Fantasy Draft Results: Lou Brown’s Boys

There's two or three potential all stars here.

     So you’ve come here looking for help with your fantasy baseball draft.  We’ve offered you strategy, position tiers, and cheat sheets.  We’ve given you sleeper lists we’ve been compiling and tried to help you put appropriate values on certain guys.  We’ve given you the tools and the know-how.  How you use these valuable gifts is entirely up to you, though.  But over here, we’re all about accountability and we definitey like to practice what we preach.  So with that, we’re going to run a series of articles with the results of the multiple drafts we’ve done this season.  Here’s the first of 4 from me… 

     My primary league is called the Cooperstown Classic.  It is a 15 team, mixed, keeper league; standard 5×5 roto.  We draft (and start) 2 guys at every position with 6 OF and 9 pitchers.  Roster moves are done weekly and free agents can only be picked up in a pair of drafts that occur only in late April/early May.  You have a 10 player bench to do so.  The league is extremely competitive and has 15 very strong owners.  My team is Lou Brown’s Boys, named after the famous Indians manager from Major League. 

      Before I start, actually, let’s point out 2 major things.  First, the style of draft is a Blind Bid.  Owners submit a list of players and bids (with letters A –>Z for tiebreakers) and players are awarded to the team with the highest bid.  If you lose out on a guy, then you carry that bid money to the next round.  The salary cap is $260.

      The next thing that I must point out is the protects system.  You can protect up to 9 players from the previous year.  The first guy is free, the second costs $10, the third $15, $20, $25, and so on.  That money is deducted from your salary cap.

So coming into this year, my protects were as follows:

1. C  Russell Martin
2. 1B Adrian Gonzalez
3. SS Hanley Ramirez
4. 3B Chris Davis
5. 3B Evan Longoria
6. OF Jason Bay
7. RP Joakim Soria

My big offseason purchase is in a contract year! Oh baby!

I had a total of $117 bid dollars left — For $8, I bought Bay and a higher pick in a supplemental draft that netted me Davis.

Now with 2 new teams this year (weeded out some weak owners) the bid money was tight.  Each new team had $250 to spend as they each grabbed 2 players in the aforementioned supplemental draft to compensate for the fact that most other teams had an average of 6 protects walking in.  So I had to be savvy with my bids.

Based on my protects coming into this year, I knew my 2 major priorities were pitching and speed.  Using a 65/35 split of my original $260, I budgeted $169 for hitting and $91 for pitching.  Now considering my protects were predominately hitters, I declared Martin my freebie and Soria my $10 guy.  That left me with $81 for pitching and just $34 for hitting.  So here’s what the first round sheet looked like:

     Now I know some of the names here look a little sketchy, but with all of the protects and being on the low-end of the bid money scale, I had to dig deep.

Let's hope Speedy can keep that average up this year!

To fill my speed issues, I figured I’d suck up Bourn’s crappy average to get some extra SBs.  Along with him I figured Spilborghs, Jones, Lopez and Sweeney were all going to find themselves near the top of their respective lineups, therefore getting better opportunities.  Lopez is my call for Comeback Player of the Year, so I’m pretty high on him hitting leadoff in Arizona, and Jones and Spilborghs are having fantastic springs.  Sweeney is more of a gut feeling, but I like the player he could develop into. 

     I tried to balance out the rest of my hitters with decent selections that I thought I could squeeze through on the cheap.  Baker, Getz and Betancourt are all pretty low-profile guys and each one of them will be solid contributors.  They won’t go knocking the cover off the ball, but they won’t hurt me with crappy numbers either.  Nady and his 20 HR power, I figured would slide by in a high profile Yankees lineup.

     As for my pitching, I went big on 3 solid guys and tried to sneak the rest through.  Shields has always been a reliable starter and the strikeout upside on Joba and Kershaw are just too good to pass up.  I know that I need to lock up these guys to keep my rotation competitive in Ks and wins while also maintaining solid ratios. 

     Danks is in his third year and he’s been making solid improvements each season.  I expect a big breakout for him.  Johnson and Baker are also 2 guys I expect big seasons from as they continue to develop.  For some reason, Baker gets lost in the shuffle, and Johnson is still rebounding from injury — although his performance in the second half of 2008 definitely put him on some people’s radar.   

For a buck?!?!? Are you kidding me???

The buck on Lee was a gut feeling.  People have been strangely down on him and his typical mediocre spring.  They say he can’t repeat last year’s performance.  Duh!!  Of course he’s not going to repeat last year’s performance.  But he’s not going into the tank either.  If he can win 15 games with respectable ratios, then that’s plenty.  And if he does tank, well then…it was only a buck.

     My last bid was for Motte at $6.  I needed a second closer and felt that a small bid would suffice.  He hadn’t been named the closer yet and he wasn’t someone I felt everyone would go after.

     On the whole, I was very satisfied with my choices.  I was confident in the hitters I was going after, very confident in the pitchers….now it was a matter of how the bids held up.  So how did I do once the sheets were tallied up?

     Well, after two coin tosses (same bids and letters as 2 teams on both Danks and Getz) I ended up getting everyone but Jones, Nady and Motte.  I was very happy with the way the first round went.  Of course, I was a little bummed that I lost out on Jones (Keith took him from me by a buck) and Motte (my boss took him for a $14 bid after pumping me for info the day before).  I was pretty high on both.  But what can you do?  I was o.k. with losing Nady although it was my wife who trumped me there with a much bigger bid.

     So with that, I was headed into the second round with $15 in bid money and needing 2 OFs and a pitcher.  There was a lot of overlapping in the first round, so the player pool was still rich with outfielders, but the pool for closers was dried up.  It wasn’t until after sheets were submitted that Kevin Gregg was announced the closer, so I wasn’t too high on him.  The only issue I had was the lack of funds in comparison to the other owners.

Second round sleeper

For round 2, I played it safe.  I put a $12 bid on Aaron Rowand and a $2 bid on Colby Rasmus.  Rowand will play every day and his numbers aren’t terrible.  Rasmus, I think, will use this final week of spring training to reclaim the starting job from Chris Duncan.  For 2 bucks, it was worth a shot.  The kid’s got mad potential.

     With my last dollar and one pitching spot to fill, I forgot about potential closers and just stuck with the starters.  I’ve preached about a big breakout for Tigers starter Edwin Jackson, so I threw it onto him.  I think Comerica Park is going to be very good for him and as my 8th starter???  Almost a no brainer!

     I got all three players and finished my draft in just 2 rounds.  Oh baby!  I was very happy with the results.  I think I may need one more big bat, but hopefully with the extra speed, I’ll be able to trade for one.  I also need a second closer, but that can wait until free agency starts up.  There’s still plenty of possibilities floating around.  The final product from the draft looks like this:

I think, in comparison to the rest of the teams, it is a very strong squad.  With a few of the right  in-season tweaks here and there, I’m confident in a money finish.