Anatomy of a Fantasy Baseball Draft Pt. 1
The keepers league I am in had an auction style draft the other night. I thought it would be fun to talk about the things that make up a fantasy league and in more detail, some of the things that make a typical fantasy baseball auction style draft so darned fun to be in.
First off, the league has been in existence for over 20 years now, with many charter members still participating, so it is an established collection of guys (no women owners in this league) who really understand their baseball. Several owners regularly visit spring training camps in Arizona every season. They love baseball. They know baseball. They can watch spring training in Arizona for the fun of it, but they are using the experience there for scouting for this league too.
In this league, there is a $260 salary cap and each team can keep up to a maximum of 14 “keepers” on their roster before the draft which is there to help each team fill out its roster of a total of 24 players per team. Each team also carries its own rookie roster of up to ten players, and there is a minor league rookie draft for that too.
The rookie draft is important in this league because a team can draft some young players with some promise, and, if they develop into a legitimate players, a team can call any of those players up and build up a roster of your own players to make up your own organization (much the same as the major league system now). Many of the best players in Major League Baseball now are somebody’s called up rookies (Mike Trout, Bryce Harper and Paul Goldschmidt were rookies that were called up in this league) that have developed into real, big league stars and became the key members of their fantasy teams.
So, this league has a rookie draft to help savvy owners try to find the stars of tomorrow, and it has the regular draft of free agents and players whose contracts had expired after the previous season.
The Draft. That is where a team owner fills out his team. That is where an owner can be smart and either pay the big money to get a big name player who is out there available, or to try to nab the lesser named player or players that are going to have that career big year. Such big years of players make fantasy owners’ seasons into successes.
In a draft, in a league like this, there is a salary cap that everyone has to operate under. Your total amount of salary cap of $260 to fill out a team of 24 players is what makes a fantasy league into an even playing field. Everyone has the same amount of money to field a team. To keep their core keeper players. To find the rest of their players in the draft. Everyone is motivated at a fantasy baseball draft.
The key to everything of course is how smart owners are at knowing who the good players are. It is how smart owners are at placing value on the players in baseball and making up a team of the best players they can assemble, at or under that key salary cap price that everyone has to play under. It is, in a sense, just like baseball. YOU are the general manager of your own team. You the owner have to do what it takes to make YOUR team into a success.
But there are twelve teams in the league. Twelve teams that all want to win. Twelve teams that all want to get the good players. That all pretty much want the same excellent players everyone else wants. Twelve teams that each had limited amounts of salary cap remaining to fill out their teams.
Just like the major leagues, there are teams that are already good, teams that hover somewhere around average, and some teams in a weakened state that were likely to be in a rebuilding mode. Everyone wanted to get good players. Everyone wanted to make their teams get better. One thing was certain, though. In this fantasy league, there was going to be a whole lot of action there on Draft Night.
On Part Two, we will look at the proceedings that happened on this night in a typical draft, in a typical league.
