Man, the month of February really is the worst. It’s compounded on a Sunday night when there’s no football and baseball seems so far away; and there’s a full week of work ahead and the weather is just windy, and nasty, and meh.
I guess I’ll drown it out by writing about some baseball. Today I had my first (partial) fantasy draft of the year. It’s a FanGraphs points league on Ottoneu.
It’s always hard for me in an auction to really decide on what type of strategy I’ll go with. Like Mike Tyson said, everyone has a plan until you get punched in the mouth. That’s kind of how an auction draft goes. I wasn’t going home today without owning Carlos Correa, and I got him for a solid $40.
The only other things I wanted to stick to – the only other semblance of a plan was that I wanted to also land Clayton Kershaw – and I wanted to spend my dollars on hitters in run-scoring environments. I think if you look below you’ll see that I tried to do that.
Now the problem of course is that I spent $373 damn dollars today with a budget of $400. That’s right, $373 dollars on 17 little players. That means the other 23 players need to come from $27. I can hit a few guys who do better than the majority thinks they will do for a buck; but I can’t do it 23 times.
It also likely means I’m going to be straying from my plan of having guys in run scoring environments. I’ll likely have to have a shithead like Martin Prado at third base, and fill out the outfield with warm bodies that no one else wanted. At the end of the day, this draft wasn’t a success but if I had it to do over again; I’m not real sure what I would do differently. It’s always nice to own Mike Trout. It’s always fun to have a few Coors players. But I probably should have opted to do a little less messing around with the likes of Javier Baez (I like his position eligibility, park, and power upside) and Carlos Rodon and just bought Nolan Arenado instead of the combo of LeMahieu and Blackmon.
You’ll see below I landed Kershaw because I want to own him somewhere that it matters, because I’ll be watching plenty of Los Angeles games. I did the same thing on Kenley Jansen and over-extended on him for the same (bad) reason. I think Britton is over-priced as well, but I wanted to land two closers which should be easy to move if I need to. The surprises came with Hendricks and Arrieta. I think they’re two top-15 pitchers; and I promised myself I wouldn’t be allocating a lot of the budget on pitching but they just kind of were there and I needed a few horses to go along with Kershaw.
Gausman and Rodon at this point are just guys for me that I like the upside on. Same thing with Bettis – he pitches at Coors and that sucks but I think he’s a guy who in a road start at San Diego or Los Angeles or San Francisco; basically away from home I’m comfortable starting him and he will eat innings. At $3 I’m okay with a turd like Bettis. Joe Kelly is another sleeper reliever who I think could be like a Chris Devenski; someone who probably goes higher than $2. I have read good things about Kelly’s velocity and pitch development in recent months and think he could be a good scorer that not many had on their radar.
So really, in conclusion; I still don’t know what I am doing in points leagues and I’m not that strong in an auction draft. There will be things I can’t account for in-season like other teams making trades and also the feeling that I need to make a deal but I hope to keep the core of this team together all year and see what they can do while seeing how well I can manage these other ‘Moneyball’ spots.
On a February day where there was nothing on but basketball, this really made me long and wish for baseball season and it was a really fun four hours that I wish we could go back and do again. An auction draft from scratch is always a blast.
from Diamond Hoggers http://ift.tt/2khUpYO
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