On Target: Draft Preparation and the Ranking Sheets
by Josh Parks
published March 17, 2004

Josh Parks is a Seattle freelance writer and baseball enthusiast.  He returns for his second year with Baseball Notebook with this, his first essay for us in 2004.

I still remember the first time I ran a set of Baseball Notebook ranking sheets for one of my leagues. On the one hand I had a very clear sense of having almost an unfair advantage using the forecasts while on the other I felt a little intimidated by the task of putting them to work. As I pored over the names and numbers I remember thinking to myself, "Once I figure out what all this means, my opponents are in big trouble."

The purpose of this article is to describe some of what I've "figured out" about using the ranking sheets, particularly for those who might be new subscribers to Baseball Notebook, new to fantasy baseball (since some of what I have to say applies no matter whose rankings you use), or simply looking for some food for thought. I'm going to focus specifically on using the rankings to prepare for a draft, as opposed to an auction, since that's where my own experience lies, and since auction preparation has been covered more frequently in David Luciani's own essays and Q&A columns.  If this piece provides a starting point for a new manager's draft preparation, or some new insights for an experienced manager, it has done its job.

If you've used Baseball Notebook's rankings before in a draft you know that player selection hardly follows them in an orderly fashion. This is good news. It's a sign that your information is different from your competitors' and that it is presumably somewhat better than theirs.  Otherwise you wouldn't (or shouldn't) use it. What's more, the fact that you find yourself searching up and down the list, sometimes way down, to cross off the names of your competitors' selections means that they are leaving value on the table, sometimes lots of it.

This brings us to one of the crucial points about the ranking sheets. It's been said before but it bears repeating: the rankings are based on projected relative value of each player to your team in your league. They do not tell you in what order you should draft your players.

You might ask yourself what the difference is.  "If I want to maximize my team's value (and I do), why not just pick the most valuable player available?"  The simple answer is because you don't have to. If you did make your picks based solely on the rankings you'd still likely end up with an above-average team. In fact, I pretty much followed that approach one year and finished second.  But when I went back and looked at how I'd drafted I realized that by following the rankings so closely, I was essentially forcing myself to choose between two players when I didn't have to, and that I could have ended up with even more value if I'd used a different approach.

Another way that I like to look at this is in terms of denying value to my opponents. Let's say Player A has a $30 projection, Player B has a $28 projection, and I'm quite confident Player A will still be available with my next pick, and Player B will not. By selecting Player B now and taking Player A later, I maximize my own team's value, by landing both players, while effectively denying Player B's services to any other team.

To some extent I think of these two principles - maximizing my team's value while minimizing my opponents' - as competing with one another. The tension between the two is resolved, theoretically at least, by selecting each of my players exactly one pick before anybody else in the league would have taken him.

As I said, it's a theory. In practice, you're locked into a fixed draft order so there's no way to select players exactly one pick ahead of everyone else. So, assuming you can't read minds, the question becomes: How do you figure out when you can afford to skip a player and when you can't, or how do you stay one step ahead of a player's perceived value?

Unfortunately, the ranking sheets don't tell you that either but remember that's not their job. They exist to tell you, at any given point in the draft (or the season), who you want on your team. It's up to you to figure out how to get them. And while I don't believe it's possible to predict exactly when a player will be selected, I also don't believe it's necessary. There are a number of different resources readily available that will help you form an impression of perceived value for certain players who interest you and that impression is generally sufficient. You can then modify your approach based on your risk tolerance and what you know about the specific opponents you'll be facing to give yourself the best chance of landing those players.

