How to draft Pujols

Since Pujols seems to be the big prize in American League drafts it seems apropos to offer a quick guide on how to draft him. The strategies that follow are made within the Baseball Manager game, affectionately known as BBM. These strategies are not the only way to get him but they work. I drafted him this year in one of my keeper leagues and am in position to get him in a non-keeper league.

The first step is to set the SP and OF caps to the bare minimum (3,500 at SP and 3,000 for the outfield.) This assures you of not spending more than that. However that is not enough. You have to actually spend less than that in order to position yourself first for the 1^st base draft. How can that be done? Read on.

If the league is a Keeper league you want to keep 5 cheap SP and 5 cheap OF. By cheap I mean the 100-200 type players. These don’t necessarily have to be dogs. You won’t have much of a team if you have no pitching and a worthless outfield to go along with Pujols. The good news is that in a keeper league there are usually several players worth keeping who don’t cost much. Look at this list of names – Viciedo, De Aza, Boujos, Reimold, Crisp, Gardner, Dirks, Cain, Boesch and Austin Jackson. These are some of the outfielders in my keeper leagues with salaries of 100-200k. A manager can put together a pretty promising outfield with that kind of talent. Keep 5 of those and you’ll get a 100k player with your 6^th pick. Do this for both the starting pitching draft and the outfield draft and you’ll have the #1 selection for 1^st base (assuming that no one else is using the same strategy).

A note: You may be able to reduce that keeper number to 4 players at those two positions and thereby keep two other promising cheap players on your roster, but the risk is that you might draft someone with a higher salary with the 5^th pick. The safer play is to keep 5 at each position.

For non-keeper leagues, the strategy is more difficult and less “guaranteed”. Once again, set the salary caps to the minimum. The challenge now is to draft cheap quality. Duh. Everybody wants that. The trick is to figure out how to do it. The Verlanders and Weavers will cost more than 3,500 so players of those type of players are out of the question. You can, however, draft some quality players by zeroing in on the 3^rd tier players. These are guys who will cost around 400-800. Guys such as Floyd, Peavy, Mendoza of KC, and even Freddy Garcia will likely have salaries under 800. And there are plenty more. Drafting 3 or 4 of those types coupled with the 100k players at #5 and #6 and you come in under the salary cap AND you have a squad you can work with.

Once you determine a dozen or so players to target, do you rank them at the top of your draft list? No. A player you rank #1 will add 500 to his salary. Even if everyone else had him ranked 20^th he would still cost 1,400. The strategy is to rank this group just below the high-priced players. An even better strategy is to rank one or two just below the top group of players, then rank the others just below a second tier of quality players. Yeah right…grin…therein lies the rub. How do you know where that magic cutoff position is located? The answer is you don’t.

This is why non-keeper leagues are more difficult to maneuver into that numero uno position. But cheer up…you can still make some reasonably good guesses about who is going to cost the most. Put the Verlanders and Weavers at the top. Just below them add the next most obvious group of stars. Then, somewhere around number 10-15 you put in a couple of your targeted 3^rd tier players. Move down the list a little and add the rest of the target group. The better you are at this the better your chances of getting the prize. And if you aren’t number one after the SP draft you still have the OF draft to squeeze past that team ahead of you.

It’s fun to go after Pujols. The downside, however, is bypassing all the talent to get the cheaper players. That really shows up in the keeper leagues. It’s tough not to keep the stars but they usually cost the most. There’s no way you’re going to be able to keep those high priced players and still get Pujols.

With all the leagues in Baseball Manager there must be some other strategies that work. Let’s face it, someone in every league will get the 1^st pick and not all leagues are going to have managers who think like me. It would be very interesting to hear how your league worked or how you nabbed the big guy. Leave a comment. Let’s see how you did it.

League Membership

My fantasy sport leagues have all been played online. But before there was an Internet I’m sure some of you played in leagues made up of friends and relatives. That must have been fun getting together every so often with everyone and talking about how things are going. The draft sessions must have been a blast.

