I'm a longtime vet of fantasy baseball, but this is the first year with the monster. I like what I've seen so far - particularly the responsiveness of customer service.
With that said, what do BBM vets say about how many tools to bring to your draft? In the past, I frankly have had so many cheat sheets, columns, lists and notes that I was overwhelmed and couldn't check them all while the draft was going on. Since then I've gone more minimal, simply having my list ready and and ranking the players via Yahoo's ranking tool.
This year I will use the draft tracker and am considering having a list of closers/closers in waiting, along with 1 list of 10 or 12 late round flyers that are well down in the rankings that I might pick up in late rounds.
What do y'all bring to the table? And do you take the BBM rankings (or your own custom projections) and go through the tedious process of clicking all the Yahoo players onto your draft list or not?
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Personally, I'm pre-ranking my top 50 (using BBM projections, other reading, and keeping O-ranks in mind), using draft tracker, and having a list of relievers. On the BBM projections, I have some small adjustments in mind and am mostly focusing on positional value. High-upside, late round flyer list sounds like a great idea.
I did a couple mock drafts without pre-ranking my players, and I found myself scrambing on whether I agreed with what BBM was putting forward.
That gets me thinking, I wish BBM (or anyone) had a breakout player functionality, where significant upside to the projection is highlighted. Could work both ways, highlighting downside and thus bust potential. Or could just be general volatility to the projection. In the late rounds, I'd rather take a breakout guy than a steady eddie.
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I have always been a tier guy. I paper write down my tiers. and stick to em. I never waste time writing down players I don't want. Preranking is purely for exclusion only. U simply can't prerank without knowing ur draft position. Since u already know ur sleepers and lottery picks writing them down isn't that important. unless u are forgetful then write down every player u may draft. if u hear another persons sleeper and like it jot it down on the bottom. Don't worry about Yahoo ranks or the draft room hating on ur picks.
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Know who you are targeting and avoiding. Identify the handful of players that you want to draft at each position, where they are in terms of ADP/tiers will give you more info for on-the-fly who you should take in which round. ("If I take player X now, I grab my SS and still have two of my targets at 2B available.") Know who you absolutely don't want to draft so that you don't put yourself in a position to take them. Closer is one position where I'll go through and identify pretty much every player with either a yes or a no for whether or not I will draft them (I try to avoid bad WHIPs and low K/9).
Mock draft before you real draft. That will help you better plan for things not going according to plan 
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Typically, I will scour as many sources of information as I can. BBM here is but one of 11 sources, both online and in print. From there, I collect the projected data and boil them down, averaging out into one list of statistics, which will tell me who's worth drafting while eliminating any potential biases. From there, I'll compile my draft preferences based on an average draft pick rank (this player's averaging the 11.4 position, etc.). It's not perfect, but it gets the job done. Actually figuring out when to pick a player is based more on "guess and gosh", since even the best predictor can't really tell the future with 100% accuracy. Matt can tell you how massive the number of datapoints gets to be for me, which is why I try to start as early as possible (mid-February has been the earliest so far).
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I should also add: Microsoft Excel is your friend.
100% Agree (1 vote) |