In my last column we looked at the first round of two different real money leagues that were drafted in December and January to see the differences in early rankings/projections versus actual draft spots.
There was a thread started in the Strategy & Theory Discussion Forum of the message board about the drafting of pitchers.
My contention was that in NFBC drafts where your team is not only competing at the league level but also measured against the entire field in the overall ranking that the better drafters were taking the better pitchers fairly early – not in the first round and only the occasional stud in the second round but starting in earnest in the third round or bunching several picks later than that to likely have three pitchers – either two starters and a closer or three starters – in the first ten rounds. ). So let’s take a look at the two drafts I referenced last week and see how and when pitchers were drafted.
What the draft results tell us is that most teams drafted either three or four pitchers among their first ten picks. The actual draft for the two drafts is
December Draft January Draft
1 team took two pitchers 3 teams took two pitchers
8 teams took three pitchers 5 teams took three pitchers
4 teams took four pitchers 6 teams took four pitchers
2 teams took five pitchers 1 team took five pitchers
Throw out the two and five pitcher teams and you see how most drafters started out.
We can also get good information by looking at the pitchers drafted each round:
December January
|
Round |
#Pitchers |
Round |
#Pitchers |
|
1 |
0 |
1 |
0 |
|
2 |
3 |
2 |
4 |
|
3 |
6 |
3 |
3 |
|
4 |
2 |
4 |
4 |
|
5 |
5 |
5 |
7 |
|
6 |
9 |
6 |
4 |
|
7 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
|
8 |
6 |
8 |
6 |
|
9 |
13 |
9 |
10 |
|
10 |
3 |
10 |
5 |
Note the similarities in the two drafts:
No pitchers taken in the first round.
Two to four pitchers taken (for the most part) in round two through four.
Then an increase to roughly four or five on the low end to seven or eight on the high end from round five through round eight and then a huge explosion with most teams drafting a pitcher in round nine. And no, that was not a round of closer runs in either draft.
Both drafts were very similar in the amount of pitchers drafted in the first five rounds – one had 16 while the other had 18 and in the next five rounds – the first having 37 and the other drafting 33. So both drafts saw 50 or 51 pitchers taken in the first ten rounds – slightly more than three per team.{jcomments on}