It happens every year.  I know that I am a good fantasy baseball player.  I know that I know enough about the players and especially the numbers to compete in fantasy baseball leagues.  Yet every year, I feel like Forrest Gump amongst all the smart minds in the Tout Wars American League Draft.  So, on Saturday, I arrive at about 8am, an hour before the draft and on the corner in front of City Crab is standing, the bearded one, Ron Shandler.  Like a shepherd waiting for his sheep.  We engage in a conversation about value drafting versus strategy drafting.  Now, EVERYONE who will draft against us knows that we use the SMART System, a system we invented as a joke initially to make fun of all the systems that were out there when Colton & The Wolfman won our first LABR AL expert’s league in 2002.  So, in casual conversation among geeks, I ask Ron how he or anyone can be a “value” drafter.  For those who don’t know, a “value” drafter is one who knows all the values of every player and all the upside metrics of every player and takes all that into account real-time in order to figure out whether to go another dollar on a player trying to get “value” at every position.  I vomited like the port-a-potty scene in The Benchwarmers.

Drill Sergeant: Gump! What's your sole purpose in this army?

Forrest Gump: To do whatever you tell me, drill sergeant!

Drill Sergeant: God damn it, Gump! You're a god damn genius! This is the most outstanding answer I have ever heard. You must have a goddamn I.Q. of 160. You are goddamn gifted, Private Gump.

Now, I am not suggesting that I have a 75 I.Q.  Compared to these guys, it feels like it.  So, Glenn and I spent hours upon hours figuring out what the strategies would be as we have to plan out the whole draft in order to compete against the superior baseball minds.  We had four possible plans on offense and four or so on pitching side. All the offensive plans surround whether we could acquire Carlos Santana, Mike Trout and Robinson Cano.  The plan A was where we got all three of them which honestly, to my surprise we did.  Since Tout Wars uses OBP, we got three of the best in that category with two of them playing scarce positions and the other being the best player in the game. Great start.

We budgeted $195 for hitting and $65 for pitching so it would be tough to draft in the SMART System which requires a “real” closer to be drafted.  Early in the draft, we got a $5 discount on drafting Robinson Cano and moved the money to pitching.  We generally don’t think this is a good idea.  When you get a pitching bargain, keep the money there.  When you get a hitting bargain, keep the money there.  Changing the plan is better for those who have deeper knowledge of every player in the league.  However, when Sonny Gray went for $19, we knew that we need to have Jeff Samardzija as one of the only pitchers who could not kill our ratios, but bring close to 200 strikeouts.  The pitching plan was much harder to piece together.  

 

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Here is a list of our team:

 

 

 

Wolf/Colton

 

C

Suzuki

Kurt

2

C

Conger

Hank

1

1B

Santana

Carlos

27

2B

Cano

Robinson

30

SS

Escobar

Alcides

17

3B

Freese

David

10

CI

Morales

Kendrys

10

MI

Colon

Christian

1

OF

Trout

Mike

46

OF

Rios

Alex

20

OF

Rasmus

Colby

7

OF

Cron

C.J.

4

OF

Gentry

Craig

2

UT

Moustakas

Mike

10

 

Pitching

 

P

Samardzija

Jeff

22

P

Gausman

Kevin

10

P

Street

Huston

17

P

Porcello

Rick

9

P

Verlander

Justin

10

P

Gibson

Kyle

2

P

Fien

Casey

1

P

Chavez

Jesse

1

P

Mujica

Edward

1

“Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you gonna get.”

After you complete the process of picking up your core players, it is cherry pick time for most of the rest of the draft.  We were saving money for Leonys Martin.  Unfortunately, he went for $25 which was too big of an overpay even for us. We grabbed some nice bargains with David Freese, Mike Moustakas and Kendrys Morales all at $10 each.  We noticed that we were short on speed so “Run, Forrest! Run!”.  We began looking for it, and it almost alluded us as we grabbed C.J. Cron who will get playing time at DH, Colby Rasmus who will be park of the boom or bust Houston Astros, but we overpaid for Alex Rios and grabbed Craig Gentry for $2 to make sure we would compete in SBs.

“Anyway, like I was sayin', shrimp is the fruit of the sea.”

Well for us, it is not shrimp, but Trout.  We banked a lot on Trout and it is not usually our strategy to pay top dollar for players at a non-scarce position, but AL outfield is SCARCE.  Let’s take a quick look: Adam Jones is awful in OBP leagues. Jose Bautista gets injured and plays on that turf, Jacoby Ellsbury has been hurt almost as much as Cargo or Nelson Cruz. Michael Brantley only did it once.  George Springer hasn’t done it even once. Yoenis Cespedes is on a new team. After that we are in an area of players we can have WITH Trout, a side dish if you will.  It somehow made a ton of sense when we were putting it all together.

So, hope this allows you to look at strategy as almost EVERY column that you will read about expert league’s will be all about the players that someone got and the bargains that came out.  Those things ONLY matter if those players are in YOUR strategy or your draft goes in a way to create the same bargains.  Make the plan, execute and win.  KEEP IT SIMPLE…like Forrest…

“When I got tired, I slept. When I got hungry, I ate. When I had to go, you know, I went.”