Today's Fantasy Rx

As some of you hopefully noticed, we updated our Site Philosophy page on Friday. We added a section of influences and another with recommended links. If you haven't yet had a chance to read through our beliefs, we strongly suggest you peruse this page when you have a chance. You should gain a better understanding as to both our approach to baseball and fantasy baseball, as well as where and how we generated those beliefs.

We were listening to 670 The Score sports radio in Chicago yesterday, and they brought on "baseball expert" Matt Spiegel from their website, who immediately proclaimed "Moises Alou will go down as one of the four or five best right-handed hitters in the history of the game."

After falling out of my chair laughing, I browsed over to their website, finding this article:

"Alou is old, but still one of the true run producers in the game and a man who deserves to be mentioned with the best all-around right-handed hitters in history. Dimaggio, Kirby Puckett, and Alou is a viable top 3."

If you're in Chicago and needing a sports radio fix, we're sorry.

Internet Fantasy Baseball Contest Review of:

ESPN Fantasy Baseball

We've played some version of ESPN's main game for the last five seasons, winning 4 T-Shirts along the way. Its extremely difficult to win a real prize as you need to be in a league with 9 other strong owners. ESPN compiles the overall rating based in large part upon your league strength, so if even one owner decides to ignore their team, you have no shot of winning any prizes in the top 10 overall.

Due to the somewhat significant time requirements, we'll likely not buy our annual three-pack of teams this year. ESPN allows daily transactions, and we simply won't have enough time to monitor those type of teams this year.

Cost: $29.95 for one team, $49.95 for three teams, and $69.95 for five teams.

Style: Rotisserie categories after a straight snake draft. AL-only, NL-only, and ML leagues available.

League Size: Only 10 team leagues are eligible for the top prizes, although they recently added 8-team and 12-team options for those desiring less or more competition.

Roster Breakdown: C, 1B, 3B, CR, 2B, SS, MI, 5OF, UT, 9P, 3 bench, 1 DL when available.

Categories: Traditional 4x4, traditional 5x5, or Sabermetric 4x4 (standard pitching, but OBP, SLG, R, and RBI on offense). They offer both standard rotisserie and Head-to-Head league formats.

Draft Options
1. Live draft. Use their Java applet to pick your team in about 2-3 hours. Make sure to pre-rank your draft list in case you get kicked off. We once got stuck with Kerry Wood on the day of his 1999 injury announcement.

2. Single-list draft. Rank 800 people in order and let the computer draft for you. We find this form of draft completely obnoxious, as we could never stomach giving up this much control. Of course, we had to use this back before they offered a Live option, but I don't like talking about those pre-industrial days.

3. Multi-list draft. Rank those same 800 players by position. The computer randomly assigns each team a certain rank in each position, and it drafts a theoretically balanced team for you. While this option is less obnoxious than a single-list draft, we still can't fathom the thought of giving up this much control over our draft when they offer a Live option. If you get the top AL 2B pick, you can grab Boone or Soriano; the top SS gets ARod, etc.

Upside
1. There's nothing particularly complicated about this game, the live draft is fun, and you can gain a real advantage by paying attention to daily transactions.

Neutral
1. Trash-talking. Some really ignorant people play this game, and no I'm not referring to us. We've been sworn at plenty of times in both trade offers and during the live draft. However if you like trash-talking with complete strangers that don't know Magglio Ordonez from Rey Ordonez, then you should consider this a positive feature.

Downsides
1. The prizes are AWFUL (and yet strangely ironic). Grand prize is now a Compaq laptop; I guess they assume you're reading this on your abacus screen. Second prize is a Compaq iPaq, and third prize is an MP3 player. The only other prizes are for league winners: they get either a T-Shirt or something less useful like a banner or mini-bat. They used to offer trips to Spring Training - we can't believe how disgracefully this game has evolved.

2. Games' started maximums of 180 for the year and 90 by the All-Star break severely limit strategy options. Any GS above that maximum are not added to you team statistics. All they had until this year was the 180 limit for the year, and they also added IP minimums of 400 by the break and 800 for the season, although they don't list a penalty in the rules. This change is a primary reason why they lost our business this year; we just can't believe they want to limit interesting strategies to this extent.

3. Trade Review/Waivers. Unless your league disables either of these "features", you're liable to see perfectly fair trades protested and then rejected by the "experts" that administer the leagues. The waiver feature works just like normal roto waivers, expect once you pick up someone from waiver, you drop to 10th place, and everyone else moves up. All players traded from the other league are placed on waivers for a day or two, as well as any players released by a team (so you can't immediately reacquire someone you accidentally released). Due to their limited player pool to begin the season, several top rookies always wind up being added to the pool via waivers after they're called up, but they always wait until after they play in a game or three before bothering to add them.

4. "Undroppable players": ESPN will not let you release a couple dozen of their preferred star players. When top guys go down for the year with injury, it usually takes a couple days for them to change this list. Their laziness can really affect a close race since you won't be able to replace your injured star for a few games.

If you still want to play, here's how to win:

1. Choose live draft with either NL or AL only.

2. Print out the current list of average picks for your given league. This should take you to the correct page, but its also accessible by clicking on "'02 average picks" off of the main ESPN Fantasy Baseball page.

3. Try to draft either the best player in the upcoming round or someone who's slipped a round or two. We keep a copy of the recent average picks' list handy for all of our straight drafts as reference. They're much more accurate for weak leagues as strong owners preemptively jump players lower on the list.

4. 8 of your top 10 picks should be batters unless a stud pitcher has fallen a few rounds (we drafted Schilling 41st overall last year). Your other two picks should be closers, probably in the third and fifth rounds, or later if possible. Concentrate on filling out all four IF positions, 3 OF slots, and your catcher. Now you should have enough offense to focus on high skills' pitchers.

5. 3 of your next 5 picks should be starters. Last year, pitchers like Morris and Person were readily available in rounds 12&13. We drafted Vazquez in rounds 8 and 9 in two different leagues since we were worried about losing him, and that decision turned out fairly well. The other two picks should fill either CR or MF and one of your two remaining OF slots.

6. Draft purely based on need for your remaining picks. Grab a couple of top setup guys if possible; they usually go before round 20.

7. Finally, and this is the key to this strategy, spend all three of your bench picks on pitchers. Make sure you have six starters and six relievers.

8. During the season, keep six relievers active every day, and rotate your starters out of your bench slots. You effectively use a 12-man pitching staff, and while your starts are limited, you can have unlimited relief appearances (which is why drafting two good closers is so important). With 8 of your first 10 picks spent on offense, you should finish in the top three in hitting categories. The two closers and six relievers should allow you to finish top 3 in saves, and as long as you've drafted guys with good K:BB and K/9, your ERA and WHIP should be fine. Using this default 12-man staff will also boost your wins and strikeouts, enabling you to field a competitive team across the board.

9. The downside to this plan is that you're very vulnerable to offensive injuries since several other teams will carry offensive backups on the bench, thereby depleting the available free agents. We've still found tremendous success with some version of this plan, so we strongly suggest that all ESPN fantasy baseball participants should use these concepts as the basis for their strategy.

Tomorrow, I'll begin a more in-depth look at the Challenge games, including the vital strategies for winning each version. We finished in the top 2% of Diamond Challenge last year as we spent $500 on transactions for the first time, and we expect we'll improve upon that finish this season.

Today's Fantasy Rx: While I have a couple days of Challenge articles planned, we're not overly familiar with games other than Baseball Weekly Challenges and ESPN. I still haven't received any recommendations or suggestions, so I'd really appreciate if a couple of you sent in requests for reviews of specific games.