Fantasy Baseball Draft 2011

Baseball season is on its way, and along with it comes your fantasy baseball season! If you’re taking part in a league, or leagues, then your draft will probably be coming up soon and you need to prepare. This article can help you get the basics of fantasy baseball down if you’re new and need to learn some of the basic strategies of fantasy baseball and fantasy drafts. TWO KINDS OF DRAFTS Fantasy baseball drafts can occur in two ways: using an auction where players bid amounts of fantasy money for each player they want using a pre-set team budget, or in a snake draft where each player takes his turn picking an available player for his team. Auctions were the original form of fantasy draft, but when online fantasy sports became popular snake drafts gained popularity since it was easier to do...

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Where to Find Fantasy Information

If you were wondering where to find out all about fantasy baseball but don’t know, here’s a list of some of the biggest and most useful sites. It’s not exhaustive by any means, but these sources will give you more content then you’ll be able to digest before opening day is here. ESPN Fantasy Baseball http://games.espn.go.com/frontpage/baseball Probably the biggest source of information out there. Rankings, articles, and the daily Fantasy Focus podcast. Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball http://baseball.fantasysports.yahoo.com/b1 Some news and videos, as well as a downloadable draft kit. CBS Fantasy News http://fantasynews.cbssports.com/ A fully staffed site with rankings, news and other features. Rotoworld http://www.rotoworld.com/sports/mlb/baseball/ Keeps up on the latest news and features their...

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Sleepers People are Talking About

Fantasy Baseball demands you take not only all-stars, but also cheap, probably mediocre players as well to fill out your roster. Often times, league winners are the ones who get maximum production out of their minimally priced players. So before you draft you need to do your homework and find out who the experts like to overperform this season and give you good value for your late round draft pick or $1 bid. To help you out, I’ve listed many of the repeatedly talked about sleepers for this year, organized by position. I’m only including cheap sleepers, guys who shouldn’t cost you more than $4-$5 in an auction, at most. Once you read about guys you like here you can research them further to see if you like their potential and if they’ll fit your team strategy in terms of production. Hope this...

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Where to Play Fantasy Baseball

If you’re new to fantasy baseball you may already know you can play for free online at several different sites. But what are the main sites to play? And which ones are best? I’m going to quickly go over them and give you a few details ESPN – http://games.espn.go.com/frontpage/baseball ESPN is the gold standard of online reality games. You can play for free, set up your own custom leagues for free, and get most of their fantasy information and expert opinions for free (some if it is published as ESPN inside material). Even if you don’t play here, you should hardly avoid all the fantasy advice they provide, lots of rankings, lots of sleepers, lots of draft day wisdom. Plus they have a really nice draft room program, and the AI for missing bidders isn’t too bad, other than not keeping up...

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Drafting Your Fantasy Pitching Rotation

The pitching side of a fantasy baseball is a much ignored topic, which is a shame since it’s half of the game. Batting is much more exciting so people focus on that. But you’re not going to win your league with that attitude, not after 2010 and The Year of the Pitcher. Setting up a great pitching roster will give you a huge five category advantage over your opponent owners. This year starting pitching is quite deep, and the difference between the top 20 or 30 starters is huge compared to the late round scrubs. The old days of saving $9 for your nine pitchers or just sweeping up whatever’s left in the last rounds of your draft isn’t likely to get it done. But how do you organize a good fantasy rotation in your draft? Let’s find out. SNAKE DRAFTS People in snake drafts have a bit of a disadvantage...

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The Value of $1 Guys

Most fantasy talk during Spring Training revolves around the bigger names. How the stars are doing healthwise, how the mid-level guys are doing performancewise, who might break out, all that biz. There’s also sleeper talk, new prospects, guys entering their prime, or coming up from the farm team, and that’s good too. But there’s another group of guys who aren’t really stars and aren’t really possible breakout stars, but are just normal players who may or may not post some decent numbers this year. These guys are the $1 Guys. They may not cost exactly $1, maybe three or four, but they’re frequently the cheap journeymen who make up the fat base of fantasy baseball talent. So how do you use these types on your fantasy team to help you win? There are several important ways, let’s look at them… SPEND...

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