RotoRank Roundtable

Keeper League Draft Strategy: Are you playing for this year or next year?

I always cringe when I hear some owner’s strategies for drafting a keeper league. One of the most common mistakes owners make going into a keeper league draft is “playing for next year”. When you decide to go this route, you are saying you are not skilled enough to compete against the other owners in the league. “Playing for next year” has never worked out for the Cubs, so why do you think it’ll work for you?

There is no way someone can convince me to play for next year before your initial draft even starts. I am way too competitive to tank a year on purpose so that I might have a chance (with emphasis on chance) to win in the following year.

The Problem with the “Play for Next Year” draft strategy
When owners take the approach of playing for next year before the draft, they drastically alter their perception of each player’s value in the fantasy world. Guys like Bonds, RJ, Maddux, Burks become devalued in their minds because of age, and players like Jose Reyes, Jesse Foppert, Rocco Baldelli, Aaron Heilmann, and Hee Seop Choi bring a sparkle to their eye. Your draft list will become more focused on youth rather than proven talent, you are doomed to endure at least 4 years of misery, unless you plan on dropping out of the league after the first year, once you realize what an awful mistake you made! By ignoring more established players during your draft and going solely after youth, you are sure to get some genuine keepers, like Vladimir Guerrero, Roy Oswalt, Adam Dunn, an so on, but the overall quality of your team will be so dependent on the ability of your rookie prospects to turn into superstars, which is highly unlikely to happen in four years, let alone one year.

Veteran owners like myself always relish the chance to have a few owners play for next year before the draft even takes place, because it gives us a few less teams to worry about during the draft and the season. With all of the veterans they leave on the table, I can be drafting grade A, B, or C players way into rounds 15-20 of the draft, making my team all the more formidable.

The proper way to “play for next year”
If you seriously want to build a team to win next year versus this year, you need to change your mindset. In a keeper league, the draft is all-important, because the only way your team can improve after the draft is via trade or free agent moves. If you have a lot of rookies or Class AAA minor leaguers on your team, you won’t have much to trade to other owners in your league during your “tank” year! The key to drafting a keeper team to compete next year is to draft the best possible team in the first year, only grabbing young talent when it’s absolutely warranted by their performance to date. Then, once the season starts, trade two of your star veterans for a young stud, and use FA’s to pick up those rookie players that you originally wanted to draft. You will also want to take advantage of injuries, so when a big name player like Phil Nevin or Trevor Hoffman goes on the disabled list and potentially out for the year, make a decent offer (but not exorbitant offer) for that player, since his value definitely lies in the future. This strategy also requires you to be a shrewd observer of the Free Agent market, so that you can continue to grab veteran guys and package 2 or 3 of them together to get another young stud for your collection. By the end of the year, you should have a very young competitive team for 2004.

Conclusion
This twist on the draft for next year strategy won’t guarantee you a first place spot in the following year, but its odds for success are a few hundred percent better than drafting only young players during your draft!

I’ve had to revert to the “play for next year” mentality only once in my keeper league experience (back in 1996), when I had a team endure an unexpected retirement (Kirby Puckett, who was still in the prime of his HOF career), a few major injuries to my pitching staff (Jose Rijo, Bryan Harvey, Duane Ward, etc. – you might not think it, but these guys were highly rated at the time!), the loss of a rising offensive talent (Larry Walker), and a few disappointing rookie and veteran performances to start the year made it one of my worst finishing teams ever. I didn’t plan on using this strategy (but sometimes luck throws you a curve ball), so I didn’t really switch to this mode until the second month of the season. I collected an all-star team of injured players, to accompany my existing casualties, and I made some nice free agent pickups throughout the season. The following year, my team was surprising healthy and I won the league, so this strategy can work, it’s just not as easy as drafting young players and hoping that they all become the next class of Hall of Fame caliber players!