The startup draft is the single most important part of a dynasty league. Obviously.
What I didn’t realize during my first startup was how important it was. The baseline level of talent teams acquire early is far stickier than I would had imagined three years ago during my initial startup, which had me jumping all over the board to grab specific players I felt were undervalued at the cost of lower picks here and there.
I do not recommend this approach. As I noted in my last entry about the 24-team baseball league that I love to talk about so much I started this newsletter, there’s a franchise that has been rebuilding for the same amount of time I am (two years), but he’s ready to compete now and I’m not because he nailed the startup draft and I didn’t. He just mulched his incredible roster of prospects for win-now guys in a trade so big it *barely* fit into my phone:
That’s too many players, IMHO.
With all that said, I’m in pretty good shape and, in fairness, am not exactly taking the identical approach to our Detroit friends here (also if you’re somehow randomly reading this and aren’t in our league, I highly recommend using real team names, it makes things much easier to remember.) He’s trading into immediate contention perhaps a year early, but flags fly forever or until a really mighty wind takes ‘em down, whereas I plan to ride the prospects I’ve grabbed for a decade.
BUT… my strategy is a reflection on how weak my team was beforehand, and it all goes back to the beginning. I wish I had a better startup draft, and now I know how’d I’d do it. Prior to that startup I preferred auctions; now I don’t. I find that auctions suck the fun out of everything, especially trading, on which it effectively throws clamps. So I’m a draft guy now, because it makes the game better, and have ideas to that end.
There are three real tacks one can take during the initial draft to ensure your team stays near the top of the table, and one that will sink you. Here they are, in order.
1. Chalkity chalk chalk: Go for it from the start
I have done startup drafts in three sports now and my main takeaway is that the best way to approach them for immediate competition and long-term viability is to do the extremely boring thing and take the best player available over and over and over.
This is not exactly rocket science, but the simplicity of the approach does not detract from its efficacy. You may want certain players more than others and you may miss out on them and be sad, but winning will make you happy—I promise. (That’s what I hear, at least.) The first-year champion of this baseball league, Mr. I Win Every League, slaughtered the startup draft and walked to the initial title. In the two subsequent years he has finished no worse than third, and last year was, on the final day of the season, rotating in and out of first place as the last games finished up. Blissfully for our menchies, he did not win, but his team has never fallen below the baseline level of excellence that he established at the outside.
It’s important to make a choice in a dynasty draft if you’re “going for it” straightaway or building for a later title run; this is a “going for it” strategy, and the best one. You can almost do no wrong this way, which is why so many people (hello, old me) find it so bland, but sometimes these same people (new me) run the strategy to perfection in a football startup and come close enough to winning the whole shebang to feel good about it (hooray!). This gets to another point, however tangentially: If you draft the best players and have the right strategy, the people with the wrong strategy will occasionally trade you too much stuff for the best players, and you will be better off for it.
2. Go young
The sole owner who “went young”—drafting prospects and rookies in our initial baseball draft—also went young in our football and basketball drafts, and his teams are now competitive across the dynasty landscape. He’s not the manager of any of them any more because he’s a lunatic, or played one on WhatsApp, but his drafting process was anything but crazy. It worked to perfection.
A quick aside. I love listening to NBA podcasts far more than I like watching basketball, because the complexity of the transactions is the real goods. On a recent Lowe Post, Zach Lowe noted that the importance of real-life drafting was literally impossible to overstate. It’s the only time what you do is fully up to you. It’s the only time to add value without considering anyone else’s needs, or worrying about what you stand to lose in a given transaction. He was talking about the Miami Heat, who are probably the best drafters in the league, but the concept easily applies to fantasy as well.
Back to the all-youth approach. It’s very good! It’s even better when you’re the only one who’s doing it in a startup, which, given how intent people are on proving their bona fides in year one, is well within the realm of possibility. It’s also the best approach to get the guys you want, all the time, because in most cases the best young options, i.e. the guys you want, will be slightly less desirable than the full-fledged stars. And there’s another wonderful aspect to the whole thing that’s basically the opposite of the old saw about a car losing half its value the second you drive it off the lot. The perceived value of these guys only goes up as the first year passes, which presents opportunities to do some some real car-salesman gouging.
The one thing this approach begs for is a modicum of patience, but only a modicum. You don’t want to perpetually collect prospects. You want to win. Our booted owner’s baseball team made the finals after the new manager dumped his prospects for good players; it was basically the opposite of the trade above, between different franchises. His football team romped to the title last season behind a quarterback we laughed at him for taking so high, Lamar something, but the new owner over there made a similar big move in bringing on Julio Jones and DeAndre Hopkins at the price of picks and prospects. It’s highly unlikely the original owner would have made these moves, or been able to supplement his incredibly deft picks of Jayson Tatum and Luka Doncic in the NBA league, but the winning strategy is clear.
3. Seek trades for every pick
I wrote previously about using the draft as an opportunity to maximize the return on every single choice, which entails squeezing owners left and right to make sure you don’t leave any pennies on the floor, so to speak. This strategy works in a FYPD because our FYPD is 5 rounds, which caps the number of chances you have to put on these squeezes; it would work just as well in a startup draft, but would be just an incredible amount of labor to get advantages you can get by using the “chalkity chalk chalk” method and waiting for someone to offer you a no-doubt yes trade. While that’s not assured, it’ll happen a few times a year, and is just far easier than this method, though it often leaves you with nothing to do but wait. But this one would work fine to extremely well if you had the discipline, which I plainly do not.
4. Get your guys
This is the strategy I don’t recommend, even if it’s fine. It’s also the first strategy I used, so I’m speaking from experience.
I had the 14th pick in our startup draft, which was actually two drafts: A FYPD, basically, and a major league draft. When it came time to pick, I had two choices. I could go with the obvious chalky guy, who should have been off the board by then, or the guy on the team I liked who I really wanted to do well who I didn’t expect to last until the second round. You already know by the way I’ve phrased it that I took the second guy, and I was immediately roasted for it. I am still roasted for it to this day. I deserved it then and I really deserve it now.
The first guy was Francisco Lindor. The second was Andrew Benintendi. Oops!
If that was the extent of my failure, I’d probably have a stronger team now. Was it the extent of my failure? Reader, it was not. I then traded into the late first round, sacrificing valuable second and third round picks, to get a pitcher. Chris Sale and Max Scherzer were available and, frankly, either one would have helped me compete immediately more than Clayton Kershaw, but I didn’t know that at the time, and took Kershaw. He was fine. It was fine. But it wasn’t first-round good, and when the Red Sox (the team that won it the first year), grabbed Corey Kluber with the 45th pick, a full round later, he got better production than I did without giving up a dime.
Credit where credit is due to (to me): I made the playoffs that year, and played the mighty Red Sox, who edged me out for the division title despite appearing vastly superior. But my plan was always to make the playoffs and live with the results, and now the test was here. One week to validate my strategy; one week to see if I was on the right path. Yeah yeah sample size, but that’s how I looked at it. Then I lost 11-0-1, grabbing the tie only in the ass hours of Sunday Night Baseball. I am still humiliated by it, and it was the impetus to blow the operation up so I could have a better handle on what the fuck I was doing.
Now that I have a firmer grip, two years later, I hope these strategies can help you, for better or worse. Next time I’ll (probably) take a look at how to do a rebuild, or at least how I did it, because it’s the friggin’ best.