Notice I said "certain players who interest you" and not the entire baseball population. This is part of the other good news about the ranking sheets: you don't need to figure out a strategy for each individual player. In other words, if every expert in the world thinks Manny Ramirez is a first rounder, and so do your ranking sheets, you don't need to worry about him. Chances are you'll either have a shot at him in the first round or you won't, and if he drops to the second, you can take him then. Likewise, you don't care so much about players whose projected value is less than their general perceived value. For instance, in the most recent projections, Baseball Notebook is forecasting Randy Johnson to be worth $12 in many 12-team mixed 5x5 leagues (depending on the number of positions to be filled), which puts him in "seventh round" territory - he's the 84th player listed on the ranking sheet; 84 divided by 12 is 7. Since I'd expect Johnson to be drafted higher than the seventh round, even without doing any research, his perceived value (or likely draft position) is higher than his projected value. You don't need to worry about somebody taking a $12 Johnson in the third round since you'll be focused on taking somebody worth $17 or $18, and probably more.

I should point out here that sometimes in situations like this the player in question's trade value is worth considering. Some managers may take somebody like Johnson earlier than the rankings would indicate with a mind to trading him early in the season and preferably after a hot start. There's some risk involved, since there's no guarantee the trade you have in mind will happen, let alone that hot start. Plus, there's a chance Johnson will end up being worth more than you thought, which might hurt you if you end up trading him away to a contender, though that's a consideration with every trade.

What you are doing when finding players that "interest you" is identifying those players whose projected value is noticeably higher than their perceived value. These are your bargains, your sleepers, your "target players" - the $20 and $30 guys you'll be landing while your opponents are worrying about position scarcity.

I consider the process of targeting players fairly unglamorous and straightforward, though it can be as sophisticated and thorough as you are inclined to make it. At a minimum, you need to compare the ranking sheet you generated for your league with somebody else's rankings. You may want to give some thought to whose rankings you use, the more readily available to your opponents the better. In fact, if your league is hosted online it probably has rankings available especially for its users, so it's likely your opponents will refer to them at some point, even in a competitive league, so you may want to give them preference.

If you're in a league with unusual parameters I believe rankings for standard leagues are still useful for targeting purposes, depending on how sophisticated your opponents are, since they may not appreciate how those parameters affect player value and may very well be referring to a standard list in their own preparations. The more unusual your league's format and competitiveness, the more you'll want to find something that fits your league, though anything is better than nothing.

Once you've got a comparison list you want to work through it more or less as you would during an actual draft, treating the comparison list as the draft results and using the ranking sheet to "track" those results. It will help you stay organized by thinking in terms of draft rounds.  Keep in mind any differences in league size between your ranking sheets and your comparison list. If your comparison list is based on a 12-team league and yours is 14, make sure you run through 14 players on your comparison list for each round. For the sake of simplicity, I'll stick with the 12-team mixed 5x5 league example.

So, starting with the comparison list [EDITOR'S NOTE:  One great site for finding out where players are going in the draft is MockDraftCentral.com], check off the first player, then find that player on your ranking sheet and cross him off there as well. Continue until you've worked through the "first round" of players. Now take a look at the first round of players on your ranking sheet.  For a 12-team league this means the first 12 players listed - and make a  mark or some kind of notation next to each player who did not get "picked" by the comparison list. You will also want to break your ranking sheet up into "rounds" for easy reference.

Your ranking sheet might end up looking something like this:

1st ============
PEDRO MARTINEZ
KEITH FOULKE (X)
ERIC GAGNE (X)
MARIANO RIVERA (X)
CURT SCHILLING
OCTAVIO DOTEL (X)
MARK PRIOR
JOHN SMOLTZ (X)
BILLY WAGNER (X)
ALBERT PUJOLS
ALFONSO SORIANO
ALEX RODRIGUEZ

The crossed-out names indicate a player "taken" by your comparison list, while the notations next to the remaining players tell you how many times that player has been skipped, starting with whatever "round" they're grouped with.

Now work through the next 12 players on the comparison list, crossing each one off your ranking sheet as you go. This time when you look at your ranking sheet you want to consider who is left of the top 24 players, again making notations next to the players who are skipped.

