Season's Greetings

If anybody was there for the beginning of this blog, you'll remember my obsession with fantasy baseball. Well, the season begins again tomorrow. How will it go? Even I do not know although I do intend to win the three leagues that I am part of. Therefore, I wanted to have a strategy that would allow me to pick the best team possible. Here's the list I came up with to help me decide where players should be picked.

• Last year's statistics are incredibly important. Often times, if a player has a solid previous year and career in general, he is a safe bet for fantasy. The only problem with trusting the last year's statistics is that you will have your one-hit wonders. Roger Maris had a three-year span in his career between 1960 and 1962 in which he hit 133 of his 275 career home runs and drove in 354 of his 851 career RBIs. Somebody drafting a team in 1963 would have been in for quite a surprise when his numbers returned to the form that they had been before the three-year power surge. Therefore, you need to be careful when viewing just last year's stats.
• I also like to look at whether or not a player has been injured recently. Often times, I do take a risk on an injured player, but I only do this in the late rounds simply because I would hate to waste a starting spot pick. Also, I often take this risk on pitchers; in the past few years I have lucked out by choosing the likes of Ben Sheets and Chris Carpenter. However, this does not always work out as, at about midseason last year, I traded for Cole Hamels at highly reduced value with the hope that he would rebound. That didn't happen, but nevertheless, I am very careful when viewing previously injured players.
• Finally, one more tip I live on is the fact that you can absolutely not play favorites. I am a huge Phillies fan, but often times I have one or two Phillies on my fantasy team. It doesn't matter how much I like Brett Myers; when he struggled last year, he had no place on my team. Whoever has seen the movie Little Big League will understand that being a fan is not part of the business. You must be able to separate favoritism from a winning team. Nobody will think any less of you for wanting to create a dominant team.

I hope that this strategy works as well for you as it has for me over the past few years. Remember though, nobody can predict the future. Even the best strategy can fail while drafting, so keep your eyes on the free-agent pool as the season progresses and never be afraid to supplement your roster. It is possible to draft a lemon.