Introduction

One of the most overlooked keys to winning a fantasy baseball league is knowing the league’s scoring rules.  If you don’t know how your players score points, how can you be expected to build an accurate draft list and draft plan?

I did two drafts this weekend using the CDM Draft and Play system, and it was amazing how many people didn’t know that there was no trading in these leagues!  This small fact can have a huge impact on your draft plan.  You don’t want to waste picks on players for trade bait, so you want to make sure each pick fits into your game plan.

Basic Rules

1. There is no trading in any of the CDM Draft & Play Games
2. Free Agents are for the most part on a first come first serve basis.
3. Injured Players do not require the use of a reserve spot, but you may only have 28 healthy players on your team at any one time.
4. There are two types of scoring leagues: Rotisserie or Fantasy Points.
5. The Fantasy Points game has two negative point categories for pitchers: Losses (-5) and Earned Runs (-1).
6. Only one grand prize is awarded for each scoring format, so All rotisserie scored leagues compete for an overall prize of $1000, and all fantasy point leagues compete for a separate $1000.  The best chance to win the grand prize is to be in a mixed league, because AL and NL only leagues do not have the same talent pool depth to compete on a national level.
7. If you don’t make a pick in 60 seconds, the computer makes your next pick based on highest ranked player!  Since I was preparing material for this article, I was burned a few times by this draft rule!

RotoRank Preparation

Since this draft was using Fantasy Scoring, I took advantage of the new league configuration tab explicitly designed for fantasy scoring.  This page should be used for all fantasy scoring leagues!  RotoRank still produces good rankings for fantasy scoring leagues, but there are some players who RotoRank won’t rate properly for fantasy scoring leagues, namely hitters with low batting average or pitchers with high ERA.

I used the Expert Draft Guide report in combination with the Draft Rankings Comparison report to produce my game plans.  I always like to prepare to game plans, so that I can quickly switch gears based on the flow of the draft.  If you read my free 2004 Mock Draft article, you’ll know that due to some problems I had, I didn’t take a pitcher until round 12.  Normally that’s not a good idea, but I had planned for that event although the reason I executed that plan wasn’t entirely my choice!

Upon analyzing the reports, I found that starting pitching was practically worthless in the fantasy scoring leagues for this new CDM Game.  Since Earned Runs and Losses are subtracted from point totals, most starters don’t rank in the top 50.  I think Prior just made it actually, and a few others were grouped between 51-60.  Closers are far more valuable in this game, as well as having good point scorers in the scarce infield positions.

The Draft Plans

Plan 1 was to pick the best available point scorer no matter what position he played.  This was the plan I expected to use; because I thought most of the owners had realized the non-factors that starting pitching would be in this league. 

Plan 2 was to draft the best closers available until bargains surfaced in other positions.  The top 6 closers should all be in the top 25 of all players for this game at the end of the year, based on my projections as of 2/13/2003.  This plan was also going to utilize the popular CDM strategy of rotating starting pitchers in and out of the lineup based on the fact if they had 2 starts in a week.  (Interestingly, this is the plan I decided to go with in the rotisserie scoring game as well, although it is not as advantageous in that game due to the ERA and WHIP categories that tend to suffer as a result of the extra starts.)

The Live Draft Results

In a rotisserie league, Gagne is a poor first round choice, but in a fantasy scoring league, he was the highest scoring player on the board at pick 7!  Prior should not have gone in the first round, since I project him to score between 610-640 points as opposed to Gagne who should score over 700, if he gets his 3^rd consecutive 50 save season.

With 2 more pitchers and an outfielder being selected before me in the second round, I realized I had the RotoRank edge!  I went to plan 2 and would draft best available closers until bargains surfaced at the scarce infield positions later in the draft.  All of the hitters selected were worthy picks, but they were at the deepest positions.  All Hitter Statistics have positive values, so they will be more valuable than pitchers in most cases.

With only top two Shortstops off the board at this point, I decide to grab Foulke.  I was hoping to get Tejada on way back down in round 4.  Note: Dotel in round 4 was actually a better pick than RJ or Mussina, based on the scoring system.

I could have taken Rivera, but with 3 stud closers already, I had to take Tejada.