I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, there’s no better way to prep for your upcoming fantasy baseball draft than a good, old-fashioned mock draft. Check that…pluralize it – mock drafts.
At this point, you’ve been reading articles here in the 2017 MLB Draft Guide for over a month now and your knowledge of both the MLB player pool and fantasy baseball draft strategies has grown. Extensively, we hope. We’ve got Player Rankings and tiers, the 30 Strategies have been educational, Ray Flowers’ award-winning Player Profile series is a constant stream of information and all the articles that he and I, as well as a few other Fantasy Alarm contributing writers, have offered should prove to be extremely helpful as you set up your own strategy and player targets. Now it’s time to take everything you’ve got and implement it.
If you’ve ever taken the SAT test or the LSATs or the MCATs, what’s the best way to prepare? Sure, you study the information, but you also do a series of practice tests to see how you fare under similar circumstances as the actual test. Well, why should your fantasy baseball draft prep be any different? You need extensive practice runs, and that’s where I come in.
Welcome to the Mock Draft Army
For those of you who have participated in the Army over the last few years, you know how invaluable a tool this can be for both your draft prep and in-season success. If you are not familiar, or if you’re skeptical about the usefulness of a mock draft, allow me to offer up a brief explanation.
One of the biggest complaints about mock drafts is about the participants. You go to some of the big sites, you join a mock and you find yourself in a 12-team draft that has eight people and four bots. How is that going to be helpful? The bots are simply pulling players in accordance to the site’s default rankings, not making shrewd selections based on the flow of the draft. Or better yet, how about when four of those eight people flip to auto-draft after the first six rounds because that’s all they wanted to see? That mock draft just became a colossal waste of your time.
It doesn’t work like that in the Army, though. Not even close.
Over the last 10-plus years, I have worked with some of the most amazing minds in the fantasy industry and the Army is my way of bringing you and them together in a forum that will best help you prepare for your upcoming draft. We’re already 20-plus mocks into the season, but from now through the start of the regular MLB season, I will be running roughly 6-to-8 mock drafts per week in which half the room is filled with industry experts and the other half, readers, Twitter followers, and listeners to the shows we all host on SiriusXM Fantasy Sports Radio. No bots. No auto-drafting. You draft with the big boys (and girls) and we all draft to the end.
In addition to a quality mock environment in which you can try out new strategies and chat with the experts, we are also helping to develop a much more accurate set of Average Draft Position (ADP) numbers. Save for the ADP from the National Fantasy Baseball Championships (NFBC), there is very little reliability to be found in other sites’ numbers. With so many bots and so few people completing their mocks, the ADP becomes nothing more than an extension of that site’s default rankings and that doesn’t help you at all. The ADP for the Mock Draft Army doesn’t have that problem.
The key to really making these drafts work for you is found both in how you participate and how active you are in the chat area. You’ve got six or seven amazing fantasy minds at your disposal for questions on player value, draft strategy, sleepers, you name it. Ask them whatever you want. The floor is yours. They are participating because they want to help you win. With their advice, the ADP numbers and your use of these drafts to try out a variety of different strategies, you’ll be able to confidently walk into any snake draft and dominate your competition. You’ll know your opponents’ moves before they will and if they throw you a curve, you’ll be able to adjust on the fly with ease.
So if you don’t follow me on Twitter -- @rotobuzzguy – you should start now. If you aren’t listening to me on SiriusXM Fantasy Sports Radio (Saturdays 3-5pm ET; Sundays 8-11pm ET), you better start that too. I write about these mocks and the ADP trends right here on Fantasy Alarm and we discuss a number of these drafts on-air as well.
If you would like to participate in the Mock Draft Army, email me at mockdraftarmy@yahoo.com and put "Mock Draft Army Sign-Up" into the subject heading. Drafts are filled on a first-come, first-served basis so the time to act is now.