Fantasy Baseball Draft

Yesterday we held our draft for our fantasy baseball league. First, a big thanks goes out to our hard-working commissioner, our own Dave Creagh, and a big thanks to Mrs. Creagh for letting us invade her basement and providing us with delicious cookies and other foods. Personally, I’m not all that happy with my draft. I like my team, but there were definitely some picks I’d change and there were a couple times where I really wanted a guy who was picked just before me. I’ll go over some of the more interesting picks of the draft. The league is a 12-team league with a snaking draft order.

Adam Dunn, 2nd round, pick 23 overall: Absolutely loved and hated this pick at the same time. Loved the pick because it was genius, and hated it because in a million years I never thought someone besides me would go for Adam Dunn any earlier than the 5th round. I had the 20th pick overall and was going to take Dunn in the 3rd round because I knew Blaine would snap him up when it came back to him at the bottom of the 3rd. Dave just ripped my heart out with this one. Dunn has hit exactly 40 homers in the past 4 years with just about exactly 100 RBI in each of them. This is an OBP league and he will go for about a .380 OBP. Most fantasy rankings had him in about the 7th or 8th round, with ESPN ranking him 94th overall and Yahoo had him at 66 or 100, depending on what you look at. Still, I had him in my top 15, and this was a great pick.

Rickie Weeks, 10th round, 116 overall: Well this was my pick, and I guess in retrospect it was terrible. In my defense, it was questioned why I would pick someone who hit .234 last year, but his OBP was .342, which is bad, but not all that terrible when his OBP the previous year was .374. I was just really desperate for steals and I needed a second basemen, and he was the last second baseman left that’d give me some solid steals. His 90 or so runs will also be a welcome addition to my team. ESPN had him ranked 185 and Yahoo was about the same, so yeah, I guess I could have waited a round or two. Or five.

Matt Wieters, 5th round, 61 overall: This was more an interesting pick, and time will tell if it was good or bad. For a little background, we run a keeper league, and you can keep anybody drafted 5th round or later. Doing the math, you can see this was the first pick in the 5th round. There has been nothing but good things said about Wieters, and he will definitely be a great player in time. However, he was the fourth catcher taken in the draft, and the other three were taken in the previous thirteen picks. Wieters will not even start the season in the majors, and in the future, if he’s as good as advertised, he is still going to be about a second or third round pick at best. In my opinion, that is not great value as a keeper.

Yu Darvish, 20th round, 229 overall: Just like Wieters, time will tell if this will be a smart pick. I’m sure Blaine will tell you all about Yu and why he took him in his next post, but Blaine is stuck with an empty roster spot for a year, because Darvish is not coming over yet.

Ben Sheets, 15th round: Sheets is not on a team and will not play for most of 2009. If he’s lucky, he will make 10-15 starts, assuming he gets healthy and assuming he finds a team. His long history of injury problems is not too promising. Sheets is not worth more than a 19th or 20th round pick in deep keeper leagues.

Well it’s time to go to dinner so I am going to cut this a bit shorter than I had planned. Blaine should say something about a couple picks I was going to talk about in Elvis Andrus and Kenshin Kawakami.

Because I know people care, here are the teams for me, Dave, and Blaine:

Cubs (Tom Nielsen):
Hitters: Victor Martinez, Carlos Delgado, Rickie Weeks, Chipper Jones, Michael Young, Grady Sizemore, Nick Markakis, Josh Hamilton, Carlos Pena
Pitchers: Roy Oswalt, CC Sabathia, Kevin Slowey, David Price, Jeremy Guthrie, John Maine, Gil Meche, Francisco Rodriguez, Heath Bell, Chad Qualls

The Filthy Italians (Blaine Curcio):
Hitters: Brian McCann, Mark Teixeira, Chone Figgins, Evan Longoria, Elvis Andrus, Manny Ramirez, Raul Ibanez, Andre Ethier, Adrian Gonzalez
Pitchers: John Lackey, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Francisco Liriano, Erik Bedard, Hiroki Kuroda, Kenshin Kawakami, Brett Anderson, Jose Valverde, Trevor Hoffman, (Yu Darvish)

Balco Bobbleheads (Dave Creagh):
Hitters: Kelly Shoppach, Joey Votto, Dan Uggla, Alex Gordon, Hanley Ramirez, Ichiro Suzuki, Jayson Werth, Carlos Quentin, Adam Dunn
Pitchers: Ricky Nolasco, Cole Hamels, Chris Young, John Danks, Chien-Ming Wang, Jered Weaver, Fausto Carmona, Matt Capps, Joey Devine, Brandon Lyon, Chris Ray

I’m sure we’ll give updates as the season progresses.

Interesting baseball fact of the day: Tom Nielsen won this league in 2007.