Mock me if You Will -- Todd's Epiphany

I recently had an epiphany. Actually, it was something I pretty much knew, but am finally willing to admit, or better stated accept. The difference between the skilled fantasy gamer that does well, sometimes really well, but also has times where they struggle and those gamers that are always in contention boils down to one thing, and it is not luck -- it is preparation.

By preparation, I am not talking about having rankings and depth charts average draft positions. I am not talking about reading about each player, deciding in a vacuum if they are a breakout or bust candidate. I am not talking about knowing the next-in-line closers for each team. What I am talking about takes the aforementioned information to the next level and best might be describes as fantasy baseball game theory.

What I mean by preparation is knowing the machinations of the player pool inside and out, so you are best able to react to every scenario confronted in your draft or auction. This goes beyond just having a set of projections and dollar values or rankings by your side. The goal of a draft or auction is not to get the maximum value possible from each pick. The goal is to amass the maximum value at the end of the draft or auction, and distribute this value in such a way to maximize rotisserie points. This entails knowing the player pool backwards and forwards, so you know how to deal with every situation, regardless of the picks of your opponents. The 30, or 60, or 90 seconds between picks is not sufficient to formulate this reaction unless you have been faced with a similar situation previously. Without this past experience in your memory bank, while you may be able to discern the manner you want to proceed, you will likely not have sufficient time to identify the ideal player to carry out your plan. Or perhaps you settle on “value” and figure you will be able to balance everything else later. The point is, continued deployment of either or both of these methods will ultimately result in a squad constructed with less value than if you were fully prepared.

The fully prepared player will be ready under any circumstance. They will be able to recognize the current landscape of the player pool and adjust their series of picks accordingly, or they will be able to adjust their strategy on the fly to take advantage of an unexpected player of high value. There is a purpose to each pick beyond “best player available.” They are setting up future picks in an effort to maximize the OVERALL quality of the team.

Truth be told, I have been discussing the above for several years, this is nothing new. The epiphany is even though I may have had a hand in every projection and wrote or edited every profile we have produced recently, that is nowhere near enough ammunition to take on a league of NFBC gamers or Tout Wars cohorts, not to mention the sharks in my local league. And simply adding the ADP from our good friends at Mock Draft Central to my arsenal was not sufficient. I have been naïve, kidding myself that I can compete in this manner. In a vacuum, I will put my player-by-player analysis up against anyone’s. ANYONE’S!!! But that does not render me a solid gamer, capable of competing against the best every time. It means if things fall right, I have as good of a chance as anyone to win. But if they don’t, I am ill-prepared to have all my bases covered and will have a weaker team than I otherwise could have constructed.

So how do I plan on becoming adequately prepared? Three words – mock, mock, mock. There is no better way to become intimate with the player pool and all its permutations than to go through the process of assembling a team. This way, you will be faced with a variety of different scenarios in terms of what players are taken in terms of position and categorical contribution. It isn’t so much knowing who will go when, an ADP will tell you that. It is more a matter of being able to react to positional or categorical runs – do I jump in or will there be someone available later? It is a matter of being forced to at one time or another dissect every player’s potential contributions in terms of how they can help your team. So when you are doing “the real thing”, you will immediately recognize the situation and know exactly which players you can select, as opposed to what was described above, recognizing the situation but not knowing the best player to now take, or taking the “best player available” and trusting that you will be able to use that value later.

For the purpose of really getting a handle on the player pool, a slow mock is preferred as that affords you the time to really analyze the situation and find the best player to carry out your plan. But obviously, one can only do so many slow mocks so relying on multiple regular mocks, with a minute or so between picks is necessary. The drawback is the time constraint. But the more mocks you do, the less this becomes a hindrance as you become better at thinking on the fly. But what I really suggest you do is after the draft is complete, go back and decide if the strategy you deployed was optimal? Did the draft proceed as you expected after the curveball thrown in the early rounds? Were the players or types of players you anticipated to be available actually there for you? And if not, was there a flaw in your thinking that you can correct and better combat next time? THIS is the sort of post-mortem analysis that is most beneficial, as you are no longer constricted by a ticking timer. If you do conclude your thinking was flawed, go back and decide on what player you “should” have drafted. Or go back and decide if you really made the best possible selection at each turn. Doing this means you are familiarizing yourself with the player even more. The more times you look at a player in context to what your team needs, the better you will be able to recognize this intuitively when it counts.

Though a mock obviously implies you are preparing yourself for a draft, this is quite applicable to the auction format, at least in terms of knowing the player pool like the back of your hand. There are some significant differences in terms of dynamics with a draft an auction. In a draft, the players leave the board roughly in order of value and are relatively similar in order from draft to draft, while there is no rhyme or reason to the order in an auction and it differs every time. In addition, in a draft, you do not have access to every possible player you feel can help whereas in an auction, you at least have a shot at everyone. This means you cannot familiarize yourself with a bunch of auction scenarios like you can draft scenarios. However, in an auction you are not confronted with the same constraint of a time clock, so you can think about the strategy as players you do not want are being auctioned off and then have the experience of having looked at the player pool extensively in mocks, as opposed to having to both formulate the strategy and find the players necessary to carry it out.

Suffice it to say I will become a regular at www.MockDraftCentral .com in the coming days and weeks. For those not familiar with the service, it is an outstanding site dedicated to mock drafting. The java platform is easy to use and you can export the results to a spreadsheet for a post mortem. You can plan a private mock or join a public one. And you may recognize one of the options for projections to generate predicted standings.