| | I'm in three leagues this year. One is rotisserie, the other two are head-to-head. None of them use the standard 5x5 categories.
One of the H2H leagues is particularly bizarre: the stats are OBP, SLG, R, RBI, SB, ERA, WHIP, Saves, K/9, Quality Starts, with no weekly innings requirement. Apparently, I was the only person in the league to realize that nabbing all the best relievers and drafting zero starting pitchers would pretty much guarantee a win in 4 out of 5 pitching categories every week. Once I got Papelbon and Nathan in rounds 4 and 5, I had that pretty much locked up. Instead of trying to get a balanced offense, stacking in 2-3 categories would assure me a win nearly every week. I decided to neglect the two power categories and focus on drafting low-power guys with good OBP/R/SB. Since everyone loves power guys, the players I was targeting were available pretty late. The lesson here is: if your league uses bizarre categories, figure out a good way to exploit it.
I noticed a trend with a lot of fantasy player rankings and average draft positions: people tend to be overvaluing last year's results. Guys coming off of a single down year were extremely undervalued. David Ortiz, Victor Martinez, and Michael Young come to mind. Conversely, players who had surprisingly good years in 2008 were overvalued. Josh Hamilton, Ian Kinsler, and Nate McLouth come to mind. I'd include Alexei Ramirez, but honestly, he wasn't even that great in 2008.
My strange draft strategy in the bizarre H2H league made it tougher to get players common to all three of my teams, so I do not have a single trifecta. However, I have the following players on two of my three teams:
Miguel Cabrera
Prince Fielder
David Ortiz
Curtis Granderson
Chone Figgins
Bobby Abreu
Joe Nathan
David Price
Jonathan Broxton
Clayton Kershaw
Jason Motte
Hong-Chih Kuo
Cabrera was mostly a function of my draft position in the first round. When I'm drafting closers, I go for ability, not for any ridiculous projection of how many saves they'll get. I took Kuo not for saves, obviously, but because he's a nice extra piece to put into my pitching staff if I want ERA/WHIP improvement (with a few Ks). Ortiz and Abreu become much more valuable when your league includes OBP.
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| | Posted 4/5/2009 8:07 PM - 9 Views - 0 eProps - 1 Comment
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