Fantasy Baseball Manager of the Year

MOTY Draft Rankings and Sortable Stat Projections

Draft day is easily the most fun of the fantasy baseball season. And the most critical. Here’s everything you need to draft a championship contending team.

Draft Rankings

EVERYbody offers draft rankings. Only MOTY ranks batters and pitchers, combined, based on an apples-to-apples comparison — better known as the MOTY#, the default criterion for the MOTY projection lists.

But that’s just the beginning. Using the MOTY Scope™ advanced filters, you can customize the rankings to your liking — including or excluding players based on league, position and stats to fit your strategy. For example, NL outfielders with more than 20+ hr, .280+ avg and .900+ ops.

What you wind up with are draft rankings customized by you for your draft. Not the same old cheat sheet everyone else picked up down at the local newstand. In fact, you're just one click away from a set of custom cheat sheets no one else in the world has, not to mention anyone in your league. Once you you have your rankings the way you want, click the "printer-friendly" icon on the top right of any table and your printer will spit out your rankings — nice, neat and ready to draft.

And once your draft starts, MOTY’s sortable projections work even harder for you. As players start coming off the board, you can apply filters and sort the tables – on the fly – to quickly find the best options for your next pick. Then cooly draft “your guy”  while everyone else scrambles to beat the clock.

ComboCats

You’ve heard of the 40/40 club – Jose Canseco (’88), Barry Bonds (’96), Alex Rodriguez (’98) and Alfonso Soriaon (’06) – the only four players in major league history to hit at least 40 home runs and steal at least 40 bases in the same season.

Using the 2008 projections, the MOTY System highlights similar players for the fantasy game. We call them “ComboCats,” players who put up valuable stats in two “combined categories.”

For batters, the categories are home runs and stolen bases. To qualify, a player has to be projected to hit at least 10 home runs AND steal at least 10 bases. A guy who steals 30 bags but only hits 3 homers is valuable — but he’s no ComboCat.

For pitchers, the categories used are whip and era. To qualify, a player has to be projected to post a whip of 1.25 or lower AND an era of 3.25 or lower. For pitchers, the lower numbered clubs are more valuable — remember whip and era are used.

Talent Tiers

The MOTY System examines the overall player projections and breaks them down into three “tiers” of fantasy value based on their position percentiles. “Elite” players rank 90% or higher in their respective position pools, “All-Stars” between 89%–75% and “Competitive” players rank from 74%–50%.

Then, based on the number of teams in your league, MOTY tells you how many players in each tier you should target in your draft.

“Untouchables”

If you’re planning on drafting any of these players, don’t. Or risk being laughed out of your league. The Untouchables are guys who won’t smell the fresh cut grass on Opening Day, for whatever reason — retired, playing in Japan, out for the season with an injury or simply unsigned.