February 29, 2012

Resident Fantasy Genius

CBS Experts League Draft Results

by Derek Carty

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Last Wednesday night, I received a Facebook message from Mike Gianella, a good friend of mine in the industry who runs the Roto Think Tank blog. He said that the CBS Experts League was in need of one more participant, and he suggested me to fill the spot. Little did I know, the league would be drafting less than 36 hours later, making for some shotgun preparations.

Despite having to prepare with haste, I think I wound up with a pretty good team. There’s some risk, sure, but in a league of this depth, I did pretty well for myself. The league setup is 12 teams, AL-only, 5x5 with traditional 23-man rosters and seven (!) bench spots. Here’s how my roster turned out:

My biggest regret in this draft is that I left money on the table. Early in the auction, players went for more money than I felt they were worth and more than I was willing to spend on them. This led to my roster lacking a superstar. In leagues with early-round inflation like this, you really need to just bite the bullet and buy one big-ticket guy, even if you overpay. If you don’t buy one because it’s a bad “value,” you’re going to wind up giving back whatever value you’d gain from forgoing that top option by the end of the draft anyway. When so much money flies off the table early, there’s going to be very little left late. You’re going to get David Murphy for three times less than you believe he’s worth no matter what, so you might as well spend some extra cash early; there’s not going to be anything worthwhile to spend it on later because no one will be able to drive up the prices. Additionally, when you have a lot of extra cash at the end of the draft, you wind up in a bidding war for the last “good” guy available simply because if you don’t spend your money on Mike Carp, who else are you going to spend it on?

Still, I did wind up with quite a bit of depth without a single hole and only a couple of guys who figure to play less than 75 percent of the time (Lillibridge and Abreu, who was only acquired because of an online auction room mishap, may well be the only ones). This team is stocked with power, and while I’m a bit concerned about this league’s reputation for inactive traders, hopefully I’ll still be able to parlay that strength into shoring up weaknesses that pop up throughout the season (probably batting average, for one).

For an AL-only league, I have an incredibly deep pitching staff, with three potential closers (remember, there are only 14 AL closers and 12 teams in this league) and an entire rotation of solid to good starters. I plan to play the matchups a bit with guys like Vargas and Tomlin, plugging in elite set-up men like Uehara and Coleman when they’re up against tough offenses.

I absolutely love Joe Benson as my top reserve pick, because with so many injury risks in Minnesota, he’s bound to find his way into a starting role at some point.

So now it’s your turn: What do you think of my roster? To provide some context, you can check out the full results of the draft here.