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.

The new Yankee Stadium and fantasy stats

Everyone's making a big fuss about all the home runs that have been flying out of the "new" Yankee Stadium over the past weekend. Obviously when a new park witnesses 25 home runs in its first five games (including exhibition), that gets the attention of fantasy owners. Ditto for the 14-run inning the Indians posted in their 22-4 mashing of the Yankees last week.

So what's the deal? Is it the way the park is situated or the shape of the seating areas, creating some weird wind effects? Some media geniuses are already calling the stadium "Coors Field East." Hah, good one. So does that mean we should start changing how we approach our fantasy lineups whenever we've got guys playing in the Bronx, the way we used to with Denver (in the pre-humidor days)?

I'm not sold.

First of all, the sample size is way too small. Obviously the 22-4 game is going to skew the numbers a bit (eight homers in that one). There have also been two games so far at the stadium in which only one homer was hit.

There's another reason for all the longballs, too: Bad pitching. Two of the Indians' homers were surrendered by someone named Anthony Claggett, making his first major league appearance. Two apiece were allowed by Edwar Ramirez and Damaso Marte (2009 ERAs: 8.44 and 21.00). One came off Chien-Ming Wang, and you know how great he's been this year. Two of the Yanks' were served up by Fausto Carmona (groundball to flyball ratio this year: 0.78).

In other words, pitching probably has played the biggest role in all the dingers. Plus, it's only April, so who knows how the winds will change, along with the temperatures and humidity, over the course of the next five months in New York? Even a full season's worth of data might not be enough to really give us a sense of whether Yankee Stadium is homer-friendly. Consider this, as baseball researcher and author David Vincent points out in an article in the Daily News: Washington's Nationals Park averaged 1.85 home runs last year in its inaugural season, and so far this year is averaging 3.5 round-trippers a game. Is it global warming? El Nino? Or perhaps the Nats' awful pitching (team ERA: 5.40)? Or some combination of these, plus a small sample size?

Anyway, I'm not going to rush to pick up Cody Ransom all the sudden and start him in every home game until we get some more information. For now, treat your lineups the way you normally would, and don't overreact. The "old" Yankee Stadium was 14th in the majors in home runs allowed per game last year, pretty much average. Let's see how it stacks up after a full season's worth of games this year before we start to make any big adjustments, OK?

Of course, as I was writing this, three homers were hit at the stadium in the course of an inning and a half, by Kurt Suzuki, Hideki Matsui and Melky Cabrera. So what do I know?