Today's Fantasy Rx

Our first AL auction of the year was last weekend, a standard 12-team, 4x4 keeper league that we joined last season. We finished second on the strength of a combined $69 spent on Manny and Juan Gonzalez, as well as timely trades of a $1 Joe Mays and $7 Mo Vaughn.

One of the unique features of this league is that all players' salaries increase by $5 each season; you could theoretically keep a player up to 47 years as long as you're willing to carry a $236 player.

Going into this season, we kept only one player from last year's draft, Steve Cox, now at $14. Through trades and FAAB, our 2002 roster now also includes a $29 Carlos Delgado, $14 Jeremy Giambi, $7 Jeff Conine, $21 Andy Pettitte, $7 Cory Lidle, and $35 Kazuhiro Sasaki. In retrospect, we should have released Delgado and Pettitte, but when keepers rosters were due, we felt that both looked to be solid investments this year, and now we just think they might be slightly overpriced.

After recalculating draft values to account for category inflation, we discovered that ARod was valued at around $40, while no other infielder was worth more than $22 (Jeff Cirillo) due to keepers. So our plan was to lock up ARod as the centerpiece of our offense and then fill in around him with bargain players.

Cameron and IRod both went about $6 over value with the first two nominations, and then Mike Mussina was tossed by the third owner. With $63 already committed to pitching, we had planned to spend maybe $12 more on a couple of starters and middle relievers. However, we'd valued Mussina at around $35, and considering we've seen him approach this price in a few other leagues (LABR pushed him to $32) and we believe he'll win the Cy this year, we felt that we might have even undervalued him.

So we felt perfectly comfortable about remaining in the bidding up past $30. Normally we'd stop price-enforcing at around 80-85% of value, but we believed that our fellow owners would keep right on going.

Of course we were abruptly stuck with Mussina at $32, leaving us committed to spending at least 38% of our budget on pitching.

Now, with our primary strategy of spending money on ARod and more offense completely totaled, we faced the standard choice of many owners early in the draft: do we attempt to stick with our apparently failed strategy or adapt to the rhythm of the draft?

Two noms later, we grabbed ARod for $45.

With only $56 left for 14 slots, we received an immediate "See you at 2"; we were only at about 10:30 or so at this time, and we tended to agree with our fellow owner's assessment.

After forty-nine more nominations and over two hours, we picked up Toby Hall at $12.

Thirty-five picks later, we grabbed the best remaining offensive player on the board, David Ortiz, at $15.

We kept an updated spreadsheet during the draft to maintain accurate values based on the remaining players. When we purchased Hall and Ortiz, both were at a discount of about three dollars each.

The challenge for us now was to fill in the remaining 12 slots with quality players for all of $29. We probably jumped the gun by drafting Darrin Fletcher at $8 instead of waiting for Mark Johnson, but we were able to pick up two solid outfielders with great power potential in Shane Spencer and Brian Buchanan for a total of $11.

We only had $10 left for 9 players at this time, and our goal was to try to nominate players that would draw some extra cash off the table to bring everyone else down to our monetary level.

John Burkett only pulled $4, and then we heard crickets on our "Doug Davis, $2" bid. While we didn't mind rostering a developing young pitcher who could win fifteen games, we also weren't pleased about losing our last $1 of extra cash.

Whenever you're down to a dollar for every remaining player in a draft, you need to decide when to nominate players you want and when to nominate players that you wouldn't mind having on your roster if no one else outbids you.

Chris Richard drew $2 off the table, and then we successfully grabbed Nate Cornejo, the best starter left on the board, for $1, following that up with a $1 Jack Cressend.

We had a couple middle infielders and third basemen targeted at the end of the draft, players we'd chosen after realizing we wouldn't have much money left. A $1 Herb Perry looks fairly solid considering that Texas is only carrying two other position players on the bench. While we wanted Tony Graffanino, we were worried that one other owner would outbid us, so we chose Jay Canizaro instead, losing Graffanino to that owner without forcing him to spend his extra dollar.

Fortunately, we were able to fill the rest of our roster with exactly whom we targeted, grabbing current Tampa starting 3B Bobby Smith at middle infield, Brady Anderson for our 5th outfield slot, and completing our team with Casey Fossum and J.C. Romero.

While we know we lack flexibility and have no chance if any of our stars suffers a major injury, we're quite happy with the way our initial strategy evolved into a modified stars-and-scrubs. We have effectively no speed as ARod might lead our team in steals, but we have a very nicely balanced pitching staff and some great power sources on offense. After a couple weeks of the season, we'll be looking to trade Pettitte or Davis for a quality middle infielder, and if we can grab a few points in steals without sacrificing much pitching, we should remain competitive for the entire season.

I've related this draft experience to you as an example of how you can alter, or not alter, your strategy during the draft. Although we ended up with a very different team than we'd envisioned, we can now approach trades dealing from strength instead of trying to avoid creating holes in a balanced team.

2002 Drafted Roster of The Sword in Bill Stoneman
C: Toby Hall and Darrin Fletcher
1/3/C: Carlos Delgado, Herb Perry, and Steve Cox
2/S/M: Jay Canizaro, Alex Rodriguez, and Bobby Smith
OF: Jeremy Giambi, Jeff Conine, Brian Buchanan, Shane Spencer, and Brady Anderson
UT: David Ortiz

SP: Mike Mussina, Cory Lidle, Andy Pettitte, Doug Davis, and Nate Cornejo
RP: Kazuhiro Sasazki, Jack Cressend, Casey Fossum, and J.C. Romero

Pitching performances that impressed me from 4.2.02:

Eric Gagne, 1:0 K:BB in .2 IP with 0 H; 7/7 pitches were strikes.

Giovanni Carrara, 1:0 K:BB in 1 IP with 0 H; 10/12 pitches were strikes.

Ryan Dempster, 7:1 K:BB in 7.1 IP with 6 H and 1 HR; 10/14 outs on balls in play were groundouts.

Victor Zambrano, 1:0 .2 IP with 0 H; 6/6 pitches were strikes.

Steve Reed, 3:2 K:BB in 2 IP with 2 H and 0 HR; 3/3 outs on balls in play were groundouts.

Alan Embree, 3:0 K:BB in 1 IP with 2 H and 0 HR; 14/17 pitches were strikes.

Todd Ritchie; 7:2 K:BB in 6 IP with 6 H and 0 HR; 7/10 outs on balls in play were groundouts.

Jamie Moyer, 5:0 K:BB in 6 IP with 4 H and 0 HR.

Tim Hudson, 6:1 K:BB in 6.1 IP with 4 H and 0 HR; 62/89 pitches were strikes.

C.C. Sabathia; 5:1 K:BB in 5.1 IP with5 H and 0 HR.

Today's Fantasy Rx: While we certainly appreciate all the reader mail we've received over the past few months, we wanted to let everyone know that when we launched this site, we decided that we weren't going to reply to any e-mail with a virus. Although, it sometimes takes several days, we do try to reply to all non-contaminated messages. If you haven't received a reply to your e-mail (aside from the messages in the last couple of days), it's probably because you sent us a virus.