Musings on Draft Strategy: The Importance of Depth and the Middle Tier

I pride myself on the fact that, although I’m still relatively young, I’ve been actively involved in some sort of fantasy baseball for quite awhile (about half my life, I believe). I’m not necessarily all that proud with the strategies I’ve used throughout the years, however. For my formative years I had the popular strategy of “pick the best guy available,” which would seem like an obvious method to this madness (although it isn’t entirely, and a brief synopsis of my family’s fantasy baseball drafts throughout the years would prove this). But like so many things in life, it’s just not that simple. I’ve certainly made my fair share of mistakes in draft selections throughout the years, and I acknowledge that I will probably continue to make more in the years to come. But as one fantasy lover to another, I’d like to offer my thoughts on what I perceive to be one of the most important aspects of strategy in a fantasy draft: positional depth.



Tackling this issue also requires addressing the penultimate philosophical question of fantasy baseball: how do you determine if one player is more valuable than another? There are far too many ways to answer that question, but for the sake of this discussion, I’m going use an example where two players have relatively equal stats. Let’s say players A and B have virtually identical core production stats – 22 HR, 80 runs, 95 RBI, .295 BA and 9 steals. How do you know who’s the better pick? Let’s also say that player A plays first base, while player B plays second. In this case, player B obviously carries more value because there are not nearly as many players who would put up that kind of production at his position. To put it simply, some positions have far more depth of talent than others, which dilutes the value of those players some.

Understanding how the depth of one position compares to another seems fairly obvious, but there’s more to it than that. You also need to understand the depth of players throughout each position. In order to figure out the hierarchy of players within a given position, I strongly urge you to develop your own player rankings. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t absorb other people’s rankings. For example, Chris has been providing some fine comprehensive lists of players at each position. The idea, though, is to take his and others’ perspectives to help form your own, because only you know your draft preferences. League formatting also comes into play, as different league structures will require different strategies. The moral of the story: it’s important to develop a list of players that you feel comfortable using to properly assess the depth within a position.

Once you’ve developed a ranking of players, the next step would be to determine where the various tiers of players lie within each position. For example, in nearly every league Hanley Ramirez, Jose Reyes and Jimmy Rollins will be taken in the first round, but it will be a long time before the next shortstop is taken. These guys are clearly in the top tier at this position. Using this logic, it would be stupid to draft a guy like J.J. Hardy in the second round, as he is nowhere near the ranks of the previously mentioned, and there’s no reason to take a guy in the second round that you can get in the seventh. Duh.

In my experience, I usually find three tiers within each position. There are a handful of guys that are clearly above everyone else at that position (Ramirez & Co.), then there are a few more guys who are solid players but still are noticeably behind those top guys (J.J. Hardy & Co.), and then there’s everyone else. Actually, this third group could easily be broken down further, but the idea in drafting is to not have to pull from this pool of players. Figuring out the first tier at each position is easy – these are the guys that everyone talks about and knows about, and everyone typically has a couple of these guys on their roster after the first few rounds. What’s important – and what I believe separates a first place team from a cellar-dwellar – is identifying that middle tier of talent.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: in the BTPF Mock Draft conducted last month, I selected Jhonny Peralta in the eighth round. Believe it or not, this was one of the picks with which I was most proud when it was all said and done. In the previous round four shortstops were taken, and Peralta was the remaining shortstop from my middle tier. Part of identifying the middle tier is knowing when to draft these guys. Unless you’re really set on one of these guys in particular (which isn’t likely, since you’ve got him in your middle tier), it doesn’t really matter which one you get (unless, of course, you need strength in one particular stat). This is why I liked this pick so much – I was able to get the final remaining member of my shortstop middle tier right after everyone else was taken but before anyone else could get him. The fact that the next shortstop wasn’t taken until round 11 further illustrates this point.

To summarize, there are a couple of equally important aspects to understanding positional depth in fantasy baseball: you need to know the depth of quality players from position to position, and you need to know where the major talent gaps are within each position. This approach represents a style of drafting that emphasizes having solid players at all positions as opposed to drafting the “best player available” and trying to load up on superstars. This is one reason guys like Ian Kinsler or Dustin Pedroia might get drafted ahead of heavy hitters like Ryan Howard and Mark Teixeira or stud aces like CC Sabathia and Johan Santana. You can always get a Youkilis or a Gonzalez or a Lester or a Haren in a later round, but second basemen, for example, get pretty thin after those first few are taken.