I took on a lot of salary at the end of the year in my bid for the title, so I may have to keep more higher priced players than I’d like to($Marcum $18, Goldie at $18, Headley at $14.. even Halladay at $40) and some cheap players I normally wouldn’t want to keep (Ellis at $5, yikes) just to get to my 7.

By the way the salary cap is the standard $260.

I’m going to have to see if I can trade some of those players for 2 back just to get some salary room for the player auction.

@Wake Up: I wouldn’t simply because his torso doesn’t seem like it would make a comfortable pillow.

Who you got for closer in OAK now? I recall their fill ins for Bailey as being terrible last year. I know that there’s little point in having a great closer for a bad team, but jeez. I expect that they could just be writing off at least 2012 and thinking that Sonny Gray could close as early as 2013. How about Fautino De Los Santos? He’s got closer stuff (high Ks, high BB).

It’s interesting to look at the A’s current depth chart. Outside of relievers, I don’t think they have anyone over 30. It’s actually kind of exciting, but mostly terrifying.

Have a safe trip home.

@Awesomus Maximus: Nah, flight to NY was at 6 AM and I slept. I’m boarding the flight home now and don’t have it. Will need to Netflix Iyar home.

I can’t vouch for The Art of Fielding beyond page 152, but so far it has been very good. The dust jacket includes praise from Jonathan Franzen, which might give you an idea of Harbach’s writing.

I gotta see Hugo. I’ve given the book, which I haven’t had time to read, to my brother-in-law’s 11 year old son and my friends’ 7 year old daughter, and both devoured it. Everything I’ve read about the book has been positive. I should probably read the book instead of continuing to read reviews of it, especially if I intend to continue giving it to young kids. You dig the movie Metropolitan? I always fear that I am like the main character, who entertains fully developed critiques of books that he’s never read.

Glad to hear that you weren’t involved in The Change Up, though if you had been, it wouldn’t have meant much. I bet that a lot of funny, smart people were involved in it, but the Hollywood system can wreck even the best ideas (not that it had any, but still).

Regarding mock draft results – that’s helpful that you can see the trends if you pay. Of course, it doesn’t really matter now what the trends say since no one is actually drafting for real leagues at this point. It will become much more valuable right before draft day.

I also think people generally neglect to review their own league pre-rankings. For casual drafters, they go into ESPN or Yahoo and go right down the prerankings to find their next player. ESPN had Gio Gonzales outside the top 300 last season so the odds that he got drafted lower for people using ESPN are greater than people drafting with Yahoo. Just another thing to keep in mind. Finding the guys with injuries or short seasons can be gold.

Speaking of terrible movies, I saw The Change Up the other night. It was one of those movies where you could tell that it had been worked over so many times that they had just given up and released it just because they had sunk money into it. My wife correctly called the plot within the first 5 minutes, so we mostly kept watching to see if she was right. Funny thing is that she is always on my case about not wanting to watch movies (a completely incorrect characterization) but after watching that she said that maybe we should take a while off from movies in the hope that something worthwhile will come out. Probably didn’t help that the prior movie we watched was the Louis CK Beacon thing, which obviously was brilliant.

I’m fine with not watching movies for a bit, because I have been reading The Art of Fielding and am very happy with it thus far.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwHbvcNjhW8

Genius!

ADP’s will adjust, so anything that you think is moving up or down etc will vary by draft time, no worrys in december about adp’s!

@Ed Nugent: CarGo will be better than Jennings. By a decent amount unless CarGo craps the bed and Jennings hits his ceiling.

@OaktownSteve: I like Heisey, mentioned him the other day (I think). Worried about too many outfielders and Dusty not playing him though.

@Big Magoo: Hmm… I don’t think I do, bit early still.

@SwaggerJackers: Only been saying it for 4 (stutterer!) years now. Hope others listen too.

@AL KOHOLIC: $1 for hot dog and beer? Damn, $5 would get you nice.

I hear you guys, so this year I actually splurged a bit and paid for a premium membership at MDC. I’m not sure its really worth it, but you definitely get a lot more info from the trend reports and individual player histograms than you do just from looking at straight ADP. For example, Ryan Braun is still ranked #3 in ADP, but he’s trending wayyyy down, while guys like Matt Moore and Mark Melancon are trending significantly up, even though their ADPs are still relatively low. The histograms are also pretty useful–they’re charts where it shows you how often a player was picked at each individual draft position. For example, on Matt Moore’s chart, you can see that he’s actually most frequently getting drafted in the 100-130 range, even though his ADP is 173, its just that he’s sometimes getting drafted really, really late, and wasn’t even drafted in about 40% of their qualifying drafts (that info you can see with a free membership I believe), which is far more than anyone else whose ADP is below 200. That means you can assume his ADP is not a good representation where you can project him to go in drafts, and if you want him you actually have to target him much earlier. They also provide you with “target” and “bargain” columns on the ADP table, the former is about where you should consider targeting the player based on where he’s going most frequently if he’s someone you want to draft, the latter is where you may see him fall to such that his cost is significantly lower than his ADP. Again, for Moore, while his ADP is 173, his “Target” is 116, a huge difference relative to most other guys, and his “Bargain” is “ND” (not drafted). This is the system noticing how frequently he’s being drafted early in the former case, and in the latter case noticing how frequently he’s being drafted very late or not at all. Essentially, though, its saying if he’s a guy you want on your roster, if you don’t take him by the end of the 10th round (12 team league), the odds of someone else taking him are going to go up significantly. You may be able to get him a bit later, but you may not, its up to you to decide how early you’re willing to take him and if you’re willing to risk letting someone else get him. For most players, where their draft position distributions are more typical, their “Target” will be at or slightly above their ADP, but this helps you identify anomolies like Moore who’s straight ADP info really isn’t worth much, and will actually hurt you if you rely on it too heavily. These are the guys you can’t just look at go “okay, so if I take him 12-15 picks before his ADP, I should land him”. In Moore’s case, in a serious draft there’s little chance that’ll fly.

This info is all much more helpful in planning a draft strategy than straight ADP, but of course, its mostly stuff you could reasonably infer just from knowing about the game and relying on your own fantasy baseball experience, so it may or may not be worth it, I’m still making up my mind lol.

Also, love Luebke, I was sure he was going to be a mega-sleeper this year and worried he might wind up overhyped, but it seems he’s still flying under the radar. I still plan on reaching for him significantly in my main league, but that could still mean taking him in the mid-late teen rounds, which I’m probably willing to do.

As for catchers, big Mesoraco fan, but the guy who has really flown under the radar is Wilson Ramos. He’s at 267 on MDC, which is insane. Do people not realize he was rescued or something? He was very solid last year and should play even more this year, which could mean an outside shot at 20 HR with a respectable AVG. And he’s the 17th catcher off the board! That’s after Salvador Perez, Jonathan Lucroy and Kurt Suzuki, who are so yawnstipating picking them should come with a free season long supply of caffeine and laxative. And that’s not to hate on those guys, they aight, but seriously, Ramos went .267-15-48-52 last year in just 435 PAs and had an .813 OPS after the all-star break. This year he won’t have someone like Pudge around, who needs some veteran-appeasement playing time, and the Nats might be able to cobble together a respectable lineup if Zimmerman, Werth, and LaRoche can bounce back a bit. If he plays in 120 games, its not so hard to see Ramos being a Top 10 catcher.