Your ranking sheet might now look something like this:

1st ============
PEDRO MARTINEZ
KEITH FOULKE (XX)
ERIC GAGNE (X)
MARIANO RIVERA (X)
CURT SCHILLING
OCTAVIO DOTEL (XX)
MARK PRIOR
JOHN SMOLTZ (XX)
BILLY WAGNER (XX)
ALBERT PUJOLS
ALFONSO SORIANO
ALEX RODRIGUEZ

2nd ============
MIKE MUSSINA (X)
JASON SCHMIDT (X)
TODD HELTON
JAVIER VAZQUEZ (X)
JOE BOROWSKI (X)
EDDIE GUARDADO (X)
JOHAN SANTANA (X)
MANNY RAMIREZ
JASON ISRINGHAUSEN (X)
PRESTON WILSON
NOMAR GARCIAPARRA
KEVIN BROWN (X)

You can now quickly see which players have been taken, which first round players have been skipped twice, and which "second round" players have been skipped once.

At the risk of jumping ahead of myself, a little bit of research will tell you that Todd Helton is quite likely to go in the first round for a league like this, yet he is listed as a "second rounder" by the ranking sheet. Not to worry. As I mentioned above, you are not as concerned about players taken earlier than the rankings indicate. During a draft, you should be happy whenever somebody is jumping down on your ranking sheet, since that translates into more projected value left on the table for you. You may want to file away that you think Todd Helton is a likely first-round pick. You'll be surprised how quickly you pick up on information like this, and it is useful, since you probably wouldn't want to skip Helton in the second round if he happened to still be available for some reason. But for the purposes of targeting players, you don't need to make any special note of it here.

Continue this process until you've worked through 10 to 15 rounds, moving further down the ranking sheet to include the next round's worth of players. I don't believe you need to do more than that, though you certainly can if you want. As you scan your marked-up ranking sheet you should quickly notice which players have been skipped more than others in their group. In the list above, let's say Dotel has the most marks next to his name with four, indicating he was skipped four times, and that Borowski and Guardado have the most for their group with six, meaning they were skipped six times starting with the second round, and Santana is a close second with five. Voila, four target players. Remember, you're not simply looking for whomever is skipped the most in each group. You're looking for any player who is skipped noticeably more than the rest of the players around him. This will keep you from overlooking potential targets.

Also keep in mind that the more valuable a player is projected to be, the fewer skips it takes to make him a target player. This is because as you move down your ranking sheet the difference between projected values becomes smaller. With that in mind you will probably want to take a closer look at the first group of players on your ranking sheet with an eye toward whom you might want to target for one of your earlier picks. You might notice, for instance, that Keith Foulke was skipped twice. Since the rankings are projecting him as the second-most valuable player in your league, it would not be a bad idea to make him your top targeted player, while realizing that he's still likely to be taken relatively early.

You should now have a list of five to ten players who stand out fairly clearly as ones whose projected value is higher than their perceived value. These are your target players, the ones whom you can afford to skip over at least the first time you get to them. Obviously, the uncertainty now becomes how many times you can skip them.

What you want to do here is take each of your target players and decide for yourself when you think he's most likely to be drafted. Some people may simply want to use the comparison they just completed to answer this question and I don't blame them, since they've already done a lot of work. While I believe the more information you can gather about your target players' perceived value, the better off you are, if all you've got to go on is your comparison list, that too is better than nothing.

So some might look at Joe Borowski on their marked up ranking sheet and note that he was skipped six times and conclude that he's an eighth round pick (since he was skipped starting in the second round, so you add two to his skip total) and therefore he should be targeted for the seventh round.  As long as you're comfortable with that, that's fine. After all, you probably won't land every single one of your target players, nor should you try, since that would probably lead you to picking them earlier than you need to. You just want to land more than your share.

Personally, I like to look at five to ten different resources, sometimes more. This is not something I do for each player, only those that I've specifically targeted through the process described above. Whether you scour the Internet or subscribe to every fantasy publication available, there's practically no end to the various rankings you can use to assess perceived value. Let's say you find five Top 300 lists from various experts, including your comparison list, and you figure out Borowski is, on average, about the 128th player ranked. In a 12-team league this translates to a late-ish tenth round pick (128 divided by 12 is about 10.7).

