Draft Day primer

It's a popular weekend for fantasy drafts with the MLB season slated to get under way Sunday night with another blood feud at Fenway Park. For those of you making your final draft preparations, a few tips:

1. Start with a list of player rankings. It can be from any source you trust: ESPN.com, SI.com, or one of those outrageously priced magazines on newsstands. Most will provide a list to suit your needs - top 300 (or more) overall, top NL-only players, etc. - as well as lists broken down by position.

2. Ideally, you've been doing some thinking/research/reading of this blog on your own up until this point and have some of your own opinions about who you like/dislike. I suggest using the prepared lists as a basis and reworking them according to your preferences. That way you don't have to start from scratch, but you can move Alex Rodriguez up or down a few spots depending on what you think of him.

3. I also find it helpful to group players into tiers by delineating them after they've been ranked by position. For instance, let's say your catcher rankings look something like this:

1. Joe Mauer
2. Brian McCann
3. Victor Martinez
4. Matt Wieters
5. Miguel Montero
6. Jorge Posada

You probably consider Mauer an "elite" catcher, far and away the best on the list. So you draw a horizontal line below his name to mark him off as the top tier. Then, let's say you think McCann and Martinez are more or less equal, so you mark them off as the next tier with a line under Martinez's name. And you put Wieters, Montero and Posada in the same tier after that.

1. Joe Mauer
______________
2. Brian McCann
3. Victor Martinez
______________

4. Matt Wieters
5. Miguel Montero
6. Jorge Posada

This way, as you get further into your draft, you can easily see the availability of players grouped in the same tier. For instance, maybe Wieters and Posada have already been drafted but Montero's still on the board, and there's a drop-off after that to another tier of guys you really aren't interested in. It's probably a good time to call Montero's name with your next pick. Seems simple, but it can really help you decide when it's OK to pass on a certain position and when to pull the trigger.

4. Know your league! Make sure you bring a paper with slots for every roster slot you'll need to fill. If your league starts an extra corner outfielder, you'll be much more pressed to grab a big-hitting 1B or 3B in the earlier rounds. If you need to carry a certain number of relievers or count WHIP as one of your statistics, you'll want to do some extra reading to identify quality set-up guys.

5. Do the same with your leaguemates' squads and jot down their picks by position as they make them, at least in the earlier rounds. Let's say I'm in a 10-team league, and I know eight of the other teams already have a SS. There are two SS left on the board that I'd be comfortable with as my starter, so I can probably afford to skip that position with my next pick, take another guy, and grab a SS on the next go-around.

6. Have fun. Make fun of other people's picks. And let them laugh at yours. But don't let them dissuade you from building your team the way you want to, because when it comes down to it, nobody knows anything. Nobody thought Zack Greinke would be so good last year. Nobody thought Chien-Ming Wang would be so bad. But it happens. Fantasy baseball isn't a computer program; you can't just plug names into a roster and get an expected output. It's unpredictable. It takes skill, but also a lot of luck. And don't forget it's supposed to be fun.