Coordinating drafting for leagues (and for solitaire projects)

Reader Shawn Kaufman writes in with a drafting question:

Hi Tom,
I just was curious about your thoughts on drafting. I have never been in a league that conducts an annual draft. I have also been playing with the Great Teams Volume 1 set of teams lately & picked 8 teams from the set to play a mini season of 48gms. I have always played using blind drafts & splitting the number of position players when I draft so each team gets at least 1 of the better players at each position. For example if I have 16 2b & 8 teams, each team gets 2 second baseman. I split up the best 8 & each club gets one of the better 2b. I get some pretty balanced clubs, with some better than others. Do you have any suggestions of a better way to do a draft?

I like using already assembled teams but the idea of creating teams is always on my mind. I have the original 16 team’s franchise all-stars, BATS vol1 & the GTOP Vol.1 to work with.
Thanks
Shawn Kaufman

Conducting a draft for APBA, whether it’s for a league or for a individual project like Shawn’s is quite a task.  You want to make sure you do it right because it is an undertaking you rather not do over no matter how fun it is.  That goes double for a league when there is other people involved.

I’ll start with how leagues can conduct an initial draft and later adapt that to a replay or solitaire project.

First, a big caveat for leagues that might want to just throw all the available players into a big pot and beginning to draft them wholesale.  If your league has 10-12 teams, you will end up with every team having a superstar at every position.  While that my sound great for some who just to roll the dice and have some fun, it has definite drawbacks.  It will skew your statistics so that good pitchers will have high ERAs and good hitters will have lower batting averages.  Power figures won’t be affected as much unless you are playing Master Game or Baseball for Windows but even then the effect will be minimal.  In essence, you might want a more balanced team with some D pitching and some scrubs to even out the All-Stars.

[Note: the above point is a bit moot with Shawn’s Great Team of the Past example.  You’re simply not going to find any balance with incredible players everywhere you look.]

A few ways to draft full teams

1.  Simply throw all existing players from the given player pool and draft from that.  Again, not always recommended.

2.  Limit the pool.  There are a couple ways to do this.  One is for the league to artificially limit it by league or division.  For example, a starting 12-team league may decide to draft from this year’s National League only.

A more clever way to limit the pool is to conduct a “Draft before the Draft”.  That is, each manager could draft, say two Major League teams.  Once each manger has picked their two teams, those are the teams that players would be eligible to be picked.  That adds a bit of fun and even ensures that some of the managers’ favorite players might be available to be picked.

Assuming this would be a continuous ownership league and rookies from all teams would be eligible in the future years, the league would see more and more players from other MLB teams.

3.  Another method of drafting is the “tiered method” which requires a bit more preparation and collaboration.  It also works best for expansion drafts when those coordinating the draft are NOT the ones participating in it.

In the tiered method, the draft is separate tiers (obviously).  Before the actual draft, it players in the pool are divided into three or so groups.  In the top group, there are two or three superstar or franchise players for each team drafting.  In the second group, there are ten or twelve solid players for each team and in the third group there remains the balance of live bodies to fill out the roster.  I’m just throwing out numbers here.  You can adjust to how it fits your league best.  The idea is that each team will be ensured to have a couple stars on their team and a solid core behind them.

We used this in the IAL for our expansion draft and it seemed to work well.

But what about Solitaire Projects?

Getting back to Shawn’s original question, though.  He’s not in a league but doing a solitaire project.  Specifically, “he’s splitting the number of position players when I draft so each team gets at least 1 of the better players at each position”.

I think that’s a good strategy.  Of course it depends on his metrics of what he thinks is a good ballplayer but I trust him :)  With this kind of thing, a lot of intervention (i.e. making sure that the teams are balanced) is a good thing.

Drafting whole teams may be a bit daunting so replayers may want to try doing it by position.  For example, start by each “team” drafting catchers and so on.  With that method, there’s more attention being paid to each team’s depth chat.  You won’t have the worry of neglecting a particular team’s position.  Of course, since this is a solitaire project, no one is going to cry foul if you adjust the roster afterwards to make things “fair”.

Also, don’t forget, this is APBA.  The beauty of the game is that we can do what we want with this game.  If Shawn wants to make a team weaker, he can.  Or if he wants to do a truly blind draft with the perceived notion that real life general managers do make bad moves, he can.  It’s really what he wants to get out of the game and more to the point, his current project.

Shawn, I don’t know if any of this gets to the heart of your question but if not chime in and maybe it will stir up some discussion.  I’m hitting on a wide range of topics.  I may follow up with a more nut-and-bolts article.

Also, let us know what you eventually decide to do and how it turned out.