First, I still love the columns, and the fact that you post new stuff all winter, unlike most everyone else. Thanks, man!

Second, keeper league question: I’m in an odd, 12 man, 7X6 keeper league (5X5 plus obp, slg, holds). Snake draft, goes 300 players deep. We can keep up to 8 for up to four years, but get compensatory picks at the end of Round 1 if we keep only 7. So basically, anyone who you would expect to be gone by your compensatory pick would be kept. I’m sitting on six definite keepers: Teix, Reyes, Posey, Cruz, Liriano, Latos. For the last 1-2 slots, I’ve got Krispie & Delmon Young, and Moobs Butler. We use LF/CF/RF, so keeping the Young-sters would give me all three OF slots filled. Moobs would be my IF/UT, but he’s hitting the long ball in 2011, won’t he?

Who gets tossed back?

I gotcha, that’s kind of what I was getting at, I’m just not so eloquent at ‘splaining it on here. But I definitely understand what you’re getting at. If Grey doesn’t like someone, he’ll usually say he doesn’t.

As for the Droid talk, ins’t Cuzco a wholesale store? Oh wait, that’s Costco, never mind.

*******THERE’S A NEW POST FOR FOLLOWUPS.********

I’m counting on someone (I remember Get Figgy With It did it last year) to create a cheat sheet of the tiers like last season.

That was extremely crucial for all my drafts.

I haven’t seen figgy on here in a while, so the next logical choice seems like VinWins.

Ya hear me out there, Vin, we need ya!

I do try to have a good balance between pitchers and hitters (though I tend to spend more of my auction dollars on offense than the rest of my league), but usually I just draft BPA with hitters and tweak the roster in-season in order to maximize roto points (e.g. finding SBs on the waiver wire, trading RBIs for Rs, etc).

@simply fred: If it’s not clear to someone when I write “I’m not drafting so and so” then I can’t help them.

Jay came in right after me with a similar post in regards to confusing your actual, literal rankings, and creating a post that is more enjoyable to read by mixing in schmohawks intermittently.

You the Man hombre, no doubt, and I can almost literally see the rock and the hard spot you are stuck between on this issue.

I suppose the main downside is for those (newer) readers that aren’t as familiar with your musings, the contradiction in what you’re saying and how you’re ranking can be off-putting when it comes to trying to locate clear, concise information for draft material. Sucks to be them.

Regardless, keep up the solid work brotha…. The dead horse is battered enough

@Jay: Maybe, but I hope when you go for BPA, you’re still making sure your team makes sense in the big picture. I mean, if you have Halladay already and F-Her and Wainwright sitting there on the turn in the 6th round but you don’t have an outfielder, you still shouldn’t take two SPs just because they’re BPA. At some point, you have to say to yourself, “That sucks that someone is getting F-Her in the 6th but I need a hitter badly.”

@Sir Larry: Yup

@LMack: I know, it’s cool.

- SAGNOF Bargain Bin…”Fractional Sale! All items 1/8th off (and below)”, or
- The plush toy coin-op arcady game where you use the clamp to grab an outfielder…”Snag a SAGNOF. Everyone’s a winner!”

Thank you, sir.

I hope that come draft time I can manage a team as good as this one.

So what do your 2011 rankings indicate? The order in which you project players will be drafted, or the order in which YOU would draft players? It seems weird to mix the two.

Personally, if I really dislike a player like, say, Ichiro, and there’s no way I’m paying $15 for him in my auction (around where everybody else will slot him), I’ll throw him into my cheat sheet at like $3 and be happy to take him for an appropriate value if he somehow goes for that cheap.

So… why put Hunter, Beltran, etc at 35-40 instead of 50-55 and still bump up sleepers like Tabata? Love your insights on players but the organization just seems a little inconsistent.

@Mets fan: I have no idea.

@THE BEAST: Because then we’d have a top 25 outfielders post and three posts of guys I don’t like at all which is boring to write and read. I mix in good guys with not so good guys to break up the trash.

And I know you’ve explained that a bunch of the old-timers and SAGNOFs are in a tier that you don’t necessarliy like and are essentially ‘below’ the aforementioned guys you do, so why not save yourself the explanation and actually put them in their rightful place in a tier above wastes o’ time like Beltran, Bourjos, etc.

If you personally wouldn’t draft Beltran above Delmon, and you know your like-minded contingent won’t either, doesn’t that dictate the need for a more respectable seeding and subsequently a lower heart rate for you and us both? After all, this is YOUR (our) blog, and we both know in your heart where guys belong and where they don’t. We don’t cater to the (inferior) masses. They can draft Torii Hunter all they want.

Cust Kayin’….

5×5, 12 team mixed league ($260).

Keeping Votto for $1 and Stanton for $1.

Who do I keep from:

Santana: $1
Weeks: $4
Neil Walker: $1
Eric Young: $1
Travis Snider: $1
LaRoche $6

Thinking Weeks. Thoughts?