Now that you've figured out when you think other people might select him, you need to decide when you are going to try to select him. Sticking with Borowski, if you're comfortable with your estimate that he's a tenth rounder, you can just target Borowski for the ninth round and leave it at that.

However, if you want to get a little more sophisticated, you may want to consider draft position when determining in which round you want to go after a player, especially if you pick particularly early or late. (For the sake of this discussion I'm assuming that draft order follows a "snake" pattern, where the selection order reverses for each round.) Let's say you pick third in the first round of our 12-team league. This means you would draft third in the ninth round and tenth in the tenth round. If you feel strongly that Borowski is in fact a late tenth round pick, and your pick in the tenth is pretty late, you probably will want to stay with targeting him with your ninth pick, since there is in fact one and a half rounds (18 players) between your ninth and tenth picks. This also means you may be willing to skip a player when picking late in a round, since you know your pick in the next round comes early.

Again, the issue is how comfortable you are with your approach. Remember I mentioned risk tolerance earlier? This is where that becomes the key consideration. If you're going to kick yourself for skipping Borowski in the ninth and losing him, don't. As I said, you probably won't get every single one of your targets, so don't let that throw off the rest of your plan. Just because you lost out on a player doesn't mean you have to become more aggressive with the rest of them.

For those who like to do a lot of research, mock drafts (or actual drafts, if you can access them) are another great resource, since they show people actually trying to fill out a roster rather than just comparing relative value. However, it can be a bit tricky depending on how the draft results are listed. An ordered list is better than a table, since it translates more easily to different league sizes. Don't make the mistake of looking at a table of results for a mock draft for a 12-team league and thinking one of your targets was taken in the fifth round with the 67th pick, when you're preparing for a 14-team league where the 67th pick comes up in the fourth. Again, the more competitive and more unusual your league, the more you'll want to use results for leagues that are similar.

No matter how much research you end up doing, you will want to consider what you've learned and filter it through what you know about your league. If a certain manager in your league has been mouthing off about how great Kaz Matsui is going to be this year, and Matsui is one of your target players, that should influence when you think he'll be drafted, perhaps more than anything else you consider. If you are able to refer back to your league's draft history, you may be able to discern various patterns in terms of when certain players, or certain types of players, tend to be taken. For example, you might notice a big run on closers in the third round of a lot of your drafts, which might affect your assessment of certain players.

Once you've determined when you're going to go after your target players you should plug them into a list numbered according to targeted draft picks so you can think about how you're going to approach the rest of the draft. I recently completed this exercise for one of my leagues and ended up with four target players (we only field 16 players, with a five-man bench), all of them pitchers, targeted for the second, fourth, sixth, and ninth rounds. Since I'm expecting to use my first pick on a starter, and my target list has me using four of my remaining nine picks on pitchers, including a couple of closers, my plan is to draft the best available hitters with my third, fifth, seventh, eighth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth picks. At that point I will focus on selecting the best player available the rest of the way until all my starting positions are filled.

As David Luciani has mentioned here before, you are in effect drafting two teams, one for hitters, and one for pitchers. If your ranking sheet is like mine, with lots of pitchers on the first page, it can take discipline to pick up the hitters you need. I try to remind myself that I don't need all or even most of those pitchers to do well, just more than my share, which is what I'll have if I land my target players.

So that's my plan. Identify target players and decide where in the draft I will try to select them. The rest of the picks largely take care of themselves based on the need to select both hitters and pitchers, and filling all my starting positions. Of course, you should always expect at least one wrench getting thrown into the works. As Eisenhower said while preparing for D-Day, "Plans are nothing, planning is everything." Just know that whatever work you put in researching perceived value should still apply, so if somebody does something weird, adapt and move on.  Armed with these more advanced techniques, here's to you having a successful and dominating draft.