Without knowing this I would say you want to hold onto Kazmir for sure. He’s hurt now, but clearly has as much or more upside than any of the players you listed. I think you probably want to keep a guy like Michael Young simply due to the fact that the position he plays is thin on talent. I’m also liking Burnett and Wang. The former because of his upside and the latter because he’s a safe bet for a ton of wins given the team he plays for.

Maddux
AJ Burnett
Kasmir (I think he’s hurt)
C Wang
Scott Baker
Isringhausen

I know my guys are old, but who whould you choose, and what should I look for in the draft?
Any help would be great.
~Fred

I had a pretty good year last year, finishing in the money in all three of my leagues, winning one thanks to Adrian Gonzalez’ homer in the wild tiebreaker game at the end of the year. I know some people play in as many leagues as possible, but I really prefer to focus my efforts on no more than three, both for time and for money constraints.

All of my keeper leagues are formatted in a way that you can’t look TOO far out. In order to keep a player, that player has to have played in a major league game. So last year when I had Evan Longoria and the Rays stubbornly refused to call him up, I lost out. So typically I can’t justify drafting a guy that is more than a couple years from the bigs because they are essentially dead weight with that rule in place.

Someday I want to start a keeper league that is auction based and you sign players to contract ranging in 1-5 year terms with an established escalator to figure their salary increases from year to year. It’s complicated though and until I have the time to manage it I’m not going to bite off more than I can chew.

As for sources, it’s a long process but I’ll try to summarize. Over the course of playing fantasy baseball for 15 years, I believe I’ve bought almost every magazine, book, and subscribed or at least seen the majority of reputable websites out there. Heck, I’ve been lucky enough to work for a couple of them. For me I’m very clear on my process of preparing for an upcoming season and I know exactly what tools I need to get the most out of that prep.

Many sites/magazines have grown stale and they don’t challenge me to think about a player I may not have thought about or to think about players I am looking at in completely different ways. On top of challenging myself, I turned the corner about four years ago in regards to believing that what we are chasing before we can inevitably chase our league trophy is what a player will do next year. We need a way to more effectively predict what a player is capable of and that is why the No. 1 source I believe in is BaseballHQ. I also read Baseball Prospectus, but I think Ron Shandler and his crew at HQ do a better job of explaining things in a way that even a beginner can understand. Sabermetrics can be VERY intimidating, but they seem to make it more inviting. That and the fact that I’ve been consistently finishing in the money since I starting buying the Baseball Forecaster (HQ’s book and the only book you should be buying each spring) and reading their stuff.

I used to think Rotowire and Rotoworld were the best sources for news in the fantasy industry and they are still near the top, but their analysis of the news leaves much to be desired. Something that comes with experience is when you hear a specific injury and you can relate it to a player you once owned who had the same injury, you can put recovery times into perspective and tell right away if someone is feeding you a load of crap. That happens a lot…more in football than baseball, but it happens all the same.

So I rambled I guess, but your answer is you definitely need sources and I’ve been able to filter mine down to the very few I trust. HQ doesn’t tell me to necessarily draft Player A or Player B, they give me more than enough reason to show which direction a player is trending and let me digest it and figure out for myself the best direction to go. A source like that combined with my experience and ability to draw upon what I’ve learned from past mistakes makes me very confident heading into every fantasy baseball season.