BoaB Pat Burrell Season Post

First of thanks for everyone that hung in there and though the few of us that did our projected ranking it looks pretty close.

Make sure everyone makes an account at Fangraphs with the team so we can get updates that will be around the 1st every month.

Can NYRoyal and oldjacket re-post their strategies here?

Here is the link to the spreadsheet in any one needs it: Link

Thanks again and as with every team I draft, I have 3 players already with injuries (Youk, Hamels and Rivera)

My Strategies

I actually ran about the same numbers NYRoyal did on at bats and innings, so aim for that were rather healthy over their careers. Shandler’s fantasy guide ranks how healthy player are and I used it to determine each pick I made and am hoping those players make it through the season. This was especially true for SP. These guys need to make sure they didn’t get hurt.

I was planing on taking best available value at each regardless of position, drafting near the end of the end of the snake I decided to go hitter and pitcher each round. I noticed rather quickly that cheap, good, healthy pitching was not really in as much supply as I thought, so I put off position players and went with starters for a few rounds.

I didn’t care at all about RP and had planned for the beginning not to go after any RP with a salary over .5M. I just took the highest rank one at that salary

i set a hard cap of 8 million per player and never got close to picking one that high.

I will not be in a slow draft again without a 2 hour limit. I was getting worn out that it was dragging on so slow.

Guess I wait until he plays a game?

Pick the best player available, or pick the best player w/ a lowest cost…

Scan Cots for steals, and ask around smart baseball people for likely canidates…

I put a price on a win above replacement, looking for an ideal WAR total for the team, putting enough asside for every player to be paid minimum, and then divided the remainder by my targeted WAR total.

Then, I worked on a projection for each player, and I adjusted what I could spend with each pick. If I ever saved money on a pick, it allowed me to spend a little more on the next pick.

Beyond that, it was best player available. I’d take the best player on my board (for the most part) who I felt was going to be either worth his salary or not so far below worth it as to go over what I had saved with past picks.

I started out with a strategy of getting good WAR/$ values for players who projected to have high WAR’s. I looked at WAR/%, but especially in the early rounds, the player had to project a high WAR. It was clear that one could get a great value in a 3 WAR player for $400K, but I thought it more important to high WAR players who were a good value than to get the best WAR/$ value.

When the draft started, I thought I’d maintain an average salary per player around $3M in the early rounds, $2.5M in the middle rounds and then $2M in the late rounds. As it played out, in the early rounds, I averaged more like $3.4M per pick. After a handful of rounds, it became clear that my average salary per round strategy wasn’t going to work because there wouldn’t be many quality players around in the later rounds for $2M per pick. So in the middle rounds, I was taking the best player available (in projected WAR) as long as the player wasn’t hugely expensive. I wasn’t interested in $10M players. By the midpoint of the draft, I was projecting how much money I had left per open roster slot and figuring out who it made sense to spend multi-millions on and who it made sense to spend the minimum on.

As far as positions go, it seemed like there was a shortage in good WAR/$ players at first base and, to a lesser extent, at third base. This led me to draft Adrian Gonzalez and Kevin Kouzmanoff earlier than I think their projected WAR warranted (these both might have been mistakes). As far as the other position players go, I went with the projections and didn’t worry too much about position. If I could get high WAR in the OF, I took it even though I had drafted no middle IFers yet. The middle IF positions had some good players (in WAR and WAR/$ terms) early, but then a lot of mediocrity in the middle. So I waited to draft them, and attempted to accumulate WAR in the OF and on the corners.

For pitching, I went hard after SP’s and left RP’s for the end. To be honest, I really don’t understand why people started drafting relievers so early. Even some of the best reliever values were 2 WAR guys for $400K. When one still has SP spots to fill, and there are many SP’s on the board who can get you 3 WAR for $400K, then why reach for a SP so early? Everyone is going to get much more WAR from their SP’s than their RP’s, so I tried to maximize my SP WAR. Unfortunately, I misread how deep the SP pool is and how much money I’d have left to spend in the middle-to-late rounds. One of the key reasons I drafted Slowey, Eveland and Guthrie is that they were good WAR/$ values. But I really shouldn’t have been trying to save money there. Money just wasn’t that scarce. Those picks allowed me to spend $8M on Roberts and $7M on Haren. But I would have been better served by spending more freely on SP’s earlier.

One of the things that we all had to figure out is how do we handle the PA and IP limits. One could have looked at the roster as having 2-3 bench players, but that just didn’t seem right to me. My philosophy was that with 25 players, injuries have to be expected. So you can’t project 650 PA for each full-time regular you draft. With injuries, I figured 550 would be more accurate. 6500/550 = 11.8. So I figured I needed 12 regulars and then I’d use the 13th position player spot on a prospect who shouldn’t get any MLB PA’s.

For starting pitchers, the 1,000 IP limit was much more difficult. That could be five starters with 200 ip each, but I didn’t want to gamble on having no injuries from five starting pitchers. I don’t think the odds would have been in my favor. Initially I thought I’d deal with that by drafting 5 full-time starters and then using the 6th spot for a guy who would likely get some starts, but also have more than a few RP innings (because the RP IP limit was much more generous). But when I got to round 17, I had a bunch of money left and knew there were few good options for spending that money. And Harden’s projected WAR (even at a projected 100-150 ip) had been sitting at or near the top of my draft board for the past several rounds, taunting me. So in the end, I decided to spend $7M on him, knowing that it was very unlikely that he’d be anywhere near 200 ip and that he’d likely give me a pretty high WAR, even with fewer IP’s.

The RP IP limit broke down to 83 ip per reliever (especially if one doesn’t get any RP innings from any of the six starters). So this was easy to work under and encouraged drafting relievers who would both pitch well and pitch a lot, thus generating a higher WAR. So I ended up drafting a few closers and a few setup men who have good FIP projections, assuming that if healthy they’ll each eat a pretty high number of innings for their team (with the possible exception of Edwar Ramirez, because who the hell knows what is going to happen with the Yankees bullpen and he was my last choice so I had to pick someone).

Well, that was much longer than I intended, but it is five a.m. and I have insomnia, so there you go.

Can you each respond to (wydiyd at hotmail dot com) I just want to make sure I have one for everyone and sometime after the first of the month we can put out our first rankings. It seems that Fangraphs updates their defensive rankings once a week, so after I see they have been updated, I will send out an email reminder.

Also I need emails for::

Philkid
matthewA
viktor06
Daniel Berlyn

Finally, let me know if you have any problems with setting up an account on Fangraphs.