It’s October and it’s time for the Pitcher List staff to begin preparing for the next season. We hosted a 2022 Fantasy Baseball Mock Draft across 12 of our staff members, taking place as a slow draft through the first two weeks of October.
We be discussing our picks through December on our On The Corner Podcast, reviewing the Top 275 players for fantasy baseball in 2022, plus we’ll have a 13th episode reviewing all players who didn’t make the cut and may find their way come March.
The league settings:
- 12-teams
- 5×5 standard
- Rotisserie
- 3 OF, 2 UTIL, 9 P
- Yahoo positional eligibility
- Shohei Ohtani = Two Players
Here are the participants for this draft in draft order + their Twitter handles and their podcast on the Pitcher List Podcast Network:
- Van Burnett (Wins Above Fantasy)
- Steve Gesuele (Wins Above Fantasy)
- Adam Howe (On The Wire)
- Kevin Hasting (On The Wire)
- Scott Chu (Hacks & Jacks)
- Pete Ball (Keep or Kut)
- Nick Pollack (On The Corner)
- Ben Pernick (Buy & Sell article)
- Chad Young (Keep or Kut)
- Alexander Chase (Dugout Study Hall)
- Ben Palmer (Shaggin’ Flies)
- Chris Weber (In The Deep)
Here is the final draft board, completed on October 15th, 2021:
Photos by Lawrence Iles & Brian Rothmuller/Icon Sportswire | Adapted by Aaron Polcare (@bearydoesgfx on Twitter)
Would love to hear thoughts on the closers take in rounds 2 and 4.
Have you ever considered doing an abbreviated daily round up during the playoffs? Roundup withdrawals are tough.
Cody Bellinger Round 10? Wow!
The founder of Pitcher List doesn’t take a hurler until the fifth round. Interesting.
Big Red you should wear your glasses.
Where do you think Ohtani would go in a league with daily lineups and can move between SP and utility? #1?
Can’t see that. Those pitching innings don’t add up to much IMO.
Without a doubt, yes. Think Max Fried or Trevor Rogers are worthless? All three shared pretty much the exact same pitching performances last year. That certainly covers the differences between Tatis and Bichette or Soto and Vlad.
As a pretty experienced person at these kind of things I think a mock draft at this point is worth less than zero. If you played out the season, then it would have a lot of value as you would learn from it and have some accountability. It is hard to think of what this is actually even measuring/projecting at this point. Early “expert” mocks are one of the least valuable tools that exist. I notice that many people in these kind of things seem terribly inexperienced but that doesn’t stop them from getting published as knowing what they are doing. There is also the reality that there are probably 10 million people better at FFB than people that write about baseball. CJ Cron lol.
Look at the Dodgers abusing their staff like the Rays. The Rays choose not to spend money and run careers into the ground because they have to. The Dodgers get nothing out of what they have because they choose to emulate the Rays. Someday the analytics folks will make a shocking discovery that starting pitchers need adequate rest. LAD doesn’t get enough out of pitchers in the regular season or the postseason – that would be the epitome of mismanagement. Lux in CF and hitting ahead of Justin Turner lol.
C Web is going to lose!
Also Yordan Alvarez is not a DH by any definition. He does miss a lot of games though.
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I like Weber’s team. Think he has the best RP trio with Chapman/Diaz/Doval. Has some nice bounce back potential guys in Lindor/Rendon. Franmil in the 12th is good value. My biggest question is Conforto in the 8th. I would personally rather have Franmil heading into next year so he must believe Conforto rights the ship which I’m not as confident on as Lindor/Rendon.
I’m in agreement with theKraken that a draft this early isn’t worth a ton, no one is going to be looking back at this to inform their decisions come draft season. This is largely to gauge our feelings on players, see who our team is high/low on and talk about it. It also gives us an early sense of position depth/scarcity which will be pretty important come draft season.
As far as Conforto, he’s part of a trend that you noticed in my draft where I took a guy both because I liked them and because I wanted to make a statement that I believe a bounce back is coming. Conforto and Framil actually didn’t go too far apart if you look at just OF, it just so happens in this draft the 9th-11th rounds were pretty barren of OF and I was psyched to get Franmil at the 11-12 turn.
I disagree with theKraken.
I love early mocks because the season is still fresh in your mind, which makes this exercise more useful than the later mocks. Most people are in denial about how much information they retain over time. By the time next springs rolls around too many people will be convincing themselves that Cody just had a bad year and Yelich really is going to be MVP again in 2022………NOT! Early Mocks remove the brand name bias and rationalization that will run amok during the Winter as MLB teams craft plausible sounding reasons why the fans should pay up for season tickets and how everything about their former favorite player is actually going to be okay.
Look, I am not drafting Bellinger on ANY of my teams next year but I can tell you this: this mock draft is far more useful than the one’s you’ll see in February and March that will inflate his value back to the top 4 rounds. Just so we’re clear, Cody Bellinger has had exactly 2 good years in the last 5 years, 2017 and 2019. In every other season that man has batted .260 or lower. No one, not Cody, not his doctors, not his shrink, and certainly not Dodgers management, has provided a cogent explanation for what the fudge is going on with him. It may seem like I’m picking on him, but frankly, he is the poster child for anchoring bias which will rear its ugly head as soon as people lose the rawness of having been burned by certain players.
So yes, some things will change. For example, hopefully we all in agreement with Grey at that other site, who thinks that if Conforto is traded he becomes a must-draft player. So some players will move and some of their values will change slightly, but overall these early mocks are useful both for the experts taking part in them but also for readers who care about organizing all the thoughts and observations that took 6 months to compile.
Keep up the good work. You guys have been killing it these past 2 years.
Wheeler showed some inconsistencies, so a little surprised you took him as your first pitcher.
Brandon Crawford 2 round before Adames and 6 rounds before Dansby seems silly to me. Also Verdugo in the 18th is way too low, among other things.
I like chase’s team by a lot.
I’d love to grab Franmil that late.
Could this post be re-edited with a link to the draft itself? That way we can search for individual players by text instead of scanning every line of a huge grid
Just added it for you!
Keep in mind, Clicky Draft does a reset during the off-season, which will kill the URL and why I posted the image instead.
Someone drafted Buster Posey?