Today's Fantasy Rx

As roto traditionalists, we're quite pleased that we've managed to maintain one league with a draft on the weekend following Opening Day. Unfortunately, due to a change in one of our leagues, both of our 12-team, NL 4x4 keeper auctions drafted on April 6th this year, one in Madison and one in Chicago. We debated conducting the Madison draft by phone while attending the one in the city, but eventually chose to accept my dad's offer to run the Chicago draft for us while we took the day trip to Wisconsin. Tomorrow I'll discuss how the Chicago draft went, but we'll review the Madison draft today.

Our team name is Polkolachki, an amalgam including kolachki, a traditional eastern European cookie that we've always served around the holidays. We were able to keep 11 players, and after a rather thorough job of rebuilding where we had acquired over twenty keepers heading into the off-season and traded down to the required number, we were rather happy with our roster going into the draft:

Keeper Roster for Polkolachki

C	11	Paul Lo Duca
C
1B	12	Albert Pujols
3B	15	Mike Lowell
CR
2B	4	D'Angelo Jimenez
SS	4	Juan Uribe
MF	4	Orlando Cabrera
OF	45	Sammy Sosa
OF	5	Corey Patterson
OF
OF
OF
UT

SP	4	Brandon Duckworth
SP	1	Woody Williams
SP
SP
P
P
P
R
CL	1	Eric Gagne

Due to normal inflation in this league Sammy was a solid keeper at this salary. This is a toppers' league where contracts only last two years before you have one season of topper rights, in which you can keep a topper going into the draft, and after bidding concludes, you can keep that player for $1 over the final bid. We were one of the very few teams in the league that didn't keep any toppers because of the strength of our roster.

We're also only allowed to own two long-term contracts at any time. LTCs need to be exercised prior to the second season at $5/season for between 1-3 additional years. We extended Lo Duca and Pujols for two years each beyond their previous salaries ($1 and $2 respectively) to give our team some continuity; their new salaries also likely insured that we'd lock in solid profits on two rather vital positions for the next three years.

After the regular auction, we conduct a ten round Ultra draft; our two rookie keepers were Sean Burroughs and Nick Neugebauer, both of whom we're expecting to earn double-digit value this year.

Our goal in the draft was fairly simple. Since we can rotate our pitchers at leisure for the season, we wanted to grab a guaranteed closer (as we only suspected that Gagne would be the closer at the time) and buy some studs on offense. Our top two players on the board were Helton and Pierre, both valued at $47 and kept as toppers.

The first four tosses were Chipper, Jose Jimenez, Matt Morris, and Curt Schilling, all of whom went for up to $12 over our listed prices. Jason Isringhausen was tossed fifth, and as we considered him likely to have the most value of any NL closer this year, we successfully won the bid at $38.

I titled this piece "Money in the Mouth" because, for the first time in a live draft for us, other owners had printed out our draft values and were using them as guides for bidding against us. We heard more than one exclamation of "But that's not what you listed on the website." Using our formulas for category inflation, we'd obviously recalibrated all our values to reflect that inflation, so perhaps anyone using our sheet was actually at a slight disadvantage. Nevertheless, we drafted in line with our stated philosophies and existing beliefs on each player, but we certainly took the good-natured razzing in stride.

We felt comfortable with Isringhausen even when Hoffman, Nen, and Smoltz all went for a few dollars less since we locked in value early in the draft; we'd valued Izzy at $35 but were afraid of past bidding wars on closers. Unfortunately, the sixth toss was Juan Pierre.

You've likely seen our valuation of Pierre as one of the top five players in 4x4 NL roto, so we were prepared to go close to $50 for him. The bidding halted at our $32, and we mistakenly waited for someone else to raise the bid. If we'd known that no one else in the league liked Pierre as much as we did, we would have upped our own bid to at least $40, but we watched helplessly as Pierre was topped at $33.

We now needed to find our speed elsewhere, but the next several tosses were all power hitters and starting pitchers.

Todd Helton was the next of our targets to be nominated. Our normal strategy here is to call out as many toppers as early as possible in the hope of draining money off the table. We concentrated on middle infielders in the early going as we were solid up the middle and didn't need to purchase anyone there, and we were pleased that players like Furcal, Aurilia, and Womack all exceed our projections. Several second basemen were drafted at bargains, a trend we've observed in other drafts, but we wanted more power available in our utility slot.

The bidding on Helton stayed fairly lively and we never had to worry about jumping the bid until quite late. We comfortably jumped an extra buck or two to $49, and while we might have overspent by a dollar or two, we were happy to grab him shy of $50 as Vladimir Guerrero had been kept at $54 the previous year.

While we'd now allocated $94 to Sosa and Helton, we were happy to secure arguably the two most consistent offensive players in baseball at reasonable prices. We knew that our keeper roster necessitated a Stars & Scrubs strategy based on our bidding expectations of the other owners, and most of our alternative outfield targets also went for several dollars over their Draft Values.

We didn't buy anyone for the next thirty picks or so, but we decided to make our play on Ryan Klesko. With the positional flexibility of Pujols and Klesko, we'd be able to draft inexpensive outfielders with upside to compliment our stars, and while we may have overpayed a good $5 for Klesko, we wanted another middle-of-the-order hitter with power and speed. Since we already suspected Patterson would have a good year on the bases, we only needed one source of cheap speed in our last three outfield slots.

