Fantasy Baseball

My bi-yearly self-indulgent post on my fantasy draft. Mock away...

I have no delusions that any of you care about my fantasy baseball teams, but the amount of time I put on this site allows me these occasional self-indulgent posts.

It's a 14-team league this year, 25 roster spots, start the standard 8 positions(LF, CF, RF specific) and a utility spot and 9 pitchers (4 SP, 3 RP, 2 P). It's a points-based system, with the only real difference from a roto league being that SB's aren't that big of a component. Essentially if you're high on the OPS or wOBA scale, you're a good offensive player  or VORP for a pitcher with closers and relievers really helping your points per innings (1500 IP limit). You must keep 6 keepers on your roster and they are assigned a draft round depending on their performance from last year.

The 15-team league with mostly TCR readers that I'm in had their draft yesterday. It's a 25-man roster, point based league with 9 position spots (C, 1b, 2b, 3b, SS, LF, CF, RF, Util) and 9 pitching spots (4 SP, 3 RP, 2 Util P) and a 1500 IP limit. There's also a 2nd league of TCR'ites using a similar point system that started last year, so feel free to discuss your drafts as well in the comments. For those who get annoyed or bored when talking about fantasy baseball or just hate the concept in its entirety...um, sorry. I'll get something more Cub-centric up later.

I know you all come here for your Cubs fix and I don't pretend to be some sort of fantasty baseball expert (that would be readers "The Joe" and "JD"), but my fantasy draft is Saturday and I feel like sharing. I much prefer a points league over the traditional 5x5 roto leagues, but mostly the same advice applies. If anything, the points league is a bettter reflection of the reality of baseball and our playing fantasy baseball gives us a better understanding of the sport itself. If you do play in a roto league, you need to be more worried about stolen bases than I am.

And just so you know that I'm not completely full of it, I have been playing since 1999 and besides one very unfortunate injury-riddled season, I usually finish "in the money" so to speak. I don't alway take the league, but I'm almost always in contention. Once again, not trying to pass myself off as some fantasy baseball expert, but you could do worse. If anything, I hope to convince you to acquire Troy Tulowitzki if you're in a keeper league. He's going to be a monster for the next six seasons.

So here's some general draft strategies and ideas on a handful of players. Those who play in a league with me are probably going to be wondering why there are so many players mentioned that are on my current team or have been recently or I've inquired about. Well, I liked them for a reason, so there you go.

MLB.com has a free head to head fantasy game that opened up today and I thought some of you might want to play along. It seems simple enough and you can even win $10,000. Since I'm already tied to a few other leagues that waste enough of my time, I thought this one would be easy to maintain as the scoring is pretty simple, you only have to set-up lineups once a week and to be eligible for prizes, you can't have trading. So if you're interested in a low-key fantasy league with your fellow TCR'ers, this is the one.

I created a private league and the live draft is Tuesday, March 4th at 2:00 PM CST. If anyone is interested in joining, shoot me an email and I'll give you the league name and password to join. It's a 12 team league, but if there's an enormous outpouring of interest, we can just open up a few more leagues.

-----

Also, reader Carlos has taken it upon himself to start a little contest of guess where Kyle Lohse will sign? Just choose a team and the terms of the contract and drop them in the previous post.