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.

Pre-Season Trading

One of the enjoyable features of playing in a Keeper league in fantasy baseball is what happens in the off-season. If you happen to play in a league that only uses one of the two leagues (American or National) you have the scenario of new players being available during the draft due to trades and free agent pickups in the real major leagues. That sets up a very interesting dynamic for keeper managers. Do they try to draft one of these new players or not?

In the BaseballManager game you have a set payroll that must be managed so you cannot keep all your expensive star players and still expect to draft one of the new players to the league. And this year the American League has some hefty new stars with Pujols and Fielder leading the pack. I’ve already seen some trades in my keeper leagues that demonstrate managers jockeying for position to be able to draft one of those two superstars.

We have to keep at least 7 players from the previous year so they will automatically cut into the payroll. By keeping the least expensive players you’ll have the best chance of drafting first when the third round of the draft comes along (which is the 1^st base draft). Decisions need to be made whether to simply keep the seven players with the lowest payroll or try to keep good players even though their salaries are a little higher. What some of the managers are doing is trading away very good expensive players for pretty good inexpensive players. They will then be able to keep 7 moderately good players and still have a shot at getting Pujols.

Good strategy for both trading teams. The one gets the lower payroll and the other gets the better player. This makes for some very fun times especially for guys who’ve been sitting around without baseball for months and are eager to do something…anything…to get back playing the game. It is one of the main reasons I joined a keeper league several years back. I love the ability to manage year-round. It also means more strategy in the draft as you analyze each position relative to what you already have. Should you keep the 2^nd baseman you have or try and get a better one? The risk is that if you don’t keep what you have you could end up with worse. Ah, great fun. If you’ve not tried it I heartily suggest it.

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.