Today's Fantasy Rx

We've shied away from any sort of "list" draft for years in favor of live or e-mail drafts that give us total control over every pick. This year, one of our two NL 4x4 auctions shifted to the Saturday after Opening Day, directly conflicting with our other similar league. My dad, Pete Polko, volunteered to cover us for one of these drafts, and together we decided that we'd take the drive up to Madison while Dad took the Chicago league.

Now while he's never run a team for a full season, he's maintained an interest in roto for over a decade per our love of the game, and we've discussed most every aspect of it with him as we turned our hobby into our business. He's also drafted with me in the past, so we felt fairly comfortable accepting his offer, mutually agreeing to spend a few hours prepping him for the draft.

In most of our drafts, Jess keeps tracks of each team's purchases and remaining money, along with the nomination order, while I run the value and available player lists, as well as any minor league or Ultra drafts. I bid in live drafts and she normally inputs the bids on-line, so all our draft decisions are mutual agreements.

We knew that Pete wouldn't be able to keep track of the other teams due to his relative unfamiliarity with the players, so we concentrated exclusively on those he'd need for our roster.

As we were allowed to keep fifteen players, we kept the following off our last year's first place team:

Keeper Roster for Polkómon

C	
C
1B	
3B	10	Sean Burroughs
CR
2B	10	Marcus Giles
SS	17	Edgar Renteria
MF	2	Todd Walker
OF	10	Lance Berkman
OF	10	Corey Patterson
OF	4	Mark Kotsay
OF
OF
UT	1	Juan Uribe

SP	14	Javier Vazquez
SP	4	Nick Neugebauer
SP	1	Brian Tollberg
SP
P
P	1	Eric Gagne
P	9	Scott Strickland
R	2	Felix Rodriguez
CL	1	John Smoltz

We've owned a few of these players over two seasons from when we joined the league as an expansion team. From our first draft, we still own Burroughs, Patterson, Smoltz, and Felix Rodriguez. Despite the relative strength of this list, we also took a few off-season hits, losing a $3 Chan Ho Park, $2 John Vander Wal, and $22 Matt Lawton to the other league. Our only real keeper decision was between Giles and a $13 Travis Lee, but we decided we preferred to have the extra second basemen since FAAB doesn't begin until after the All-Star break, leaving us stuck with our drafted roster. Giles also meant that Pete didn't need to worry about any middle infielders since 2B, SS, MF, and UT were all full.

We unfortunately filed our keeper roster the day before the Strickland trade, but rather than revise our plans with only a day before the draft, we decided to just keep him at $9. Thanks to Smoltz and Gagne, we also saw no need to worry about additional closers, so all of our conversations with Pete focused on Catchers, Corners, Outfielders, and Starting Pitchers.

After projecting these stats, we decided that we needed a stud OF, a stud 1B, at least one decent catcher, and a solid starter, so we assigned the following value ranges:

OF	$50
1B	$40
SP	$25
CR	$20
C	$10
C	$3
P	$1
OF	$15

The plan we devised with Pete allowed him to use the second OF slot as his option slot. If he spent $55 on the first outfielder, he'd deduct $5 from the second OF slot. If he then spent $35 on a 1B, he'd add $5 back to the OF slot, in the knowledge that we could always grab a Kerry Robinson or Brady Clark relatively cheaply at the end of the draft.

We based the draft around the top two outfielders on the board: Sammy Sosa and Vladimir Guerrero. Due to Vlad's probable reduced steals this year, our main target was Sammy, and we budgeted $56 for him along with a $51 bid for Vlad. Pete was supposed to toss Ryan Klesko first, our preferred 1B over Bagwell and Casey, then Sammy if he was still on the table, then a starting pitcher, and then work his way down the position list for other nominations.

Fortunately we'd priced Klesko at $41, and Pete was able to grab him at $38, immediately following that acquisition with Sammy for $50 flat. For pitching, we'd priced Russ Ortiz and Kerry Wood at $25 each, preferring Ortiz because of the reduced injury risk (and the likely increased bidding for Wood in a league that normally drafts across from Wrigley Field). Our alternatives were Glavine and Brown at $20, with everyone else at $5 or less and intended for the second pitching slot only.

Ortiz went for $26, a perfectly acceptable bid for the #1 pitcher on the board, especially when Kerry went for $29 and Brown all the way to $30. At this point, he'd acquired the three primary players on our draft list while spending $1 less than budgeted.

