As more fantasy baseball owners are utilizing mock drafting as a way to prepare for their league drafts, they are relying upon those lists to make their draft day decisions rather than their draft guides. The results of a series of mock drafts can be useful to a degree, since they are basically an aggregate of the thousands of draft guides available on the internet; however, mock drafts are based mostly on perceived value of a player and not their actual statistical value.
If you enter a draft using the Average Draft Pick Ranking for the players drafted in a series of Mock drafts, you will be building your team on the perceived value of players. Chone Figgins has an average draft pick in the top 50 not because of his statistical value, but due to the perceived scarcity of stolen bases in world of fantasy baseball. I can easily name 50 players that I would rather have on a team before Figgins (who is projected to start the season batting ninth this season for LAA). Figgins will give you 40+ SB and 80+ Runs, but what about Batting Average, Homeruns, and RBI? If you were drafting using a fantasy guide that based their valuations on statistical impact across five offensive categories that are weighted equally, then Figgins is most likely to not even be in your top 100.
The fact that Average Draft Pick Rankings are based on perceived value isn’t the only draw back to building a draft guide based solely on Mock Drafts. During most mock drafts, people are trying to learn how other owners value players they covet, so most of these owners play by their draft guide and attempt to draft a balanced team. This assumption that every owner in your league will take the approach of building a balanced team will skew the Average Draft Pick numbers. Owners that are building a balanced team are not likely to draft 10 hitters to start their draft. If you are building a balanced team, you are usually drafting 2 pitchers.
A case where you may suffer from the artificial perceived value on a player could happen when you are trying to determine which position to fill on your team based on Average Draft Picks. If you had to decide between a Closer Joe Nathan who had an Average Draft Pick(ADP) of 40, and a Shortstop Bill Hall who had an Average Draft Pick(ADP) of 60, the obvious choice would be the closer. Unfortunately, if a team following you did not plan to draft any closers during the first 10 rounds, then he probably rated the shortstop you coveted a lot higher than the ADP. In this case, you will never have a chance to draft the shortstop at pick 50, because he will have been selected after you made the choice to go with the higher rated ADP player.
Mock drafts cannot predict which strategies each owner may utilize during the draft; therefore, if you anticipate certain players falling to certain rounds, you may not get your top pick at a position. If you rely solely on Average Draft Picks to make your draft day decisions, then the owners who plan a strategy that defies the ADP will gain an advantage over you during the draft.
When preparing for your draft, ADP should be used to help give you an idea of how a player is generally perceived within the fantasy baseball realm, but you should base your draft picks on maximizing the statistical value of the players available to you on the draft. Using the previous example, if you need to choose between a Closer Joe Nathan (ADP 40) with a Statistical Value of 30 and a Shortstop Bill Hall (ADP 60) with a Statistical Value of 31, you would still have selected the Closer, if your plan was to draft a balanced team. Now if you planned to draft 5 hitters to start the draft, the Shortstop would likely have been your pick, even though the ADP suggested you could wait another round.
RotoRank has several reports that list the Statistical Ranking of a player along with the Average Draft Pick Ranking of a player. With both pieces of information in close proximity to one another, you can make educated decisions on when to draft certain players, and when to let a player slide. In most drafts, pitchers are more likely to slide than hitters, so if you see a big variation between the Statistical Ranking and ADP Ranking of a hitter, don’t assume you will be able to let him slide if you really want him. If you take a player where his statistical value suggests he should go, you don’t forfeit any value (unless you are passing on a player that has a substantially higher Statistical Ranking that doesn’t last until your following pick).
A final drawback to using Average Draft Picks to be your exclusive fantasy baseball guide is that it will not predict position runs very accurately. Each draft has its share of position runs, so if you can determine when you should draft a position of need before the talent pool dwindles, you need to know what groups of players within each position are similarly valued from a Statistical Value perspective. If you are comparing two positions, like Second Base and Starting Pitcher, and the Starting Pitchers group has 10 players available in a certain grade versus Second Base which has only 2 players left in the same grade, then you should make Second Base your primary concern, as there is likely enough pitchers left at the current grade to sustain a position run.
Overall, there is no one perfect draft guide, since every draft takes on a life of its own, and there are too many variables to predict the exact outcome of a specific draft. But if you have a draft guide like RotoRank that provides you with accurate statistical values, average draft pick values, and a way of grading players across all positions, you can be in a position to compete in any league and against any strategy that the skilled owners of your league may employ.