Anatomy of a Drinking Draft

So on Saturday, we had our 10-man live draft with my good buddies from home. It's a 5-player keeper league, where each keeper replaces a pick in rounds 1 through 5 - it's normal 5x5 but with OBP instead of BA (because we're progressive like that). Last season, I went into freefall late in the year as my pitching staff became decimated and injuries to key players (hi Ian Kinsler!) took their toll on my non-core stats.

An interesting thing happened - Lance Berkman didn't play a single game in the OF last season, forcing me into a situation where I had Berkman, Fielder and Howard all competing for 2 spots (1B and UTIL). Normally I would be apoplectic about being locked into my UTIL slot so early, but I genuinely feel all three are top-20 talents. In an effort to get younger, I made a trade, sending Howard (less valuable than usual in this league because it ends earlier and usually Howard's end-of-season tear coincides with his team sitting at home watching the playoffs) for BJ Upton (giving me much-needed youth and athleticism, insanely important in a keeper league). This made my five keepers David Wright, Lance Berkman, Ian Kinsler, Prince Fielder and BJ Upton - a very good collection of talent (all rated inside the top 35, with four potential top-20 guys) but not even close to the best in the league at this point, so I'd have to make up some ground in the draft:

Rim Job Larry
Berkman Lance 1B K
Fielder Prince 1B K
Wright David 3B K
Kinsler Ian 2B K
Upton B.J. OF K
McCann Brian C 6
Young Chris OF 7
Dunn Adam OF 8
Vazquez Javier P 9
Lowe Derek P 10
Myers Brett P 11
Tulowitzki Troy SS 12
Santana Ervin P 13
Fuentes Brian P 14
Danks John P 15
Street Huston P 16
Carpent Chris P 17
Drew J.D. OF 18
Duchscherer Justin P 19
Johnson Kelly 2B 20
Dukes Elijah OF 21

I selected 4th, and Dan Haren and Jake Peavy were off the board before it got to me. At this point, I made a snap decision - with basically every top-tier starter off the board, I would try to use a modified version of the old auction-draft move of piling 80% of your resources into position players, then filling your staff with high-K/low-WHIP guys, often using multiple relievers, even middle relievers. With our league having 3 SP slots and no mid-week changes, I wouldn't necessarily be able to run it to its fullest effect - I'd still need something for wins, and with a 10-team league, Ks from starters are still huge since the pool is deep.

Either way, I took the plunge, picking for value at 54 with the best catcher available (since I figured ESPN's hype would make Weiters/Ianetta/etc. overhyped; I was wrong) and possibly the best player available. I then capitalized on undervalued resources to fill my OF slots (OF is startlingly shallow this year, even in 10-team leagues) with Young and Dunn, who I likely should have selected in the reverse order, but since it was on the wheel no one cares.

Now that I had my position players solidly filled (and with what might be the best position-player lineup I've ever had in fantasy baseball), I started on the pitching. Vasquez is an obvious choice, in hopes that moving to the easier league and out of US Cellular knocks down the gopher balls while increasing K:BB ratio slightly, although he's still been valuable for years, while Myers fits exactly the role we're looking for while giving a good shot at Ws on a solid second-place team. Lowe goes exactly against the grain of the high-K lineup, but the value was way too solid at that position, and his WHIP plus ERA should still help. Tulo was the only non-garbage SS left (and was likely a steal), Drew shouldn't go that low even with his injury history, while Carpenter would have never made it back to me and thus forced my hand. I grabbed Dukes on a flier, knowing that I could DL Upton and add Jason Motte to get another reliever into the starting lineup.

Overall, I'm pretty damn happy with the draft - it's yet another all-offense/questionable-pitching RC team, but that's been my MO for years, and I'll just have to run waiver-wire games to keep the staff solid (or ditch SP for the Royce Rings of 2009; which I'm fine with).