BGB Fantasy League preparation: Part One

The 2010 Baseball GB Fantasy League draft is all set for 20.00 GMT (4 p.m. Eastern Time) on Saturday 20 March; less than two weeks away. We’ve got our 14 teams now and Mark’s in-depth primer is online, passing on all the details about how the competition works.

That means it’s time to get on with some preparation to avoid making a complete horlicks of the draft. 

I’ll be posting some semi-serious updates of my preparation over the next week and a bit, leading up to the big evening.

I’m happy to pass on some of my tips because I don’t do anything clever when it comes to my fantasy research.  Custom stats and databases aren’t really my thing.  There are a lot of fantasy experts out there devoting countless hours to this sort of research, so you may as well piggy-back on to their efforts rather than completely reinvent the wheel. 

The place I start with is the Yahoo Fantasy Baseball section.  They produce position-by-position articles that give you a sense of how several fantasy experts rate the players.  I use this series mainly to become familiar with which players are eligible for each position.  In a lot of cases, that’s pretty obvious (expert tip number one: Albert Pujols is a first baseman and is quite a good guy to pick), but you do come across some players who are eligible for several positions that might come in useful when you’re putting together your roster.

From there, I dip in and out of several different ranking websites just to see where there are great divergences of opinions.  Do a quick Google search and you’ll find loads of ranking resources.  Every now and then you’ll come across a player who is boosted/demoted in one set of rankings and you can then look into the player a bit more deeply and decide whether it’s a good idea to be similarly optimistic/pessimistic or not.  However, the more rankings you consult, the more you find that there’s often not a great deal of difference between them. 

So I stock up on a set of free ranking sheets, overall and position-by-position, and then I mess about with them.  Yes, I go to the trouble of finding ranking sheets by fantasy experts who know infinitely more about this than I do and then I decide that in some cases I know better.

Okay, I don’t really.  Well, I do mess the ranking sheets about, but not in the misguided belief that I know more than others. 

Playing fantasy baseball is purely a bit of fun for me.  As I’m looking over the ranking sheets, some players will stand out for both rational and irrational reasons and they’ll get a star next to their name or a minus.  That’s not the sensible way to go about it.  Upgrading someone purely on a hunch formed on the back of a few stats and some positive quotes from the player in question isn’t sound fantasy strategy, yet heading into the draft with a few ‘dark horses’ on your list adds to the enjoyment.

Last year I went into the draft with stars next to the names of Javier Vazquez and Zack Grienke.  I was able to select both of them and they repaid me with excellent seasons.  That may mean I know more about this fantasy lark than I think, or it may mean that I’ve used up my luck for the next five years.  The latter is more likely.

Putting together your own modified ranking sheets is only part of the battle.  You’ve got to be able to use that research when the big day comes and that’s where mock drafts can help you.  That will be the subject of my next fantasy post later this week.