Rudy’s 2025 LABR Mixed Draft

From 2013-2023, there were three constants regarding me and the LABR Mixed Draft (15 teams 5×5, weekly FAAB, $100 w/ $1 minimum):

1. I drafted every year sometime in February (thanks as always for the invite Steve Gardner!)
2. I reviewed the draft in a loooong post on Razzball
3. My teams did generally well but never took home a 1st or 2nd place (lots of 3rd-6ths)

When it came to write the 2024 draft review, I had nothing in the tank. I liked the template/process I had set up to review but it felt too redux after 2020’s opus where I codified and acronymed my draft philosophy / process.

So I just didn’t write anything about the 2024 LABR Mixed Draft. And I finally won. Go figure.

2024 Team Recap

With 20/20 hindsight, there are some fantasy pennants that seem predestined looking at the draft board (and key pickups to an extent). I look at this one (2024 Draft Board) as a juggernaut that hung on to win despite some bad 2nd half breaks as my top 3 picks (Tucker, Gausman, Abrams) had great starts but fell off cliffs once summer hit. I definitely hit a couple of draft ‘home runs’ that with Skubal in the 4th, Machado in the 5th, Teoscar in the 8th, and Kyle Finnegan in the 17th. My most impactful in-season pickups were Ryan Walker and then maybe Jose Soriano?!

I finished 2nd in AB and 5th in IP. That drove my counting stats performance – finishing top 5 in R/HR/RBI despite my first 4 picks netting a half-season of Tucker and a disappointing season from Abrams.

Tip of the cap to the always tough Derek Van Riper who finished 2nd despite drafting Spencer Strider (?!?!) and 100+ standing points seasons from Alan Harrison at The Fantasy Fix and my Canadian older brother from another mother Tim McLeod.

Thoughts on Early Draft Strategy

My most time-consuming preseason activity is setting and updating hitter and pitcher playing time projections. This is foundational for the Steamer/Razzball player projections and Preseason Player Raters which fuel the Snake Draft, Auction, and Best Ball Draft Rooms that are part of our season-long Roto and DFS subscriptions. Both drafting and playing time projections have three seasons: 1) Crazy Early (October to December), Early (Jan to early March and 3) Prime (Mid-to-late March).

Prime draft season is pretty straightforward. Playing time projections (which include lineup distributions) get clearer based on news and posted lineups. ADP and projections are as smart as they are going to get. Draft luck/variance is as low as it’s going to get (but it’s still there – see Strider 2024).

I do not like ‘Crazy Early’ season. I did it last year as prep for attending Baseball HQ’s First Pitch in October. A lot of assumptions have to be made on free agents and team offseason transactions. This effort is almost 100% moot by January once the bulk of free agents have signed and trades have been made. So I have v1 projections out around January 1st to avoid doing ‘double work’. But if you invest the time and are successful at identifying player roles/skills, there is definitely drafting edge to be found. But there is also significant luck/variance. A good example is anyone who drafted Ben Joyce before the Angels unpredictably picked up Kenley Jansen.

I have been Early drafting for a long time now because of Industry league participation (LABR, ToutWars, TARF, TGFBI, etc.). I’ll also mix in a Draft Champions league or two (10% discount to Razzball season-long subscribers here). I should do great in these because I feel I have an edge based on my playing time investment/acumen – e.g., I think the other projections (and their underlying playing time) benefit more vs mine through ST as player roles/lineups become clearer. Sometimes / some leagues this plays out but rarely does it play out like that across all my Early drafts. I recall one year (2019?) where I was in first in ToutWars and LABR at the ASB and won Tout (but the LABR team faded).

Last year was definitely by best across-the-board ‘early draft’ season. Not only did I win 15-team mixed LABR but also 15-team mixed ToutWars and the Texas component (TARF) of EARTH – a multi-league competition where I finished 2nd in the overall standings.

