Scheduling a fantasy draft can be hard, but we finally found a workable date for this year’s Yahoo Fantasy Friends and Family baseball draft — Tuesday, April 5. No, it doesn’t allow for a lot of reflection time for our great readers and followers, but it’s what we could do.
It’s Year 18. Most of the usual characters are back, though we do have one rookie manager — Mike Kurland of The Athletic (and other places). Dalton Del Don is the defending champ. I tied for third last year. The league history, if you care (and I fully understand if you don’t), is viewable here.
A few specs: 15 managers, 5×5 scoring, daily transactions but only 70 for the season, two DL slots. Each offensive slot has a maximum of 162 games played. The innings maximum is 1,400, a number most teams did not reach last year (to play the volume game, you take on efficiency risks).
The last few seasons, I’ve run manual KDS draft slotting — where each manager can submit a preference of where they want to draft. For bandwidth issues, I wasn’t able to run that this year. So we simply took what the software gave us, and I drew the No. 5 pick.
I don’t mind picking fifth — anything in the middle is generally okay with me. I hate picking in the ends, especially in a league of this size, where major runs can start and end before I have a say in them. I always feel like I draft better somewhere in the middle.
My hope was to get one of the Blue Jays with my first pick, a young, talented, ascending…