Spring is in the air, and Fantasy Baseball has started. On Sunday our league had it’s draft. I was fortunate/unfortunate to have the last pick in the draft (I won the league last year). As usual it’s a snake-style draft so I had the 12th and 13th pick. In the first round I went with, by far the best catcher in the MLB, Victor Martinez, and I followed that pick with one of the top 2 SS, Michael Young. Here’s where the waiting begins.

Now normally, being the nerd that I am, I have a pretty well laid out draft strategy. I usually look at last years standings to see what type of team (ie. great pitching v. great hitting) did the best. Of course last year, I won, and had an all around fantastic team, so looking back at that probably wasn’t going to help. Also, this year the draft kind of snuck up on me, and I wasn’t able to do too much prep. All that to say… I didn’t have a great strategy in place.

So the draft rolls back to me, I figure I’ll try and round out my hitters first… There seemed to be enough adequate pitching to go around (time will tell on that). So in the 3rd round I selected Morgan Ensberg. I am a little nervous about this pick just because he’s a younger guy coming off a career year. Does that mean that he’s on the way up, or was it a flash in the pan? Turn right around for round 4, Jason Bay. Looking at Sports Illustrated’s Fantasy Baseball preview, they have Jason Bay listed as the #3 outfielder, and there were 8 OF taken before I got Bay. I’d say that’s a pretty good value.

I won’t go round by round for the full 20 rounds but I will say that drafting my fantasy team is both super exciting, and terribly stressful. I know that it’s ridiculous to get stressed out about fantasy baseball, but there is always the “Should I have picked someone else?” feeling that just gnaws at you. And then in round 17 when someone picks up Rickie Weeks who is rated top 5 for 2B in SI, it really makes my Jason Bay value look pretty low. Oh well. I’ll take Jason Bay over Rickie Weeks any day.

Pitching took a back seat in my draft but I feel like I have a pretty good squad (Mark Buehrle, Barry Zito, Kenny Rogers, Mark Mulder, Chris Capuano, Dontrelle Willis, Chris R. Young, Derek Lowe, and Bob Wickman in the pen). And rounding out my hitters (Ivan Rodriguez, Jim Thome, Jorge Cantu, Jonny Gomes, Matt Holliday, Jay Gibbons, and Matt Murton). Overall I think it could be a solid squad, my one fear is that I don’t have a bona fide MVP candidate. Someone who will consistently get me a ton of points. At the same time, I know that I have a solid team who could really make some things happen this year.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 23rd, 2006 at 9:18 am and is filed under Baseball, Fantasy, MLB, Vigilante Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.