It is official. Football season is over, the groundhog did not see his shadow, the snowy weather has been ushered out with warmer temperatures and spring training camps are opening.
All of this can mean only one thing: Baseball season is almost here.
With the beginning of baseball season comes the start of fantasy baseball drafts. Last year, I joined a fantasy baseball league called Strat-O-Matic Baseball (for the Richmond Strat-O-Matic Baseball League…find out more on www.rsbl.org).
To summarize strat baseball, it is a deep keeper league (where the 20 franchises keep 15 players each) that involves actually playing all 162 games for your team (with cards and dice, based off last year’s stats).
Now that fantasy baseball season is starting, owners in many keeper leagues (be it strat or the more traditional online fantasy baseball) have to make some tough decisions. In our league, and I am sure many keeper leagues around the nation, the biggest question comes from who to draft of all the available candidates.
If you have a consistent fantasy keeper league, or you are like the strat league that I play in, where some managers have been playing the game since the mid-1960s (and the RSBL has been around since 1983), then your goal is to try to establish the best franchise for years to come.
So the question that is then posed becomes this: Who do you take with the first pick to build your franchise for years to come, Buster Posey or Jason Heyward?
Ponder the question, be it as a fantasy owner, a strat owner or just someone who loves the game of baseball. Which player would you take?