Important clarification

In order for everyone to understand where/how I base my opinions and advice on, I want to clarify my background.

I majored in Athletic Training and have worked as an Athletic Trainer for over 8 years now at the DI and DIII level. I have a great amount of experience in baseball and its injuries, so much so that my thesis was pitching injuries and rehabilitation. So as you can imagine, I always take a longer look at analysis that includes injuries and technological improvements in sports medicine. Two people in particular have shaped my interest in injury analysis, namely Will Carroll from Baseball Prospectus and Rick Wilton from Baseball-Injury-Report.com. I will like to take their amazing coverage and analysis a little further with analysis of Pitch F/X data, disabled list information, and statistical analysis.

From a fantasy baseball perspective, I have been playing for over 10 years in extremely competitive leagues. The most competitive league I am in is a 12 team 6x6 league with OBP instead of Avg. and IP as the extra pitching category. We have a Games Started cap to make things a little more interesting as the year goes on and forces owners to start pitchers responsibly and not just picking up anyone who will be throwing in a given day.

With you caught up to date on what my background is, I hope that you continue to check back in the future to see how you can get a leg up on your competition.

My goals with this blog

First I apologize for not writing as many posts as I have hoped when I first began. My career as an athletic trainer for a DIII college in the Northeast means that no schedule is ever concrete. So after many 60 hour weeks in a row, on to address some of my main goals with my writing.

My main goal is to help provide information about this wonderful and beautiful game we call baseball and provide advice and insight into applying it to fantasy baseball. My understanding of the game, both as an ex-player and as a clinician dealing with baseball players everyday, allows me very unique perspective. I want to look at strategical aspects and technological advances that help everyone understand the game and especially it's injury/health implications. And finally and probably most importantly, I want to have fun.

With that I hope everyone enjoys the reading.

Basic Strategy vs Investing Strategy

After a very busy couple of weeks with work, it felt so good to be able to sit down and really start preparing for my most competitive draft in a few weeks. Every single person in the draft has a different strategy and then also has a strategy to counter everyone else's strategy. Today, I'm going to discuss the strategy that I have found to work best, both in real life and in fantasy sports.

I'm here to talk about a draft prep strategy based on stock investing. Now, yes everyone has an opinion on stock investment strategy but this one minimizes losses while maximizing profits. This involves 3 main points:

1. The most well known and talked about stocks often only produce minimal to moderate gains with a high degree of risk.
   
2. Small cap stocks (under $100 million) are too speculative to base your portfolio on.
3. The best value and where the best profits with minimal risk are in the $100 -400 million range.

You might think that this a common sense approach but let me apply it to fantasy baseball (which is why you're here).

1. The most well known players will be drafted in the first 3-4 rounds and will only produce what is expected for minimal gains, but if someone becomes hurt or is unproductive, you're season is most likely in trouble.
2. If you try to base you're strategy on speculative sleepers, your portfolio will have too many holes to plug during the season.
3. The mid-range players (round 5-15 or $30-$10) represent the best value and where you can maximize your draft. The players you select here can give you stats a lot worth a lot more than what you pay for. A 7th rounder can give you 3rd round stats.

Thus when you do your draft prep, don't try to spend so much time on the "best sleepers" or the "best overall players". Focus on those players that are going to fall in the middle, the ones that can give you supreme value for minimal risk.