Schools In Session

So how are you passing the time till the season starts?

My youngest daughter just entered college last fall. The most oft repeated advice was "stay on top of things"! Do todays work today or no later than tomorrow. Keep your grades up as you go along. Don't wait till finals to try and rescue a grade because it won't happen. Gotta hand it to her, I think she was listening. Or maybe it is just her inherent work ethic because she seemed to do only normal "cramming" at the end and finished her 1st semester with a 3.6 gpa. Not too shabby!

Now here I am. 6 weeks before finals (read draft day). Am I keeping up? Am I doing my required reading? Or am I waiting till D-Day -1 to try and get myself ready?

To be perfectly honest, I am taking a page from my daughters playbook and am devoting time daily to study my "subject".

The draft is just one step in the process of a winning season. With 22 weeks of regular season in front of you there is lots that can happen. In Hardball Heaven the WW is always flush with viable options to rescue a draft day snafu. Still, though I have always said you can't win the league on draft day, you can certainly go a long way toward making a winning season a real struggle even before the injuries, slumps and all the other little nuances of the regular season set in.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

Over the years I have witnessed several levels of preparedness on draft day Here are just a few

Oops... forgot to prepare but hey Yahoo has em all pre-ranked. Looks good to me! This guy is not going to win the league. Oh sure, we have in the past had managers forget the draft or have connection problems and ended up having their team auto-drafted. And they wound up pretty high at the end of the season but trust me, they accomplished that feat by doing some serious WW work and some shrewd trading. Not living with their original drafted team.

Hey I got this magazine with every single player in it with rankings, projections, pictures and all kinds of neat stuff! Yeah, everybody needs a little bathroom reading to occupy their "down" time. These are the guys that will wind up drafting Andy Pettitte. While you're at it you can make good use of those pages just stay away from the slick ones with pictures.

Are you mocking me? Some people find it very helpful to participate in literally dozens of mock drafts. Mocks can be particularly helpful in getting you acclimated to the speed and tempo of the draft. Some are diehard fans of the mock draft. "I have drafted from every single position and I am ready!" Ok, but have you drafted with Ageless? I remember taking Utley with the #1 pick one year. Took some people 3 rounds to get over the shock to ADP

Look at this spread I got! Spreadsheets, projections and the like that is. I got CHONE, Marcel and ADP.I have the ESPN top 300, MLB and CBS Sports player rankings by position. Yeah well here is something else you got..... 90 seconds to sort through that shizz. It goes something like this. Buatista just got picked and that's my cue...where's my 3B liist?... ok, here it is .... Beltre, good deal..... wait... wtf... he's already been picked.. musta missed that one.. ok, now who... Prado.. naw. Alvarez.. who's he... maybe Young.. didn't I read something about him the other day... oh well Young it is .... let me find him (it is about this point that the 90 second timer runs out and you wind up with somebody like say Jay Bruce!)

So how do you prepare?

Actually I find a combination of all of the above to be helpful "prior" to draft day. But the #1 thing you need coming into draft day is a good internet connection a plan. Know your league scoring and the stats you will need. Know which positions are deep and which ones are relatively shallow in talent. Have a strategy and stick with it with minimal in-draft tweaking.

Most important of all is know your players. The managers in HH by and large know the game and know the players. Kerm not only knows the current players but will already be making plans for the 1st wave of call-ups after the season starts.

At any rate if you don't know who J Tabata is and what his strong stat categories are, coming into draft day well.............. somebody's gotta come in last..... might as well be you :)

Hardballers