The RotoBaller writers’ league conducted its draft on Thursday night. It was my final draft of 2016, and I realized in the lead-up to the event that it was the my only auction that didn’t involve keeper considerations. This meant two things – 1) the draft didn’t conclude until after 1:00 a.m., leaving me bleary-eyed and exhausted as I write this, and 2) this would be the only auction where a retrospective might actually be useful to readers.

Expert draft recaps abound this time of year, but the exercise too often falls into the trap of “here’s my team,” without really getting at anything beyond superficial or esoteric analysis. Every draft room is different, particularly when you’re dealing with the more fluid and dynamic auction format, so it can be tough to find anything you can apply to your own experiences.

To that end, as I hinted on Twitter before the draft, I fully intended to employ some sort of unconventional or extreme strategy, despite this league carrying a higher entry fee than any other I’m a part of this season. Having won last season’s iteration made this decision easier, but mainly, it was my only chance to employ such a strategy in a true blue redraft league. I decided to go with the most drastic version of LIMA (Low Investment Mound Ace) possible – spending only a dollar per pitcher on my roster. It’s something I’ve never managed to pull off previously, and I thought it’d be interesting to try in the current environment.

So, naturally, I ended up with a $41 Clayton Kershaw five minutes into the proceedings. No biggie, I thought. I’ll just scrimp on pitchers the rest of the way. Not long after, I got caught trying to bid up Raisel Iglesias, and suddenly I had two pitchers before 10 of the other 11 teams even had one. At this point, I pivoted to a new strategy: Maximizing my enjoyment of the draft. This was accomplished by going after pet players like David Peralta, Domingo Santana, and Miguel Sano, snagging players I liked but had no shares of in other leagues (such as Iglesias and Adam Eaton) and trolling my colleagues/rivals at every opportunity.

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The end result is, shall we say, less than perfect. I don’t have a second catcher, my only shortstop is Asdrubal Cabrera, and I’m counting on several breakouts on both sides of the ball:

Depending on how you feel about the abundance of high-variance players, this roster may look exciting or awful (if you’re interested, check out the full draft results here). But nobody cares about my fantasy team. What’s important is finding lessons that you can take from this, or any other, draft experience:

Championships are won during the season, not in the draft room. The vast majority of rosters will experience significant turnover throughout the year. Injuries, trades, busts, ill-timed slumps – all these and more conspire to shatter the idyllic view most of us have of our fake teams in the afterglow of the auction. It’s not impossible to coast to contention on the strength of your draft, but it is extremely difficult. And there are times when falling in love with your drafted roster ends up hurting you in the long run. You might be less willing to cut a struggling player than you should be, for instance. It can be beneficial to have a few players at the back of your roster that you aren’t over the moon about, because they’re easy to cut loose when one of the new season's many breakouts makes himself known.

Preparation is crucial. A solid foundation of research and knowledge allows you to improvise more effectively during the auction. For this draft, I didn’t have time to generate my usual Excel sheet, and despite the amount of time I’ve invested in writing and compiling ranks for this site and the number of drafts I’ve already participated in, that may have held me back a bit. It's quite easy to lose your way when you're relying solely on your memory - especially if you're enjoying alcohol (or any other mind-altering substance) during the draft, as God intended.

No strategy, and no auction, is perfect. At various points, you’re going to overpay, get caught price enforcing a guy you don’t want or need, or be forced to watch rivals snatch up bargains. You’ll be at the mercy of the ebbs and flows of the room, cursing everyone else’s nomination strategies or the rival who has way too much money left, while they’re bemoaning how they failed to grab as many stars as they should have. I greatly prefer auctions to snake drafts for a variety of reasons, chief among them that they require a deeper knowledge of the game and are significantly more challenging. But that also means that you’re more prone to mistakes, and they can pile up quickly if you aren’t careful.

Despite how seriously we take fantasy baseball, it’s still a game – enjoy the ride. Given my lack of prep time and the fact that I’d torpedoed my own strategy before even cracking the first of several beers, as well as this being my last 2016 draft, I decided to just have fun with it. And though my roster construction is far from ideal and this team will need some luck and TLC if I hope to defend my title, I definitely had a blast with my colleagues. The draft is a highlight of the season and should be treated as such, and circling back to the first point, you can easily recover from a suboptimal showing on draft day.

We're less than 48 hours from the first pitch of the 2016 season, so it's finally almost time to find out just how wrong we all were about everything. As always, RotoBaller will be here to help you win your leagues every step of the way. Enjoy the games, and good luck this season.

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