But today probably most fantasy sport leagues are played online. And that can result in some great new friendships. Unfortunately, it can also have the opposite effect and you could get stuck in a league that can’t end soon enough.

Here is a suggestion when joining a league. Communicate with as many members of the league before you join. Find out about them as well as telling them about you. Basic demographic stuff is helpful – age, experience, etc.   Your main interest is reading the responses you get. You can tell something about people in the way they write. Do they write in short unintelligible phrases, is everything written in shorthand text, is the grammar something a 6^th grader would write? Those things are fine if that’s what you want, but if you are looking for a more mature league those red flags should send you elsewhere.

When I joined the Boise Summer League in 1992 in Baseball Manager, the fellow who started the league posted a note in the forum looking for members. He later told us that he made his decisions on who to invite based upon what they wrote. If they could string a few words together in intelligent sentences he asked them to join. That was some pretty funny stuff when I learned how he did it, but he must have known what he was doing because several of us still play together in that league twenty years later.

The flip side of things can also happen. Last year in a different league a new member joined. The league thought it was getting one person (a veteran some of us knew), but instead the team was run by the guy’s teenaged nephew. Okay….kind of odd twist but not much could be done about it. The young man talked a good game and assured us of his commitment. Things didn’t work out, he finished dead last in the league and ticked off several members at various points in the year. Not the best of times.

In short, be careful who you agree to play with as 162 games is a long season.

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New Year

The New Year brings a fresh start, a new beginning, the feeling that this could be my year. The fact that everyone else feels the same doesn’t seem to dampen our spirit.

A new year is also the time to reflect. The first time I heard about fantasy baseball or rotisserie baseball was in the mid-1980’s. The Dean of Student Affairs asked me to create a spreadsheet for him so that he could quickly calculate some baseball statistics. When asked why, he told me about his baseball league and how they were getting ready for their annual draft. I must admit it sounded childish and something for a kid to play, not an adult. Little did I know…

That was then. A few years later I got online via Prodigy. They offered a game called Baseball Manager and daily these ads for the game enticed me. Finally I clicked on the link and read about the game. There was a nice live forum wherein I asked some questions, got some intelligent answers and ended up joining a league mid-way through the season.

Wow, am I glad I did. I no longer think of fantasy sports as a child’s game. Obviously, millions of others don’t either. When I think about it now, I don’t know why I rejected it back then. It is fun. Maybe it’s the daily play that appeals to me most, or the competition, or maybe it’s just wanting to see a win in my column each morning…whatever it is, I’m hooked. I’ve been playing for twenty years now and during the season it’s still the first thing I think about in the morning – what are my scores?

The New Year brings promising hope of change to us. And part of me spends more than a bit of time thinking that this may be my year in fantasy baseball. And that’s a good way to start the year.

Commitment

“What’s more important? Hitting or Pitching?” You hear it asked all the time in major league baseball AND among fantasy baseball enthusiasts. Here’s the answer – commitment. Huh? Yep, I threw you a curve there. But I’m telling you, you can have the best strategy in the world, have a super draft, make shrewd moves during the season, and pull off the most spectacular trades but if you don’t stick to it day in and day out you’ll fall apart at the end.

I’ve seen it happen time and time again. A manager will be right in the thick of things all year long and then come mid-August and September their team fades away. Commitment means making the same kind of moves late in the season that you did early on. It’s hard to do sometimes. Other things in life creep in. I can’t imagine what’s more important than one’s fantasy baseball team but some people find that family, school, and work need some attention especially when they’ve been neglected since opening day in April.

Seriously, don’t give up. Last year my Red Lions team in Baseball Manager was 15 games out of it in early August. I figured I didn’t stand a chance…AND I almost gave up. But I didn’t. I kept at it and lo and behold started winning. One winning streak after another and before I knew it I had climbed into 2^nd place 2 games out with a week to go. I didn’t win the pennant but I sure made that last week interesting.

So, hitting or pitching? Yep, they’re important but they both come in second place to the real key to winning – Yogi’s famous words, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”