The Journey Begins

By Son of the Raven — aka Corey from Florida

League 3

This year, I am returning from a forced hiatus from fantasy baseball, having joined the Army and shipping off to basic training in March of 2006. That year represented the first that I had not participated in a fantasy baseball league in over 14 years.

I completed my initial training and arrived at my first duty station in February of 2007, by which time it was really too late to find and join a league. This year, I decided to ‘get back in the game’ and find a league to join.

I contacted the Fantasy 411 to find out if there was a slot open in the listener leagues. I am a Klayman League alum (”Class” of 2005!). Mike Siano had the unenviable task of telling a loyal listener that the listener leagues were being restructured and that no slots were available, but he recommended that I talk to my old friend Going Postal to see if he had any open slots in one of his Fantasy Baseball Mafia leagues.

Later that same day, I found myself a member of the ‘familia’ and a participant in League #3. As League #3 is a returning league, with keepers, the first step was to conduct an Expansion Draft.

Expansion Draft

In general, my knock against joining a pre-existing keeper league is that the new owner is behind the power curve. This time, I decided that it was my opportunity to make my ‘bones’ with the Family. Four owners participated in the Expansion Draft, and I ended up drafting Carl Crawford, Mark Teixeira, J.J. Hardy, Shane Victorino, and Ryan Zimmerman. I was happy with Crawford, Teixeira and Zimmerman — but not so enamored of Hardy and Victorino.

In hindsight, I should have looked a lot closer at the numbers, and I would have been a lot happier with my expansion draft. For instance, I calculated my targeted Average Production per Hitter (AP/H) for these guys as .290-80-22-80-13. Using the composite projections that Cory Schwartz provided at http://fantasy411.mlblogs.com, those five players average .288-87-20-78-16. Not too far off. Instead, I got hung up on dissatisfaction over Hardy and Victorino and decided I had to make some trades.

Trading Season

As soon as the Expansion Draft was over, owners started checking on the availability of Crawford and Teixeira. Normally, you package multiple players you do not intend to keep to get an upgrade. However, here is where being an expansion owner gets you — I had a pool of five protects to work with whereas the returning owners had twelve. Moreover, we can only protect five players on draft day, meaning that if I wanted to get rid of Hardy and Victorino, I would have to trade one player to get multiple players and get depth that way.

I pulled off two trades rather quickly, dealing Crawford for Ichiro and Pence and Teixeira for Kinsler and Atkins. Almost immediately, I started to regret my decisions, but there was no turning back. I felt I needed to do something to make lemonade out of my lemons.

One owner expressed interest in Ichiro; I asked for Victor Martinez and another player, but I was turned down. He countered with an offer that did not quite appeal to me, but he also included a list of the players he was not protecting for me to consider. Since he had made it clear that he was not protecting them, I decided to take a chance and ask for a 3-for-2 deal of CC Sabathia, Dan Haren and Aramis Ramirez for Ichiro and Zimmerman. We struck the deal in the 11th hour — just before protection lists were due.

Pre-Draft Strategy

The protection list I submitted was Aramis, Kinsler, Atkins, Sabathia and Haren. The three hitters averaged .293-87-25-92-8 while my two pitchers averaged 15 wins, 0 saves, 185 Ks, a 3.56 ERA and 1.20 WHIP. My Average Production per Pitcher (AP/P) to win the league is 11 wins, 12 saves, 133 Ks, 3.40 ERA and 1.20 WHIP. The result of my trades was an improvement in Average, HRs, RBIs, Wins, Ks, ERA and WHIP, but the team lacked speed and saves.

Going into the draft, my plan was to grab an outfielder that combined speed and power with the third overall pick in Round 6 (the first round of drafting). I would grab another speedster in the second round, and then I would add two closers and a starter in the next three. The night before the draft, I turned in around Midnight and set my alarm clock to get up at 5AM — an hour before the draft.

Draft Day Disaster … Almost!

I really don’t have an explanation for what happened, but the next morning, I was awakened by laughter from the room next door to mine. I immediately knew that something was wrong because everyone should still have been asleep at 5 AM.

I looked at the clock, and it was 6:02 AM! I pulled on running shoes and rushed to my office where I have Internet access. By the time I got there, it was 6:07 AM, and by the time the draft room was loaded onto my computer, we were into the third round of protected players. Phew!

In the second part of this saga, I’ll look at my draft.