Baseball - Baseball

It’s the most important day of the Fantasy Baseball season, and it’s not even baseball season yet!  It’s your draft.  It’s the day you have all the popular sites open with cheat sheets, sleepers, busts, and draft day steals.  Your palms get sweaty as you hear the 5-4-3-2-1 countdown, and then it begins....

Do you draft differently for H2H and Rotisserie?  I do.  Does that mean you’ll be unsuccessful if you draft the same way for both?  Absolutely not.

Let’s start with H2H, and I prefer pitching, so we’ll go there.  If you take a look at the categories for pitching, what do you see?  I see closers are primarily only contributing to 1 category (Saves).  So, if you’re thinking of drafting Craig Kimbrel in the 8^th round, wouldn’t it be better to draft a high end starter that will contribute to 4 categories vs. 1 category?

In H2H, Saves are dependent on wins, and if your closer is facing a better team, there may be weeks where you have 0 Saves anyway.  Look for stats that you can achieve consistently.  Now, you may be saying that my team has two RP slots anyway, so you’re going to ignore this advice.  That’s a fair point, but there are a few SPs that are disguised as RPs.  Most of these are Relievers that are being stretched into being starters.  This doesn't guarantee, they'll be good starters, but there are a few on here that are definitely worth fliers.  Neftali Feliz & Cory Luebke are solid bets to be good starters.  Here are a few othes that qualify in 2012: Chris Sale, Aroldis Chapman, Charlie Furbush, and Daniel Bard,

All in all, this gives you a better chance of getting more wins, strikeouts, and the only disadvantage is the possibility of a starter getting blown up and reducing your ERA; however, the more starters you have going, the easier it is to recover from a start that makes you shake your head.

Punting saves is the easier gamble to pull off, but if you’re really feeling daring, you can also punt SBs.  Again, there’s the risk in that speed guys may get you some runs, and be able to get cheap hits for higher .avg, but instead of going for Brett Gardner, why not go for Choo?  Intead of Stubbs how about Jason Heyward?

Rotisserie is the better, more proven way to play fantasy baseball.  It takes more skill on draft day and during the season.  The easiest way to describe it is you’re facing against your entire league in a matchup that lasts the entire year.  This also means that if you risk punting a category for the entire year (as in drafting no closers), it means you have to be dominant in others.  For that reason, it’s better to try and be balanced throughout.  If you’re in a league, you should be able to win by averaging 7-8 across all categories.  If you punt saves and stolen bases, you have 2 points, which means you need to average 9’s in all the other categories.

Overall, good luck in your draft, check FantasyDaddy throughout the year for tips/tricks in order to dominate your league.  If you have any last min questions, msg me @FD_James on Twitter.