Fantasy Baseball: Sleeper Tips

Getting the best from your draft is the key to winning, we can all agree on that. The first tip is show up! No one can draft your team for you as well as you can, including the pre ranked gods of the yahoo, espn or cbs worlds. Do not blame your horrible season on anyone else if you didn't bother to show up.
Know the strong positions and the weak ones and draft accordingly. In the 08 season OF, C and 2B are the deepest followed by 1B and 3B. SS is very weak, draft accordingly. I ascribe to the tiered method of drafting. That is do not simply draft the best available 2B in the 6th round because you need a secondbaseman. It is highly possible that your guy will be there 3 or 4 rounds later so wait him out and draft a really good SP or a high quality 4th OF or Util man. Taking Aaron Hill or Kelly Johnson is great they will fit nicely on your squad, but taking them in the 6th round of a 12 team draft is just plain dumb. SP and OF are so deep you can easily draft 4 OF's that will far outproduce almost any 2B so go for that first! Heck choose a Util/bench player ahead of them if you think they will be a better player. Here is a scenario to bring this home: I have drafted all of my positions except SS and C by the 10th round, that accounts for 3 OF's a Util the rest of the infield players, two starters and one reliever. My 11th rounder should be a SS or catcher right? WRONG! SS is weak and C is not a high stat producer after the first 4 catchers. After the first tier of catchers (VMartinez, Martin, McCann and Mauer) catcher production drops way down but the crop is plentiful. The same holds true for SS except there are alot more "sexier" names out there at SS. Although Orlando Cabrera sounds like a great option, you can probably get Adam Wainwright (number one starter) G Sherrill, Joe Borowski (40 saves) or a host of other great closers at this spot. A stud SP or a good closer will win you many more categories then will O Cabrera or Bobby Crosby or even K Greene. Plus most good managers will have already chosen the top two tiers of SS so that leaves you and the others who didn't grab I top flight guy to might over the leftovers. So what is the big difference between K Greene who will be available at round 11 or R Theriot who most likely will be there in round 15 or 16? Not much, a few HRs. Go with an extra OF, SP or Rp who will gain you many more stats.
Please do not take a catcher (unless it is one listed above) in the first 15 rounds. They will crash your season. Here is why, catchers get hurt often and do not play back to back games when they have a day game after a night game. Most catchers are not statistical giants anyway, remove them one game out of 6 a week and you are ripping away 1/6 of that players stats immediately even without injury. Great options will be available in the last 2 or 3 rounds, wait until then to draft one.

One final tip, watch the draft trends. Try to stay ahead of the curve. Be the first guy to draft a certain position (first tier player) rather then grabbing the fourth RP in an RP run. Anticipate what the guys around you will pick based on there needs, and select the guy on your list (this is key he must be a player you need and value) that you think is most likely to be chosen by the people around you.

Next post will be one last one on fantasy baseball stay tuned!