Fake Teams

I've said this before (and now I'll say it again) - "sleepers" are relative. They lurk in the middle and the end of your draft and they are known and unknown commodities alike.

Looking at starting pitching today, I'm struck by the range where players are being selected and ranked across different systems. It's not that it's just interesting, it's that it can seriously help you. If you're willing to take a player in the 8th round but you don't have to take him until the 13th round, isn't that kind of a "personal sleeper" of sorts?

Allow me to take a step back and explain what the heck it is I'm talking about.

We've been focusing almost exclusively on the results over at Mock Draft Central to help us try and get a thumb on the pulse of where players are going to be drafted. But one of the major problems with mock drafts, and certainly referencing a singular source for mock draft results, is that where a player is selected is intrinsically tied to where they are ranked in that system. The draft can be overwhelming at times, and most managers face that moment of panic where they just can't decide and there's 15 seconds left. There's a darn good chance the player selected is going to at least be in the current queue, right?

Take Madison Bumgarner for instance. Looking at Mock Draft Central, Yahoo, ESPN (rankings), and CBS (rankings), he's a guy you should target either in the 4th, 6th, 7th, or 8th rounds (in no particular order). Helpful for planning purposes, ain't it?

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Last night, a bunch of Fake Teams writers got together for a 5 x 5 Mixed League Mock Draft over at Mock Draft Central. The Fake Teams writers who participated included:

Ray

Jason

Robert

Michael

Bret

Craig

Rob (aka smokeymcpots)

Kevin

Kenny

We had a few guys who couldn't make the draft for one reason or another, no big deal really, so the remaining 3 spots were filled by one of Rob's friends and two auto drafters.

My draft results follow after the jump:

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Yahoo Fantasy Baseball has been open since February 9th and you can set up your new or existing fantasy baseball league on Yahoo today. Fake Teams writers Kevin Boger set up the Fake Teams Head to Head Points league on Yahoo recently, and there is talk for another Fake Teams Head to Head League starting up as well.

Here is what you get for setting up your league on Yahoo Fantasy Baseball:

Yahoo! Sports is the leading fantasy provider and home to the #1 Fantasy Baseball game available - all for free! Here are some of the features:

• Free live scoring
• Mock drafts
• Mobile apps
• Over 80 scoring categories
• Live and offline draft apps
• Tools to manage your keeper league
• Top-notch information and resources
• Expert advice throughout the season with bi-weekly video clips and weekly radio coverage on the Fantasy Freaks

Yahoo! Sports now offers the fantasy fanatic an even more competitive way to play – Pro Leagues are here! Join a Pro League for $20 or $100 and compete to win cash prizes.

Last week Scott White and various other fantasy baseball writers and experts from CBS Sportsline participated in a 12-team H2H mock draft. If you’re interested in reading the article in its entirety, it can be found here.

I thought it might be interesting to compare some of the results of the CBS Sportsline expert mock draft with the most recent ADP report from Mock Draft Central (MDC) in order to illustrate just how different some players are valued in H2H points league scoring as compared to standard roto formats.

Therefore, I’ve provided the first 100 selections from that draft as well as the first 100 players in the most recent ADP report. See the spreadsheet below followed by my observations:

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David Schoenfield from ESPN published his 2012 Bold Predictions article yesterday and here are a few of them:

St. Louis Cardinals: Carlos Beltran outproduces Albert Pujols from last year.Albert Pujols was great last year, but not quite best-player-of-his-generation Albert Pujols. If healthy, it's not absurd to think of Beltran outproducing Pujols' 5.1 WAR in 2011.

Beltran outproduces the 2011 version of Pujols? Blasphemy!!!

Los Angeles Dodgers: James Loney will be a top-three first baseman in the National League.Many thanks to Mike Scioscia's Tragic Illness for somewhat alerting us to this one. We just decided to take it semi-absurdly far.

This Dodgers fan only wishes this turns out to be true.

Seattle Mariners: Jesus Montero catches 100-plus games. The Mariners probably aren't going to compete, so why not try and play him where he'll accrue the most value?

Montero catches 100+ games? THAT is bold. King Felix just ordered a bottle of whiskey for each of his starts.

Here is a link to my BOLD predictions back in January. Check out the rest of David's bold predictions in the link above.

Welcome to a little pet idea I've been tossing around in my head for a while. As I freak out day after day about my fantasy team today, I thought, wouldn't it be fun to take a trip back to the past and see who some of the best fantasy players would have been in years past, before roto baseball was the life-consuming beast that it is in the 21st Century. Why do this? Well, to placate my ongoing obsession with baseball history before I was born, obviously.

For this entry, I chose 1982. Why '82? For one, it was 30 years ago, and that's a nice round number. Second, it was just a good year. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was gracing audiences with its Moby Dick-inspired brilliance, whoch is still largely unrecognized to this day. The Police were at their peak, before Sting's ego swelled to the size of Wembley Stadium. The world as we know it was on pins and needles, wondering if, in fact, Han Solo would be rescued from his carbonite tomb. And yours truly was born, so if 1982 had never happened, you wouldn't be reading this long diatribe right now. So it was not just a good year, but a great one.

Baseball has changed a bit, obviously, in 30 years, and some of that is reflected in what you'll read below. Offensive numbers weren't as crazy as they are these days, and pitchers threw more innings in general. Rotisserie baseball as we know it was just in its infancy stage, having been devised by Dan Okrent just a couple of years before. It was in a day and age where you couldn't play on computers, instead having to phone in your lineups every week or something. I realize, as I sit here on my laptop with ten browsers open, nine of them to baseball sites, that that's not a world I want to live in.

Anyways, if readers enjoy this, I'll consider doing an article like this for each decade in baseball history, going back to the early 1900s, which I actually think would be very interesting. Without further ado, let's step into the time portal and check out, by position, the best fantasy players of 1982, the players you would have needed to win your fantasy league.

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One of the more painful exercises I frequently force myself to do is to look back at the prior year draft and scan the lower rounds to see where the gems were mined. Invariably, there are a number of starting pitchers that leap off the screen resulting in my palm smacking my forehead in bewilderment as to how I missed out.

But every year, great pitching performances can be found in late rounds. Your ability to sniff them out will allow you to spend more of your early picks on the boys with the big bats, which are all too difficult to find in late rounds.

To that end, allow me to present the case for three starting pitchers that I think are going far later than their worth to your fantasy squad - in descending order of preference: Shaun Marcum, Ryan Dempster, and A.J. Burnett.

Yes, I said A.J. Burnett.

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