Mock Draft Results & Review – Kel’s Sober Sunday Night

I recently took part in a 2012 fantasy baseball mock draft with some writers from The Fake Baseball. I wanted to review how it went for me. In short, I was pretty pleased…besides a few things which you’ll see below. Keep in mind that we only drafted starters (no bench players). I already had three more pitchers queued up and ready to draft until I realized this. Oh (vernon) wells. Anyway, below are the results with some thoughts on certain picks. Oh and we used mockdraftcentral and we had two guys auto-drafting. Those two teams were predicted by mockdraftcentral’s rankings to finish 1 and 2. So yeaaaaaa always take those standings for what they are (jayson) werth. I was picked to finish 6^th. Apparently low in wins and k’s (as mentioned my bench spots would have all been used on starting pitching) and my average was the worst (my comments on that are below).

C – Salvador Perez (R22 P6)
C – Jonathan Lucroy (R23 P7)
1B – Mark Teixeira (R2 P6)
2B – Dan Uggla (R4 P6)
3B – Evan Longoria (R1 P7)
SS – Emilio Bonifacio (R16 P6)
MI – Kelly Johnson (R19 P7)
CI – Adam Lind (R12 P6)
OF – Jay Bruce (R3 P7)
OF – BJ Upton (R5 P7)
OF – Shane Victorino (R7 P7)
OF –  Brett Gardner (R8 P6)
OF – Dayan Viciedo (R20 P6)
Util – Billy Butler (R11 P7)
P – Madison Bumgarner (R6 P6)
P – Matt Garza (R9 P7)
P – Jordan Zimmerman (R10 P6)
P – Cory Luebke (R13 P7)
P – Jhoulys Chacin (R15 P7)
P – Justin Masterson (R18 P6)
P – Jordan Walden (R14 P6)
P – Brandon League (R17 P7)
P – Brandon Lyon (R21 P7)

Kel, your average…WOOF!

So yea, my average is one big pile of monkey feces that is mating with Madonna’s Super Bowl halftime performance. I’m always one to load up on power as much as I can (and was able to do that successfully in this draft) but it really came at the expense of my batting average. My poor…poor…batting average. Looking back I probably would have passed on Uggla for Pence and Upton for Brandon Phillips. Something like that would have helped my average out, and still given me help in power, runs, etc. just not as much as Uggla and Upton would have. As sexy as my outfield looks they all carry batting average risk. I don’t recommend this, and really learned that from this mock.

Being able to get Longoria and Teixeira back-to-back is fantastic in my book. Oh, and my book is a must read. Not only are you getting two guys with 35+ homer potential but you are locking in your third base and first base positions right away. Hindsight is 20/20 or whatever that saying is, but maybe taking Reyes in the second round would have made more sense but I drafted plenty of speed later on. I’m not a Bonifacio fan (at all), but Peralta was just taken so that is pretty much who I was stuck with. Billy Butler was a total “boost my average grab,” the fact is that I needed probably two more Butler’s to compete in average.

You can wait on pitching

I cannot stress this enough. I didn’t take a pitcher until the sixth round, and my second pitcher didn’t come until round 9. I still put together an excellent pitching staff. I realize many of those guys won’t jump out at you but they are all low era pitchers (almost all in good parks too) with great K rates. I had Stauffer, Henderson Alvarez, and a few others in my queue until I realized (with one round to go) that we couldn’t draft bench players.  My staff would have been fantastic, and that’s a Varnsen guarantee.

Still kind of love my team

Outside of the batting average I really like this team. I was able to draft a lot of the players that I love. Upton, Bumgarner, Garza, Bruce, Gardner, and Johnson are a few players that I’ll be targeting in every draft. I like where Yahoo ranks them, and should be able to grab them in most leagues. I really wanted Duda (I smell a 2012 Fantasy Baseball Stud post coming) as my fifth outfielder (he would have helped my average too) but I just missed him, and looking back I probably should have taken a guy like Ike Davis over Lind for the average help. Is it bad to admit that I almost drafted Mark Reynolds too? Man, my average would have been Yikes City! So that’s how it went, I’d love to hear your thoughts. As always use the comments section to drum up conversation. I’m able to respond to the comments a lot more frequently than I am the social media.

Oh and you can view everyone’s results here.