Draft day is the most important moment of the fantasy baseball season—and the difference between a winning team and a mid-season rebuild often comes down to fantasy baseball draft strategy.
Whether you’re a seasoned manager or drafting for the first time, having a well-researched approach can help you maximize value, avoid busts, and build a championship-caliber roster.
With some of the tools we offer here at Pitcher List, like PLV, player rankings, and draft boards, you can make smarter decisions and outmaneuver your league-mates. In this guide, I’ll break down how to approach your fantasy baseball draft, from understanding league settings to spotting value picks and drafting with confidence.
Fantasy baseball can be intimidating, I get it. There are 162 games in a season and you may be thinking, “This sounds impossible,” but it isn’t. And we at Pitcher List are here to help.
Let’s dive in.
Understand Your League Settings
Fantasy baseball leagues come in a whole variety of flavors, each with its own unique scoring system. The most common ones you’ll come across are points leagues, category leagues, and head-to-head leagues.
Here’s how they work:
- Points leagues: Players accumulate points based on their performance in various statistical categories. If you’re familiar with fantasy football, this is probably the easiest transition—score the most points to win.
- Category leagues: Success is determined by excelling in specific statistical categories like home runs, RBI, etc. If you’ve ever heard someone talk about a 5×5 category league (which is the standard on most sites), then they’re talking about five hitting categories (AVG, home runs, runs, RBI, stolen bases) and five pitching categories (ERA, strikeouts, WHIP, wins, saves).
- Head-to-Head Leagues: These are either points leagues or category leagues where teams compete directly against each other each week, with winners determined by the total points or categories won.
Understanding your league’s scoring system is essential, as it influences which players hold the most value. In addition, roster size and position eligibility can significantly impact your drafting strategy.
How deep your league is (i.e. how many teams are involved in the league) can also shape your draft approach.
For example, a shallower league means there are more top-tier players available, which allows you to draft stars early. Deeper leagues on the other hand mean a more diluted player pool, so finding hidden gems becomes essential. In these leagues, depth and positional flexibility are paramount.
Utilize Pitcher List’s Free Resources
We offer a whole host of free resources for you to utilize before and during your drafts here at Pitcher List.
For example, we’ve got our Pitch Level Value (PLV) metric that goes beyond traditional stats like ERA and WHIP to offer a more in-depth evaluation of pitchers. PLV can help you as a manager uncover value where others might overlook it.
We’ve also got player rankings for each position and detailed player pages that help provide insights into players’ strengths and weaknesses, helping you to make informed decisions on draft day.
Speaking of those player rankings, each set of rankings utilizes tiers, grouping players of a similar value together. It’s important to utilize tier-based drafting, as this approach ensures you’re maximizing value at each pick rather than just chasing big names.
Figuring Out Your Draft Strategy
If you get 100 fantasy baseball writers into a single room, you’ll get probably 50 different (or jk probably 100 different) fantasy baseball draft strategies you can utilize.
Some will tell you you’ve got to go hitters early because pitching is always deep. Some will tell you the opposite (see: the pocket aces strategy). And some will tell you to do everything you can to draft a well-balanced roster.
If you’re asking me, personally, I tend to be a risk-averse drafter. I try to create a balanced roster and go for the safest players I can find at each pick (this often means I miss out on some of the high-risk/high-reward players, but so it goes). I do think that pitching is deep (and I think the volatility at the pitcher position is greater than hitters), meaning I tend to wait for drafting most pitchers outside of drafting a couple of anchors who I can always count on.
All of that being said, you need to figure out what draft strategy suits you best. This often comes with experience, and I can’t emphasize enough the value of doing mock drafts so you can kind of get a feel for things in the preseason.
There’s also an old saying in the fantasy realm that I believe in: You won’t win your league in the first round, but you can lose it. What that means is just about everyone in the first round is of fairly equal value, you just have to hope those early-round guys 1. don’t get injured and 2. don’t totally bomb the season.
The other thing that saying means is that the really important rounds are the mid-to-late ones where you can find value. As you move to those rounds, it’s good to utilize things like PLV data to spot undervalued pitchers who can boost your team for relatively cheap.
Position scarcity is also an important thing to consider. Some positions, like catcher, second base, and shortstop, are generally considered scarce due to the limited number of elite players. What positions are considered scarce tends to change year-to-year (except for catcher), but for those scarce positions, targeting top-tier players can help provide an edge.
Multi-eligibility players (players eligible are more than one position) can also offer flexibility and insurance against injuries, allowing you to adapt your roster to weekly matchups and unforeseen challenges.
It’s also important to know when to reach for a player and when to wait and let them fall to you. This varies from draft to draft, and knowing your league dynamics and the player pool can help with these decisions, ensuring you don’t miss out on targets you want to overpay for mediocrity.
Spotting Value Picks and Avoiding Common Draft Mistakes
Sleepers are an extremely important part to every draft. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, sleepers are undervalued players who can deliver significant returns.
Pay attention to average draft position (ADP) trends and utilize metrics like PLV or our many sleeper-related articles (including one that I just so happen to write) to identify these types of players.
It’s also important to avoid overrated players, and you can rely on our analysis to try to steer clear of players who might not live up to their draft-day price, which can save your roster from potential busts.
Draft Smarter with Pitcher List’s PL Pro Tools
Alongside our free resources, we also offer a number of game-changing resources with our PL Pro subscription, including our draft board, which allows you to make real-time adjustments based on the flow of your draft, ensuring you stay ahead of the rest of your league.
A PL Pro membership also provides you with our premium tools, including some of our other metrics like Process+ (for hitters) and our other PLV hitter and pitcher apps, early access to our rankings, and of course, access to our 1,000+ member Discord.
I want to really focus in on our PLV hitter and pitcher apps. If you like PLV for pitchers, the apps that utilize PLV and present them in graphic form (and apply them to hitters) are incredibly valuable and are something that I use constantly throughout the preseason and the season.
Conclusion
Anyways, let’s wrap this up. If you want the TL;DR version of this article, here it is:
- Understand the settings in your league
- Familiarize yourself with the scoring system of your league, whether its points, categories, and/or head-to-head
- Pay attention to roster size and position eligibility
- Adjust your approach based on the depth of your league
- Develop a draft strategy
- Figure out if you want to focus on pitchers early, hitters early, or if you want to build a balanced roster
- Do mock drafts before your actual draft to get a feel for draft pace
- Target top-tier players in scarce positions
- Utilize multi-eligibility players to provide roster flexibility and protect against injuries
- Find value in your draft and avoid common mistakes
- Identify sleeper picks by monitoring ADP trends and utilizing metrics like PLV to find late-round values
- Avoid overrated players and potential busts also utilizing our metrics
- Utilize Pitcher List’s tools
- Pitcher List provides a whole host of free tools you can use before and during your draft, including our tier-based player rankings
- For an extra edge, consider our PL Pro subscription for access to advanced tools like our live draft assistant, additional metrics like Process+, access to our member Discord, and more.
The best way to get better at fantasy baseball is experience. You’re not going to walk into your first year and be anexpert, but we’re here to help you along the way. Fantasy baseball may seem like an intimidating prospect, but it’s also the most fun version of fantasy sports on the internet (I’m not biased, trust me).