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Every year, many fantasy baseball players take on their first dynasty league. As is the case with any format of fantasy baseball, dynasty baseball brings its own unique aspects that no other type of fantasy baseball format brings.
This will be the first post of a series to come over the summer discussing dynasty fantasy baseball strategy. There will be strategy points that are more surface-level and will pertain to someone just dipping their toe into the dynasty madness with their first league.
There will also be discussion on taking things deeper as the series progresses, for those in long-standing dynasty leagues, looking to make a move or sustain success.
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Fantasy Baseball Dynasty Leagues
With the NFL Draft taking place this week, considering the initial draft of a dynasty fantasy baseball league is a great place to start this series. Now, as this article moves forward at the end of April, most dynasty leagues have had their draft for the 2023 season. But often a dynasty league or two will spring up midseason, and if this doesn't necessarily hit home right now, it can be something to bookmark for Spring 2024 when an initial dynasty draft is upcoming.
While you cannot doom yourself to a failed franchise in your initial draft or, conversely, create a long-term winner immediately in the opening draft of a league, you can set your team's direction up significantly in that first draft. So how does one nail the initial draft of a dynasty league? Let's look at three keys.
How To Win Your Dynasty League Drafts
1. Go young, but not too young
One of the major things that you'll notice in dynasty fantasy baseball rankings versus redraft league rankings is the emphasis given to young players. That's absolutely appropriate as the intention is to build a team that can win year in and year out.
The issue becomes when the focus gets so heavy on youth that experience is tossed out the window. While the changes in the MLB Collective Bargaining Agreement have allowed for more influence from young players on the makeup of teams for the entire season rather than having to play the arbitration waiting game, players less than three seasons into their career are notoriously prone to performance sways from year to year.
Granted, every player has some fluctuation from year to year, but after 2-3 full seasons in the majors, a player has a fairly clear expectation of what he'll perform each year. When lining up your draft board, the experience angle of a young player could and should push a 25-year-old with three-plus major league seasons under his belt over a 25-year-old coming off his rookie season.
You're also looking to build a major league team in dynasty baseball, so you don't want to go off the edge and draft more minor league players than you have slots for in your initial draft. Remember that development of players is not linear, and guys who were not on a single top-100 list pop up as productive fantasy big leaguers every year, while the last extensive study of top-100 prospect lists found that less than 50% of the players on such lists achieve a playing career long enough to age beyond initial arbitration seasons.
2. Emphasize immediate returns
While focusing on young, MLB players, some can go over the edge toward youth and end up with a team that cannot compete for multiple seasons. This is a major issue for most drafters as the average dynasty baseball startup lasts between three and five seasons. If you're building a team that will need multiple seasons to mature, loaded with early-20s talent, you could just finally be seeing the fruits of that squad, and the league folds.
This is most notable when getting toward the middle and back of drafts. Do you emphasize a 19-year-old that has one full season at Single-A under his belt or the 35-year-old designated hitter who seems to defy age by producing each year?
If you're focused on coming away with a championship in the first year or two of the league (which you should do, given the fact that many leagues will collapse after those first couple of seasons), you'll take the DH every day. If you would have been drafting in February of 2016, that sort of decision would have been potentially between Nelson Cruz and Clint Frazier, who was a consensus top 50 prospect in the game at the time.
Since then, Frazier has a .238/.329/.427 slash and 29 home runs over 247 games across six seasons, never clearing more than 250 plate appearances in a single season in the majors. Cruz has put together a .275/.355/.520 line while smacking 220 home runs over 907 games – and he's still in the majors while Frazier was recently cut from a Triple-A club.
3. Get your head out of rankings
Finally, we come to the most important pre- draft work that most drafters do before the initial dynasty draft – grab a favorite analyst's fantasy baseball dynasty rankings and follow them to a T in the draft room.
Rankings, especially ones focused on dynasty baseball are exceptional tools, and RotoBaller offers a host of rankings for all league types. Note the emphasis there – the rankings are tools, and that's how they should be utilized. You wouldn't try to solve every home repair with a claw hammer, would you? Each repair requires a specific tool. Each dynasty ranking is a tool to inform you, the drafter, when you get into what will be a unique draft to any other draft you have.
First off, many view their prospect evaluation utilizing one of the major top-100 baseball prospect lists. While there are iterations of lists now available that focus on dynasty baseball, in general, most public and free lists are focused on overall baseball ability. That could emphasize the skills of a highly-skilled young player who has definite eventual MLB upside rather than focusing on how that upside will translate into dynasty baseball.
Players like J.P. Crawford and Victor Robles spent multiple seasons each in the top 10 of prospect lists from 2016-2019, and both have skills that make them viable major leaguers and even major league starting players. The issue is one of the dominant tools for each is his defense. Crawford's .249/.336/.360 major league line has less than 10 HR or SB per 162 games over his career. Robles has slashed .235/.310/.359 over his MLB career.
Looking at "expert" dynasty drafts are also a tool, but should not be considered as an end-all, be-all. As someone who has participated in a few such drafts, I know that some experts in such a draft will focus on pushing up certain players or prospects that they want to be on their team when the results of the draft are published, so a real-world draft very well may see significant value fluctuations.
All of these items (prospect rankings, dynasty rankings, mock dynasty draft results) are excellent tools when used as one piece of you putting together your personal preference list. Then, be prepared to toss that list out the window when others in the room have very different draft plans and alter your list so your top 10 players still left from your list are all closers and catchers, or a similar scenario.
While all of this may be good info for an upcoming draft, many have already drafted their team for 2023. How can you form your roster in the first season to ensure long-term success? What positions should you emphasize among your minor league players? Are trades a sign of health, death, or not a sign of anything at all in a dynasty league?
These questions, and many more will be part of upcoming articles in this dynasty league strategy series. Feel free to check in @biggentleben on Twitter with other ideas to dig into for upcoming strategy articles!
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