This Saturday was the second annual National Fantasy Baseball Championship Draft Day.  After suffering through a rough first season we were happy to put it behind us and start fresh in 2005.  We were fortunate enough to pull the #2 pick in this 15 team league allowing us to pick up our top rated player, Vladimir Guerrero.

We were seated next to the guys from Sportsbuff.com and they were a lot of fun to draft with as we took turns sniping eachother’s selections.  All in all our draft plan worked out as well as we could have hoped and I will share with you our strategy and how it came together.

We decided early on that we would take 3 hitters to start the draft and then get some solid pitching.  We expected to have 4 hitters and 6 pitchers at the end of ten rounds.  Our hope was to have 2 closers in that group.  Because we were planning to take so much pitching early, we knew our first 3 hitters had to contribute in all 5 categories and have .300+ batting averages to counteract the .275 hitters we would have to select later in the draft.  We were fortunate enough to land the exact 3 hitters we had targeted in our draft plan, Vladimir Guerrero, Michael Young, and Melvin Mora.  Each of these players were projected to hit over .300, 20HR, 10SB, 100R, 100RBI, laying a strong balanced foundation to our offense.

We then hoped to land 2 strong starting pitchers and 2 top closers in the top 10 rounds. Our plan did not fall exactly into place but we are happy with the adjustment.  Surprisingly Oliver Perez fell to us in the 4^th round and we eagerly scooped up this bargain.  We were also able to add Josh Beckett and Javier Vazquez to give us 3 strong starting pitchers early in the draft. We were able to get our two closers in Octavio Dotel and Shingo Takatsu, but they were not really the closers we were looking for at this stage.

After setting a strong foundation for our hitting and pitching early our plan was to load our offense with guys that good contribute in both HR and SB as we did not want put all our SB hopes on one guy.  We loaded up on hitters like Lew Ford, Jacque Jones, Mike Cameron, Junior Spivey, and Tadahito Iguchi.

We decided early on that we wanted to take on high risk, high reward player and that it would be Ken Griffey Jr.  Yes there is a significant chance that he will get hurt, but if he doesn’t he will be the best value pick of the draft.  Even if he doesn’t play the whole season a combined stat line of part Griffey and part Brady Clark from our bench will be fine. 

We also decided to wait until very late to take our two catchers and so we took a couple of young kids in Miguel Olivo and Yadier Molina.  Nothing too exciting here but maybe Olivo will contribute some steals.

Our full roster is listed below: 

POS	PLAYER
C	Miguel Olivo
C	Yadier Molina
1B	Justin Morneau
2B	Tadahito Iguchi
3B	Melvin Mora
SS	Michael Young
OF	Vladimir Guerrero
OF	Lew Ford
OF	Ken Griffey Jr
OF	Jacque Jones
OF	Mike Cameron
MI	Junior Spivey
CI	Bill Mueller
UT	Adam LaRoche
POS	PLAYER
P	Oliver Perez
P	Josh Beckett
P	Javier Vazquez
P	Bartolo Colon
P	Adam Eaton
P	Octavio Dotel
P	Shingo Takatsu
P	Jesse Crain
P	Frank Francisco
POS	BENCH
OF	Brady Clark
3B	Sean Burroughs
SS	Adam Everett
SP	Victor Zambrano
SP	Tony Armas
SP	Wade Miller
SP	Ricardo Rodriguez