Draft Weekend Reax

A Visit to the Mound

Baseball fans over-analyzing an over-analyzed game

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Son, I'm cutting you loose from my 16 team H2H Categories league
A Visit to the Mound is regularly updated series of email touching on a wide range of baseball subjects. Its like a podcast only in words and can be consumed in short bursts.

Uncle Bones mobettabaseball@gmail.com



to Joshua
Well Josh,

Our draft season came and went. Weeks & weeks of preparation crammed in to 72 hours of hand wringing and binge drinking.

Now that you've had a few days to digest both drafts & get in some early jabs at the waiver wire its time to really make heads or tails of this situation.

Tell me in both leagues your favorite, "I'm the smartest guy in the room" picks & your "oh crap, this could go bad quick" picks.

Please be prepared to explain your answers.


Joshua Kruk

 (10 hours ago)
to me
Use this I made some needed edits;

Ah yes.  Much like Christmas, fantasy baseball draft season brings much hype, needless preparation and overall undue anxiety.  And also much like Christmas, it ends in a flash and you leave saying "welp, I don't need to see that person for another 365 days."  

To get to the Monday morning draft quarterbacking (insert Peter King coffee reference here), let's start with the 12 team H2H auction points league.  The most obvious "oh crap" pick comes from the events surrounding what shall now be referred to as the "Edwin Encarnacion incident."  Double E is a fine player, but through spontaneously coordinated coercion and collective ruthlessness, one of our league members was bid up to $41 for a guy who could have been kept at 30, or won by reasonable people for roughly $29-33. Said member is a Blue Jays fan, so once he entered the bidding for Edwin, the rest of the league started working with with the chemistry of a grizzled group of bank robbers, donning the Reagan masks for one last score. Once the vault was blown and the dust settled, our poor friend spent $3 less than the price paid for Paul Goldschmidt on Edwin.  Cut to the rest of the league walking away in slow mo, putting on sunglasses, slinging their tuxedo jackets over their shoulders and smoking cigars to the sounds of Thin Lizzy.


The cheer to Edwin's jeer comes at the price of tooting my own horn, but I really liked getting Anthony Descalfini for $1 late in the draft.  This bid came during the phase of the draft when at least 3 members passed out with beers in hand, or were called away to watch Dinosaur Train with their future assistant managers. Descalfini has already been declared a member of the Reds rotation, and both his xFIP and the fact that opponents batted .306 on ground balls against him points to some bad luck that is due for a regression back to the mean.  The Reds plucked him from Miami, the same team that sent Jacob Turner to the Cubs and Andrew Heaney packing as well. The Marlins are the used furniture store in your neighborhood that always throws a "going out of business" sale, but somehow has been in business for a decade and can afford expensive commercial time slots.  


On to the 12 team H2H snake draft. Most people say once you do an auction draft, you'll never want to go back to snake. I am now one of those guys, and doing snake second in the rotation felt like ordering a beer flight that went from Heady Topper to half of a Keystone left in the cup holder in a Dodge Ram at a Foreigner concert. Yet, we still carried on.  The head scratcher pick of this draft was naturally the selection of Jake Arrieta over Giancarlo Stanton AND Miguel Cabrera.  Sure, we're in a keeper league and pitching was scarce.  Arrieta was the best pitcher there, but to let Miggy and Stanton pass by you makes me think Phineas Gage may have had a better plan here.  As for the STRONG PICK of the draft, call this a hot take if you must, but I'm going with Jayson Werth.  He went in round 7, which is round 12 if you count the 5 keepers.  Werth is likely going to be ready for opening day, and there's no reason to think he can't still produce in that line up. He may look like he sells baja jackets outside of burning man, but the guy can still hit. 

Also of note, I am high on Mark Trumbo this year. I compared his 2013 stats to Yasiel Puig's 2014 stats using CBS' standard scoring format, and the basic production was very similar. Obviously they are different players and got there different ways, but in H2H points are all that matters.  Trumbo came at $14 while Puig is priced at $28, and Trumbo offers 1B/CI eligibility. Puig is younger sure, but give me Trumbo and let me put that $14 toward filling out the rest of my roster.  Do you KNOW how many Kyle Gibsons that buys?  14 Kyle Gibsons, to be exact.   Remind me of this paragraph in August when Trumbo is on the bench and Puig is bat flipping his way into the hearts of Americans everywhere

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