Rotohog Draft Strategy

Unlike most fantasy baseball drafts, your goal in the Rotohog draft should NOT be to assemble the best team possible for you $275. Because the trading floor will open several days before the season starts and the open market will allow you to get whatever players you need later on, you can focus your draft on achieving two goals:

1. Make as much profit as possible, so that when you do assemble your team for the regular season, you can afford the best possible team.

2. Avoid any mistakes that would cause you to fall substantially behind the other good players competing in the game.

In some cases, trying to accomplish one or both of these goals will cause you to pick (or avoid picking) very different players than you plan to have on your team to accumulate points.

For example, I think three players that should yield a nice profit if you draft them and then sell them shortly after trading opens are Delmon Young ($2), Rich Hill ($4), and John Patterson ($.50). None of the three fits well with my strategy for the season, but I'll be targeting all three during the draft in an attempt to make a quick profit...which will help me trade for more of the players that I really want on my team.

An example of something I would do to avoid the risk of any big mistakes that could cause me to fall behind early in the season is that I won't draft Felix Hernandez at $18. In a normal league I think this would be a bargain. But in Rotohog I think there's a pretty good chance that 2nd tier starting pitchers are not going to be in high demand. I'm not risking much by picking cheap guys like Hill and Patterson, even if their price drops to $0, but picking Hernandez represents too much of a risk for me to take before we see how things began to play out once the trading floor opens.