This is our final post related to Yahoo! Sports fantasy baseball, and I was thinking this would be a good opportunity to talk fantasy baseball prep in general. I have fantasy on the mind right now, as Brad, Erik, and I completed a fantasy auction for FanGraphs last night. If you're into fantasy, I'd be interested to hear how you generally prepare for a draft or auction.
In the past, I've always compiled something akin to one giant ranking list. I think this was a result of me reading lots of ESPN fantasy baseball articles back in my formative fantasy years -- and the fact that I used to do lots of snake drafts -- but this year, I tried something a bit different. Based on suggestions I'd picked up from Eno Sarris and RotoGraphs, I created individual rankings by position and then tiered them. I'd made lists by position before, but this was the first time I'd tried tiering players and holy cow, it was a huge help.
You can make tiers any sort of way you want, but I ended up basing my tiers off ZiPS. Even if their final lines for players aren't 100% accurate, ZiPS is one of the better projection systems when rated by correlation (i.e. it ranks players in proper order well). You can choose any projection system you want (or make up the tiers based on your gut), but I like ZiPS the best so it felt like a solid idea.
I guess we'll see how it works. Anyone else have general strategies or thoughts? Any players you think are good sleeper grabs this season? In my mind, any excuse to talk fantasy baseball is a good excuse.
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