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Thursday, March 28, 2024

In March, I will once again draft online in the Tout Wars mixed draft league. That is the league that I lost in 2014 on the last day of the season, so I really want to win it this year.

The league has a unique method of selecting draft spots. The 2014 order of finish is used with each player getting their first available choice of draft positions. So assuming the 2014 League Champion Tim McLeod (RotoRob.com) took the first pick and thus likely Mike Trout, should I pick second or move down, and if the latter, to which spot?

As a reminder, this is a 15-team mixed 5x5 league with On-Base Percentage (OBP) instead of batting average. So what draft spot would you take?

As we have seen in NFBC 15-team mixed drafts, the usual choices early in the draft would be Andrew McCutchen, Giancarlo Stanton, Paul Goldschmidt, and for some drafters, Clayton Kershaw. As I have stated before, while I do agree that Kershaw is the best pitcher in the game today and is as much a lock as any of the hitters to provide early first round value, I would prefer to take a top flight hitter with at least my first pick in the draft.

What I first wanted to check was how the change in the average category would affect projected value. Stanton gets a huge boost with his projected 385 OBP to jump in total value to the same $41 value as Goldschmidt, both just one dollar behind McCutchen. Stanton’s projected BA rank is 58th while he is 12th in OBP, so you can see the reason for the jump.

This worked well for me as I would rather be lower than second with negligible difference in value on the first round but an earlier pick in the second round. I settled on 1.03 versus 1.04, so on draft day, not only would I have a choice of either 1B or OF or between the two outfielders, but I would be protected just in case one of the three came limping out of spring training.

My choosing to pick third gave Brent Hershey of BHQ a chance to move up to second in the draft, so we will see what he does on March 10. There was also one interesting note as there were probably a few Tout drafters that would prefer to be at the end of the draft rather than in the middle, none more so than Anthony Perri (Fantistics Insider Baseball), who had the seventh choice of position and chose to draft in the last spot in the first round.{jcomments on}