking is a little biased.

First off some basics of this league.  It’s a 14 team league, you start all 9 positions along with a utility spot on offense and on defense it’s 5 starting pitchers and 2 relief pitchers.  We play a head-to-head schedule with these being our scoring categories: Offense-R, HR, TB, SB, OBP and Defense-W, K, ERA, WHIP, SV.

Here is how the first couple of rounds went, I had the 10th overall pick:

1. Hanley Ramirez, SS
2. Albert Pujols, 1B
3. Jose Reyes, SS
4. David Wright, 3B
5. Ryan Braun, OF
6. Grady Sizemore, OF
7. Miguel Cabrera, 1B
8. Jimmy Rollins, SS
9. Tim Lincecum, SP
10. Ryan Howard, 1B
11. Johan Santana, SP
12. Mark Teixeira, 1B
13. CC Sabathia, SP
14. Dustin Pedroia, 2B **End of First Round**
15. Lance Berkman, 1B
16. Manny Ramirez, OF
17. Carlos Lee, OF
18. Alfonso Soriano, OF
19. Chase Utley, 2B
20. Josh Hamilton, OF
21. Carl Crawford, OF
22. Evan Longoria, 3B
23. Ian Kinsler, 2B
24. Roy Halladay, SP
25. Ichiro Suzuki, OF
26. Prince Fielder, 1B
27. Justin Morneau, 1B
28. Carlos Beltran, OF

 I think this is the first time ever in any fantasy draft that my first 2 picks are from players on the same team.  My hope was Jimmy Rollins would fall to my first pick but I knew the chances of that were pretty slim.  I know Howard is much lower on many mock drafts but remember our league uses OBP and not AVG - and the reason Howard is graded lower is because his batting average can sink a team (batted .251 last season compared to his on base percentage being .339).  Then getting Chase Utley at number 19 overall was too good to pass up.  I debated about the whole 2 guys from the same team thing, but I briefly thought about Utley at number 10 overall and his value was too good to pass on.  I think the best value pick is getting Prince Fielder at pick number 26.  Not bad getting 40 home run potential at that spot.

So how does my entire team look like?  First off I want to say that I didn’t select my first pitcher until Round 8.  The depth at pitcher really stood out to me while I did my research and I kind of had a list of about 15 starting pitchers to target in the mid-rounds.  Lucky enough for me I liked what I ended up getting at pitcher while building up what I think may be the toughest offense in the league.

Here’s my position-by-position breakdown of my team followed by the round that they were selected.  Opening Day starters in bold.

• C-Gerald Laird (21), Matt Wieters(12): Wieters comes to the MLB with lots of hype, but that won’d happen until the end of May when he gets called up from AAA.
• 1B-Ryan Howard (1)
• 2B-Chase Utley (2)
• 3B-Chris Davis(5): I’ll admit I don’t know a lot about Davis, but he has potential to hit at least 30 HR’s this season which is good enough for me.
• SS-Khalil Greene (13): By far my weakest starter, but I really think a change of scenery does him well moving from San Diego to St. Louis…hitting .418 this spring.
• OF-Jason Bay (3)
• OF-Adam Dunn(4): Another guy who gets downgraded for a terrible average but is an asset in our league due to a high on base percentage.
• OF-Jermaine Dye (7)
• UTIL-Carlos Pena (6)
• Offensive Bench-Wieters, C (12); Jeff Francoeur, OF (17); Ian Stewart, 3B (18)
• SP-Joba Chamberlain (8)
• SP-Rich Harden (9): Puts up ace numbers IF healthy
• SP-Ricky Nolasco (10)
• SP-Chris Carpenter (11)
• SP-Randy Johnson (14)
• RP-Jason Motte (16)
• RP-Kevin Gregg (22)
• Pitching Bench-Chad Qualls, RP (15); John Smoltz, SP (19); Sean Marshall, SP (20)

No surprises as a lot of question marks exist on my starting pitching staff.  A lot of guys with either some bad injury history or ones with age issues.  But when you play head-to-head like we do in this league, all I can ask for is somebody who can get me strikeouts along with a chance to collect a win.  Hopefully I hit on at least 3 of those type of players.  Motte and Gregg weren’t named their team’s closers as of when we held our draft so I feel fortunate to get hopefully many cheap saves this year with those guys.

Hopefully I’ve given a little bit of help and advice through all of this.  Best of luck with your league this season.