paul sporer Archives | DraftBuddy.com

Pretty self-explanatory title, right? I was invited to a fantasy baseball league by long-time Cheatsheet Compiler & Draft Buddy user, ezcollectibles. In fact, I mentioned in my update last Friday that he was still looking for a couple people to join.

The league is a 12-team, mixed AL/NL, 5×5 roto scoring with weekly transactions. The weekly transactions are right in my wheelhouse. I can’t keep up with the daily transactions. When I see someone streaming pitchers daily I can’t help but wonder how they get away with that at work. The entry fee is $50 per team. This will be my only fantasy baseball league this year.

The draft is scheduled for next Monday, March 26th at 7:30 Central on ESPN. As long as I can get the kids to bed on time, and thankfully it doesn’t conflict with my wife’s birthday the following day, I should be good to go for this draft with exactly one week to prepare, from today. First step is to get my fantasy baseball draft preparation tools in order. Here they are:

Cheatsheet Compiler & Draft Buddy (free) – Obviously.
Baseballguys Draft Guide ($8) – Mr. Baseballguys, Ray Flowers, really knows his stuff and pushes out a ton of opinions on players and their fantasy prospects. A great reference source for a particular player. Even if you don’t pony up for the guide, check Ray’s blog for daily insights.
MLBDepthCharts Magazine ($8) – I just purchased this recently and gave props to it in my Friday update. In fact, MLBDC guy Jason Martinez let me post the injury report update from the magazine (since updated again). Another example of a stellar website, so I’m happy to contribute for the extras they offer.
Paul Sporer’s Starting Pitcher Guide (free) – The major contribution Paul Sporer makes to fantasy baseball every year is his annual Starting Pitchers Guide. It came out last week, and is a ton of information on a ton of starters and potential starters for the upcoming season. It is free, but please donate to Paul for his hard work.

At this point, I am definitely fast approaching information overload territory, especially with only a week before my draft. The pitcher guide is 151 pages on its own. I’ll be searching through for specific pitchers I want more opinion on, which will cut it down considerably to suit my needs. Similarly with the Baseballguys guide, I printed the sections I felt most relevant to cover early, but of course I’ll be making up pages with the blog.

First thing is first though, I might as well get the CC/DB set up for this league. Do I start with Rick’s projections or check out the Zeile projections imported from FantasyPros via Projection Pal? Either way, I’m going to adjust the rankings of some players based on my personal opinion on their prospects, quite likely influenced from the above sources. I may run both sets of numbers, so I can compare and contrast the players Rick has projected somewhat better or worse than the average of the experts using Zeile.

Time to get started. I downloaded some video screencast software, so we’ll see if I can get that up and running to show off some of the things I’m doing with the CC/DB to get ready for this draft. If I don’t first get lost in a mountain of reading, that is.

When all is said and done, we may have more fantasy baseball starting pitching content on this website than any website going. Far fetched? Well, I’ll let you decide. First we rolled out Scott Rudicil’s Tiers of Starting Pitching, which received rave reviews. I recently summarized all of Scott’s rankings into a single, nice format cheatsheet page.

Now I am proud to introduce Paul Sporer’s Starting Pitching Guide, integrated with our player pages. Paul and Scott “battled” (friendly wars or words, I think) for a few years each relaying their thoughts on starting pitchers, primarly over at The Bullpen, the forums at RotoJunkieFix.com (formerly, RotoJunkie).

With the hatchet wisely buried between them, but still plenty of pitching knowledge for each of these baseball gurus to relay to the masses, now you have the pleasure of reading their individual thoughts on each pitcher one beside the other on the same page. Check, for example, Clayton Kershaw’s player page, or John Lackey, or Shaun Marcum, or Cole Hamels, or Brian Matusz, or… well, you get the point.

All told I added 240-250 of the most fantasy relevant pitcher profiles from Paul’s SP Guide to our database. If you want to go even deeper than that, including minor league prospects, you should download the whole guide from Paul. It all comes in one gigantic 127 page PDF, which includes all profiles broken down into sections “2011 Contributors”, “Flawed Investments” and “Projects” for every MLB team. Paul also recruited noted fantasy experts like Jason Collette and Zach Sanders to contribute some insightful articles to the Guide.

Great stuff Paul. As if that wasn’t enough, the SP Guide is FREE to download. Paul is accepting well deserved donations for his hard work. As if that wasn’t enough, if you make a donation prior to Opening Day, then Paul will enter your name in a random draw for one Justin Verlander jersey or one Tim Lincecum jersey. Nice! My donation is in, and I’ll be taking the Verlander if still available. Find the donation link in the upper-right at paulsporer.com. Enjoy Paul’s pitcher profiles on our player pages.