Our other problem at this point was a complete lack of money as we only had $28 left for 9 players. The best available option was to snag the occasional pitcher below value. We grabbed Hideo Nomo at $4 and then Glendon Rusch and Felix Rodriguez at $5 each.

Catchers started going around this time, and we were targeting Damian Miller or one of the Houston backstops. We decided not to push Damian Miller past $7 and wound up with Ausmus at $2, $5 below our expected value for him. While this leaves us a little short on power, we had enough to make some nice OF acquisitions.

We grabbed Rosie Brown at $2, $7 below our expected value for him, and then Kerry Robinson at $3, a good $9 below his Draft Value; Robinson fulfilled our desire for a speedy guy in the outfield, and Alex Sanchez and Dave Roberts, our other two options, both went for $6 each.

Jose Acevedo was nominated slightly before Robinson, accompanied by a "I can't read Rotohelp without seeing them tout this guy." So we bid $2, and although we were willing to go to at least $4 on someone we'd priced at $7, we were quite pleased that everyone let us have our own sleeper at $2. Considering that we'd overpayed for our three stars, nabbing a few of these undervalued players gives our roster a lot more flexibility, and hopefully some good keepers for next year that also make good trade bait.

With $5 left for two players, we were running against two other owners that could make a similar maximum bid. Terry Shumpert was nominated, and while we liked both Brady Clark and Brian L. Hunter a lot, we decided that we wanted a backup 2B since we'd planned on spending all our reserve picks on pitchers. We jumped to $4, shutting out the other owners, and leaving us with $1 for one more pitcher.

We lost several nominations like Darren Dreifort and Scott Stewart before they finally let us have Scott Williamson. While we could have tried to hold back on a specific sleeper keeper like Dreifort, we figured that we'd rather force the other owners to pay $2 for these guys rather than see them roster them at minimum price.

Drafted Roster for Polkolachki

C	11	Paul Lo Duca
C	2	Brad Ausmus
1B	12	Albert Pujols
3B	15	Mike Lowell
CR	39	Ryan Klesko
2B	4	D'Angelo Jimenez
SS	4	Juan Uribe
MF	4	Orlando Cabrera
OF	45	Sammy Sosa
OF	5	Corey Patterson
OF	4	Terry Shumpert
OF	3	Kerry Robinson
OF	2	Roosevelt Brown
UT	49	Todd Helton

SP	5	Glendon Rusch
SP	4	Brandon Duckworth
SP	4	Hideo Nomo
SP	2	Jose Acevedo
P	1	Woody Williams
P	1	Scott Williamson
P	1	Eric Gagne
R	5	Felix Rodriguez
CL	38	Jason Isringhausen

Our league has one interesting twist for the reserve rounds: aside from any kept major leaguers, you can only draft three players on the Opening Day rosters, not counting DL players. With our intention to rotate pitchers, we wanted to grab a few solid guys early and then grab a decent prospect or two along with pitchers likely to be quickly recalled.

After Mark Prior, Marlon Byrd, Bud Smith, and Dennis Tankersley were selected, we grabbed the best remaining starting pitcher in Rick Helling in the $15 first round slot. Our next two ($10) picks were Damian Moss and Britt Reames, giving us two live young arms with good potential, the former to start and the latter to close.

We decided to risk a pick on Tom Goodwin in the fourth round in the hope that he'd wind up on an NL team, and then we selected Scott Chiasson with our last $10 pick in the hope that he'd be needed in Chicago soon. We also think he might challenge Alfonseca and/or Farnsworth to close next year, so we figured he'd be a safe gamble.

As we were allowed to slot our two kept players anywhere in the draft, we decided to use our two $2 slots at the end while trying to grab the best prospects at whatever price earlier. The only real prospect that we'd targeted early was Colorado 3B Garrett Atkins, but he went two picks before our first $5 pick.

We instead chose Tim Redding as we figured that Houston would need him if anything happened to one of their starters. With our last two selections, we grabbed Los Angeles 2B Joe Thurston and Arizona 1B Lyle Overbay, both good AAA prospects with a chance to start next season. Thurston might be an upgrade on Grudzielanek even now, and if Durazo can't stay healthy, Overbay may take over for Grace next year to add some power to a weak lineup.

By the first transaction period last Wednesday, one team had already lost Griffey and Vaughn while also owning Maddux and Brown. Although we had the opportunity to acquire Griffey for a couple pitchers like Rusch and FRod, we decided to keep our staff intact and make a play for another undervalued player. We dealt Goodwin and Thurston for a $3 Albie Lopez for which we'd almost bid $4 at the draft.

Now we have three solid relievers in Izzy, Gagne, and FRod, several above average and potentially excellent starters in Rusch, Duckworth, Nomo, Acevedo, Williams, Lopez, and Neugebauer along with a few wild cards in Williamson, Moss, Reames, and Redding. We also dumped Overbay last week to add Ohka and Politte, giving us even more flexibility on a deep staff.

While we probably focused a little too much on the stars, we were still pleased that we were able to assemble our roster as planned, and we again expect to remain near first place all season.

Today's Fantasy Rx: Start looking around the other teams in your league to identify those weak due to injuries. We've already benefited from one dump trade, and now is when you need to see if other owners are willing to give up on some of their slow starters.