That said, my Early drafting approach has not changed much over the years. Here are some key considerations for me:

• Embrace The Variance – Ideally, you look back in late March and you can identify several players that you got as ‘bargains’ because early drafters had doubts. I think the types of players that this impacts are: 1) Young players where the market overly doubted playing time and/or skills, 2) Players coming back from injury who proved to be healthy/ready, and 3) Players coming off a bad year, often in a new situation. A lot of these players are identifiable based on being higher in your rankings vs ADP so you should do whatever pre-draft homework you need to do to feel comfortable with these candidates. I think my 2024 picks of Tarik Skubal (youth) and Teoscar Hernandez (new team/park) fit this bill.
• Build A Solid Foundation – The teams that finish near the top in PA/IP are typically the best teams. You don’t get there by making only sexy upside picks. It’s good to mix in some PA/Inning eaters.
• Spread The $$$ on Closers – RPs earning saves (except MAYBE Rockies) are expensive in FAAB. I like drafting a number of Closers in the back half of early drafts no matter how much I like/dislike my RP pick(s) in the first half of the draft. I feel like there is more upside if you are right (vs a position player) and it is easy to cut bait when you are wrong (harder with a prospect who ‘needs more seasoning’).

My 2025 Draft (Tuesday, Feb 25th)

I did not have a set draft strategy picking from spot 15. I historically drafted teams around the expected league average Hit/SP/RP draft equity percentages of 63/27/10 through 2023. Last year I ended up at 59/33/8.

I think about drafting positions in this order: SPs -> RPs -> Bats. I’m more particular about pitchers than hitters and try to ensure I’m drafting pitchers I want vs picking pitchers out of positional need.

I felt comfortable enough to go bat/bat if Skenes/Skubal were both off the board as I thought there would be at least one SP I liked in Round 3 and possibly could double up on that turn. I suppose it is possible I’d have passed on Skenes or Skubal if two of my top 10 bats fell to the turn. I also ruled out going pocket aces if both Skenes and Skubal fell (or pairing one with Wheeler). Skenes falling made it an easy call to go bat/SP with the first two picks and I preferred Chourio over Yordan because of his speed.

With Skenes on the roster, I had no desire to cheap out on the rest of the staff to get closer to league average SP draft equity. I wanted to press the pitching advantage – it was just a matter of whether I would be above average in SP investment or lead the room. That decision was made for me when an unexpected 8 teams went all bats in Rounds 1-3. This simultaneously removed all the hitters I was targeting on the 3/4 turn and created some good SP values. So I grabbed the top available player on my board (Sale) and reached for the top hitter on my board in Adley Rutschman.

I could have started Chourio/Yordan/Sale/Burnes if I had anticipated the room would skew hitters in late round 2 through round 3. I’d have been fine with that too. Focusing on bats for the first 4 rounds and stocking up on SPs in rounds 5-8 seemed to work out okay for the several drafters that did this but I think this would have been suboptimal from my draft position.

With Skenes/Sale in tow, the SP and Hitter strategy were in place. Keep drafting SPs at a league average clip throughout draft so I’d end up around the top at SP draft equity (~32% of draft equity) and draft hitters with an eye towards PA volume and avoiding any major hitter category weakness (namely low power, speed or AVG). One aspect worth noting is that this is a league with unlimited IL spots so there is more tolerance for the occasional high PA/Game guy who spends stretches on the IL (Buxton).

For RPs, I felt comfortable with a tranche going in Rounds 9-13 where I felt I could possibly get two in that range. I ended up taking Bautista at 9.15 (almost 3 rounds later than NFBC ADP) and Estevez at 13.15. I then got opportunistic, greedy, or foolish as I grabbed Justin Martinez (19.15 – 4 rounds later than NFBC ADP) and Calvin Faucher (21.15) at the tail end of the draft as their upside was more enticing than the lower-end bats/SPs available. I did wince a bit when Bubba Chandler came off the board after the 19/20 turn since he was on my radar for that pick pre-draft. That one might look real stupid in a month or two.