For the corner slot, both remaining top 1B, as well as Nevin, Rolen, and Beltre all exceeded the planned budget by at least several dollars, and he turned to the next tier for corners. We'd valued Lowell, both Lees, Vaughn, and Tino Martinez at $21, and he was able to grab Lowell at $18, a fair price to lock in another minimum 20 HR and 90 RBI.

With regards to our catchers, we'd priced Lieberthal, Miller, and Lopez at $12, Ausmus at $9, and Zuan, Redmond, and Petrick at $5; Kendall and Piazza were available, but we didn't want to risk significant money on occasionally injured players. Ausmus was tossed early, and Pete wound up drafting him at $7, leaving us $6 under budget, allowing a bid for the second OF up to $21.

The $20 OF were Brian Jordan, Brad Wilkerson, Geoff Jenkins, and Doug Glanville, although we suspected we'd wind up with Wilkerson because of a reduced perception of his value thanks to the Montreal Canseco dalliance. We didn't expect to acquire him at $3, so Pete nabbed us a potentially excellent 2003 keeper who should produce over a $10 profit this season.

With another $18 added to the $4 budget for one catcher and one pitcher, he had enough money available to buy practically anyone we desired here. Javy Lopez was nominated before Miller, so he grabbed Lopez at a reasonable $13. While we'd have preferred Miller, especially as he was sold at $7, we wound up with stronger catching than anticipated.

So with $9 left for one remaining pitcher slot and all our options listed at $5, we were going to get at least one more decent starter for our team to shore up our wins. Our $5 pitcher list included Steve Trachsel, Tony Armas, Kurt Ainsworth, Hideo Nomo, A.J. Burnett, Jose Acevedo, Vicente Padilla, and Rick Helling. Armas and Burnett both went for $10 or more, and Pete successfully bought Trachsel for $3. We'd agreed that anything under $10 left on the table was quite reasonable, so leaving $6 after drafting practically every player we wanted left us fairly ecstatic.

2002 Post-Auction Roster for Polkómon, drafted by Pete Polko

C	13	Javy Lopez
C	7	Brad Ausmus
1B	38	Ryan Klesko
3B	18	Mike Lowell
CR	10	Sean Burroughs
2B	10	Marcus Giles
SS	17	Edgar Renteria
MF	2	Todd Walker
OF	50	Sammy Sosa
OF	10	Lance Berkman
OF	10	Corey Patterson
OF	4	Mark Kotsay
OF	3	Brad Wilkerson
UT	1	Juan Uribe

SP	26	Russ Ortiz
SP	14	Javier Vazquez
SP	4	Nick Neugebauer
SP	3	Steve Trachsel
P	1	Brian Tollberg
P	1	Eric Gagne
P	9	Scott Strickland
R	2	Felix Rodriguez
CL	1	John Smoltz

We might need to deal for another starter and we wouldn't object to a small outfield upgrade, but we believe this roster should remain very competitive for the entire season. For the minor league draft, we prepared a list of 13 names as we owned the twelfth and thirteenth overall picks. While we almost wound up with our #2 choice, Bobby Hill, Pete was able to select our 4th pick, Brandon Phillips, and our 6th choice, Jason Lane, giving us two excellent prospects, both likely to contribute as trade bait if not impact our active roster no later than 2003.

Overall, our first exercise in remote list drafting went superbly, and Pete did a very commendable job implementing the designed strategy. The only difficult part for him was with player identification, but we formulated three different lists to aid this: one page with just our team and money remaining, an alphabetical reference list of every player on the value list with their position, and the actual value sheet, by position and price, along with the dollar targets for each position. If any of you wind up with draft conflicts in the future and need to find a replacement, we'd be happy to elaborate on the preparation to a greater extent. For now, we're just quite happy that we didn't have to drop our league, and we're immensely grateful that Dad enjoyed the experience.

Today's Fantasy Rx: Be careful of every acquisition in leagues that limit your transactions. We're already hurting a little in the above league because of Tollberg's and Neugebauer's early struggles, but we have no way to remove them under traditional rotisserie rules. In case all of the top people on our list had been drafted early, we provided Pete with an emergency list of players at every position who wouldn't hurt us. We focused on high-skills' middle relievers unlikely to hurt us like Scott Stewart, Aaron Fultz, and Jason Christiansen, along with position players like Trenidad Hubbard, Damon Minor, Ramon Castro, and Brian Schneider, players who might contribute acceptable quantitative numbers while not hurting out team qualitatively.