Year 1 – Pre Draft Hype
One of my passions throughout my entire life has been baseball. I grew up playing it every summer. I would spend hours outside just hitting baseballs at the local park when I was bored. When it got too cold outside I would spend my time creating teams and simulating seasons in various MLB games. I would watch every Cardinal game growing up, and would constantly come up with trade scenarios or free agent signings to help my team.
Surprisingly though, I never joined a Dynasty Baseball fantasy league, that is until now. I never had the chance to join before, most of my friends growing up were not into Baseball as much as I was, and it wasn’t until college when I met some like minded friends. One of them was able to be dragged into a dynasty league by his dad, and now I am being granted access as well. I may not have as much information as I used to when I would watch Quick Pitch every night and watch all of the MLB shows in the morning, but my passion for the game has not died.
I am too excited for this opportunity to keep this just to myself, so welcome to my series of how my dynasty baseball experience is going.
The Start
I was brought on as a replacement to a previous owner, so instead of an expansion style draft in this league, I just inherited his current roster. It was an interesting roster, some high caliber players mixed in with some filler pieces. Definitely not a roster that I felt could compete immediately, and too many expensive players to try and sit for a year. I made the decision pretty early, that if I wanted to be invested in this process, I had to make this team my baby. By a cutoff date we have to have our roster down to 20 or less with a max salary of 292. After the draft we have a roster size of 28 and a salary cap of 300. Up until that cutoff date, we can have as big of a salary and as many players as we want. I decided to take full advantage of the later. I started making deals left and right, trading big name players to get as many young prospects that I could. Fully committing to tanking my first year.
Some of the big names traded included: Jarren Duran, Geraldo Perdomo (in hindsight should have kept him since he was so young), Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Cody Bellinger, Carlos Correa, Brendan Donovan, and Maikel Garcia. This gave me a large prospect pool and young players to work with; Shea Langeliers, Rhett Lowder, Kristian Campbell, Cade Horton, Luis Pena, Noah Schultz, Emmanuel Rodriguez, Colt Emerson, Luis Morales, Nico Hoerner, Parker Messick, and Jett Williams
I ended up with way too many prospects in the end, and decided to condense down to get a few solid middle-aged players to help this team compete for not last place this year. Considering we can only have a max of 20 players before our draft, this felt like a good decision, since I would have had to drop most of them for nothing otherwise. I was able to grab; Bryan Reynolds, Shane Bieber, Alec Burleson, Corey Seager, Adley Rutschman, and Pablo Lopez. Unfortunately, Pablo Lopez decided to be an injured for the entire year just weeks after trading for him.
Here are the final 19 players I decided to keep on this re-building roster.
Hitters:
C – Adley Rutschman
1B – Alec Burleson
2B – Nico Hoerner, Kristian Campbell
3B – N/A
SS – Corey Seager, Colt Emerson, Luis Pena, Jett Williams
OF – Bryan Reynolds, Emmanuel Rodriguez, Seiya Suzuki
Pitchers:
Shane Bieber, Salde Cecconi, Cade Horton, Rhett Lowder, Luis Morales, Noah Schultz, Abner Uribe, and Parker Messick
Overall, I see a lot of improvement needed in this roster, but I see the potential is there, and I have 113 salary to play with in the upcoming draft. There are several players I want to target that will fit in perfectly with this young team, but there will be a separate post about that.
Two of theses players, I only kept around because I felt they were too valuable to drop and get nothing in return, but I don’t plan on keeping them around forever. Several teams had interest in these two, but couldn’t trade lower salaried players for them without putting themselves in a bad position before the draft. So hopefully after the draft is over, I am able to quickly flip Seiya Suzuki and Adley Rutshman into some quality prospects.
The roster is for sure developing, and by no means will compete this year. Several players may not even make the big league roster out of spring training. A big need going into the draft will be a third baseman, since we have none on the roster, and a catcher so we can flip Adley. The story is that Colt Emerson will play 3B for the Mariners if he makes the team, but I would need him to get games in before that position will get added to his qualifications.
On the next article I will go in depth about players I am looking at in the draft. Luckily, this is an Auction based draft, so even if other people know who I want, it would come down to who would pay more.
The Kutty Katt's Thoughts 