Thursday, November 22, 2007

An Interesting Drafting Strategy

Today I'm going to talk about an interesting draft strategy I've conceived. It has nothing to do with when you should draft pitchers, in fact it has very little to do with the draft at all. It has everything to do with dealing after the draft.

The strategy is simple: Draft known first-half performers, and avoid known second-half performers. Now, there are only a few of these types of players that continually do this, and I'm sure correlation from year to year is pretty weak. I do not feel like running the numbers right now, maybe another day, but I'm positive we'd find a group of players that have a habit at starting slow and heating up, and others that do the opposite.

Well who wants players that you know are gonna fall apart when it matters most, playoff time. The key to this as I mentioned before is trading.

Hopefully before the draft you made a list of 1st-half performers and 2nd-half performers. You drafted some of the 1st-halfers, and avoided the second-halfers. Come mid-season, and your probably riding pretty high considering the players you hopefully drafted. However, you are aware of an imminent drop off in production from your team. So, you start taking a look-see at that 2nd-half player list, and you make offers.

The people who own those players, who hopefully did bad as you expected, are most-likely disgruntled by that players performance and is eager to make a trade, especially with someone whose having a great season. (so far. . .)

The two of you make a trade, and you receive a player whose stats look much worse than you player you gave. Not a reason to be upset, even if your league-mates jeer you about it. You'll be the happy one when the player you got, say Mark Teixeira, heats up as the weather does, and the player you gave, say Justin Morneau, does horrible the second half. This example would be a realistic example of a solid trade to make with the playoffs in mind, and after all that's what you are after.

This example was overall very peachy and most-likely will not happen. However, let's say you trade for 3 players that were on your 2nd-halfers list, and only 1 of them turns out to have an amazing second half, usually it is worth it. The trick is finding players with strong year-to-year correlations, since they are the most-likely to do as you expect.

This strategy is very small in terms that only a few players are being targeted/avoided. But I always employ one major overall strategy with many little side ones implemented. . on the side. I advise you not to focus your entire draft around it, but use dome middle-to-late round selections on early birds that you hope to trade in a couple of months.

E-mail me if you have any questions or comments for me, or leave comment.

Cheers!

Paul

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