Today's Fantasy Rx

After the relative success of last season's FBR NL Challenge, CREATiVESPORTS's Dave Gawron launched the Fantasy Baseball Review AL Challenge. While FBRALC is technically a companion league, the leagues don't share all the same owners. Other differences include the FBRALC employing a draft format rather than an auction and that the league would not begin as a keeper league, although the league might evolve into a continuous format as soon as 2004.

The points' breakdown for scoring, identical to the FBRNLC, is as follows. For batters, .32 for every Total Base, .5 for SB, .25 for every Run Produced (RBI+R-HR), .15 for each walk, -.1 for every Strikeout, and -.12 for every at-bat. For pitchers, 1 point for every save, .63 for every IP, .5 for every Win and Shutout, .32 for every Hold, .1 for each K, -.24 for each baserunner, and -.32 for every Earned Run. We did not incorporate projected shutouts or holds into our dollar projections as we did not project those statistics. For each of the first 19 weeks, whichever team has more points in each head-to-head contest "wins" the week.

Our inaugural FBRALC draft began on March 5th via e-mail, and we continued to make selections using this format until March 22nd, when we concluded the last half of the draft in a chatroom. The centerpiece of our strategy, as in the NL counterpart, involved targeting solid offensive players, two solid closers since we're required to deploy two relief pitchers each week, and employing most of our reserve picks to grab starting pitching, regardless of skill level. Any starter who reaches 6 innings has a fairly good chance at least of breaking even since they can allow 4 ER and 10 baserunners without posting a negative point total even if they don't manage a win or even one strikeout.

We picked sixth in this snake draft, and we weren't overly surprised to see ARod, Mags, Pedro, Jason Giambi, and Soriano selected with the first five picks. Obviously we were quite happy to roster Nomar, as while Soriano fills a scarcer position, we still grabbed one of the top five offensive players while filling an infield slot. Manny offered more upside, however we knew we wouldn't have a chance to grab Tejada or Jeter.

Only a dozen offensive players looked likely to earn 80 or more points, and by the time our second pick arrived at #15 overall, only Matsui(82), Delgado(81), and Palmeiro(90) remained on the board. No non-Pedro pitcher projected to more than 75 points. As we preferred to fill our infield, we selected Palmeiro since we prefer his skills to Delgado's even given the age difference.

Matsui was still available for each of our next two picks, however we hoped he'd fall to round 5, so we decided simply to take the next best player on the board when we picked. In round #3, with Rivera, Guardado, and Foulke all valued at 70 points, we grabbed Foulke as the safe pick, and when Rivera stayed on the board for our 4th pick, we decided to add him to our team. While we'd definitely prefer Matsui in hindsight, hopefully at least we'll have two top closers by the end of the month.

We grabbed Lee in Round 5, and while we hoped to return to infielders, Tim Salmon and Brad Fullmer were easy selections with our following two picks since both look capable of 60+ points and Fullmer, even though he was a decent option in round 5, fell as we expected since this league employs rather strict position-eligibility requirements.

Tony Batista was an easy call in round 8 as we only like him slightly less than Salmon here, but few other infielders seemed to leave the board as most owners drafted several starting pitchers in the early rounds. Jay Gibbons and Jeremy Giambi joined our team by the end of round 10 as outfielders seemed more precious than decent infielders.

We selected our only starting pitcher among our first 16 picks when we grabbed Kevin Appier in round 11, but as both Jon Garland and Casey Fossum went before our next choice, we decided to return to infielders in the hope of completing our offense.

While only Posada and Hall had been rostered by round 12, only catcher remained available who we projected for more than 25 points. Jason Varitek nicely filled our catching slot, and we'll happily take anything over 30 points from him. Mark Ellis, Doug Mientkiewicz, Dmitri Young, and Gary Matthews, all players that we projected around 50 points, allowed us to fill our much of our offense with established starters.

We only needed a middle infielder as of round 17, however the best players on the board were guys like Melvin Mora and Mark McLemore. So we gambled by waiting to roster Brent Abernathy until round 20, and while that pick's worked out terribly since he lost his starting job and 40-man spot as Kansas City grabbed him on waivers, we managed to pick up a coupe decent starters.

Using LPR to find pitchers with recently solid skill histories, we rostered Ryan Franklin, John Thomson, and Mickey Callway, and join Appier. While we recognize this is a fairly poor rotation, at least we didn't invest in any high-round starters so we hopefully can supplement this quartet with good FAAB picks. Our last three draft selections were Adam Bernero, who owns the best skill among Tigers' starters, and then Chad Bradford and Chad Fox to give us some protection if Rivera needed to open the season on the DL.

Our one major reserve round error involved repeatedly passing Juan Acevedo, though fortunately he hasn't exactly excelled for New York. We grabbed Jeremy Bonderman and Nate Cornejo with our first two picks before selecting some offensive depth in Brian Daubach and David Segui. After rostering Brendan Donnelly to insure we weren't stuck running several terrible starters if all our gambles failed, we completed our roster with Justin Miller, Doug Davis, and Josh Stewart. While the former two don't look likely to return to the majors in the near future, Stewart's seen some helpful early success for Chicago.

Rotohelp's Drafted 2003 FBRNLC Roster
C: Jason Varitek
CR: Rafael Palmeiro, Tony Batista, and Doug Mientkiewicz
MI: Mark Ellis, Nomar Garciaparra, and Brent Abernathy
OF: Carlos Lee, Tim Salmon, Jay Gibbons, Dmitri Young, and Gary Matthews
UT: Brad Fullmer & Jeremy Giambi
Bench: David Segui & Brian Daubach

Starters: Kevin Appier, Ryan Franklin, John Thomson, Mickey Callaway, Adam Bernero, Jeremy Bonderman, Nate Cornejo, and Josh Stewart

Reliever: Keith Foulke, Mariano Rivera, Chad Fox, Chad Bradford, and Brendan Donnelly.

Bench: Justin Miller & Doug Davis

We're obviously disappointed that we weren't able to roster the same caliber of talent here as we bought in the NL auction, however we recognize the limitations of single-season straight drafts. Hopefully our offense will keep us close in most weeks and a little luck on FAABed starters will enable us to remain rather competitive. We've started slowly by going 0-2 over the first two weeks of the season, however we only lost the two weeks by a total of 5.2 points despite suffering though horrendous starts by Lee, Bonderman, and others. Mike Bordick replaced Abernathy, and the addition of a few new starters like Gary Knotts should give us enough roster flexibility to stay in the hunt even without much established starting pitching.

Today's Fantasy Rx: In straight drafts, you generally shouldn't let any player you really want slide more than two rounds past where you expect him to go. While Fullmer looked like a good pick for us in Round 5, we weren't willing to risk losing him past our selection in round 7. Similarly, since Matsui was a viable pick in Round 2, rather than gambling on Rivera's health, we should have selected Matsui in Round 4 since Urbina, Julio and Baez unsurprisingly remained on the board in Round 7.