I think I made the right call leaning into pitching vs hitting based on the hand I was dealt drafting from the end. My team is a little weaker in HR/RBI than I’d like coming out of the draft. I perhaps ’embraced the variance’ a bit more than usual bypassing safer 1Bs like Hoskins and Josh Bell in the back half of the draft in favor of a cheaper/riskier Christian Encarnacion-Strand AND having an absolute punt at SS with Brooks Lee / Colson Montgomery as I didn’t like the SS prices/options. There’s always FAAB and trading :)

Room Splits

We all know everyone’s teams look great using their own rankings/projections. So when I look at a draft, I focus more on how teams distributed their draft capital.

The LABR draft has historically mirrored my Player Rater draft capital distribution of 63.5% Hitter / 26.5% SP / 10% RP (using auction $ price for each of the first 23 picks or, if I’m being anal, the 23 players likely to start week 1).  This draft was no different at 64/26/10. One helpful part about looking at a draft like this is you become less affected by positional runs. If a certain position goes on a run earlier than expected, it likely means there will be value later vs continue that price inflation throughout the draft.

Below were the splits in this draft. If you told me I was going to invest 33% in SPs again, my goal would have been closer to last year’s Bat/RP split of 59/8 vs 57/10 (see note on CI and SS above).

I ran correlations (r^2) on last year’s Hit/SP/RP splits and found the following results:

• Hit % -> Hitter Standings Points = 0.05
• SP % -> W/ERA/WHIP/K Standings Points = 0.34
• RP % -> SV Standings Points = 0.16

This is a one year / one league sample so not sure how much to read into it. It certainly supports my behavior/bias towards investing more in SP.

In addition, the correlation between this room’s 2024 Hit% and 2025 Hit% was 0.40 – i.e., drafters tend to distribute their draft capital similarly year over year. The most dramatic shifts were from DVR and Paul Sporer who both went from near bottom at 58-59% on Hitters in 2024 (DVR splurging on SPs with pocket aces and Sporer going pocket RPs in rounds 3/4) to 68% and 64% on hitters in 2025.

If you want to calculate this for your team in the Draft Room, just unhide column D and add the round number next to all your picks. We only want it to include our ‘starting 23’ so you’ll mark them with a ‘y’ in the C column and a ‘z’ for your bench players. If you want to do it on your first 23 (or however many starting roster spots), that’s fine too. You can then see the draft equity splits in Z1:AA3 in the top right. It’s worth noting that the calculation for this during a draft is a little wonky sometimes. I think the best time to review this is either pre-draft when mock drafting or post-draft. During a draft, the easiest way for me to keep on track is to remember certain SP patterns in the top 10-12 rounds – e.g., if you take 2 SPs in your first 4 rounds, spreading out your next two around the 8/12 ranges gets you in the 57-60% vicinity.

Other draft room notes for those unfamiliar with it:

• The numbers in the 10 categories are my auction $ estimates that are in the Player Rater. If you add them together + $1, you get the auction $ value. I find them to be an easy way to compare player contributions across categories. They total up in row 3 and row 2 has the 50th percentile targets (aka a $260 team with league average splits).
  • Lots of people are obsessed with 80th percentile targets. I don’t find that helpful. My general goal is to draft a team constructed as I like, ideally nets maximum overall value (cell K3), and is above average in all 10 categories without being too imbalanced in a specific category.
  • As you can see with this team, I’m above average in all the pitching categories but weakest in Wins which should make some level of sense since I have Skenes. Part of the appeal of Reynaldo Lopez and Ranger Suarez were their projected win contributions. My hitting turned out pretty well but lighter than I’d like in RBI (which I noted in my team review).
  • I monitor my category balance throughout the draft.
• I only worry about my team. I just ‘x’ out the drafted players
• The exclamation points in column AA show up for players I like a certain draft equity $ amount more than ADP.

Parting Thoughts

If there is one piece of advice I would give all drafters, it would be to spend some time in your early drafts mapping out various draft scenarios from your draft slot. One reason people draft similarly every year is because it makes them feel more comfortable. I find running a few different scenarios before the draft helps me to get comfortable with different draft strategies. You can use a tool like the Razzball Draft Room (part of the season-long subscription) to ‘mock’ a few teams based on likely available player(s) and get a feel for your options.