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 & Player Projections

EVERYBODY offers draft rankings. Only MOTY ranks batters and pitchers combined, based on a true apples-to-apples comparison — better known as the MOTY#. For those of you who focus on position scarcity, MOTY rankings include a “Relative Position Scarcity” (RPS) factor for every player. Plus, an Adjusted MOTY# (Adj. MOTY#), overall value + position scarcity in one number. All sortable, all filterable.

But that’s just where the advantages begin. Using the MOTY Scope™ advanced filters, you can customize the rankings to your liking — narrowing them down to just the players you should focus on — based on league, position and stats fitting your strategy. For example, NL outfielders with more than 20+ hr, 20+ sb and .850+ ops.

What you wind up with are draft rankings customized by you for your draft. Not the same old, out-dated cheat sheet everyone else picked up down at the local newstand. Click MOTY’s “printer-friendly” icon at the top of any ranking, sorted table or saved roster and you’ll instantly get a set of your lists — nice, neat and ready to draft.

As players start coming off the board during your draft, you can apply MOTY scope filters and sort the results — 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 Soriano (’06). Using the 2009 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 35 bags, but on hits 3 homers is valuable — but he’s no ComboCat. As for pitchers, the categories used are whip and era — whip projected to be 1.25 or lower AND era projected to be 3.25 or lower.

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. For whatever reason — retired, playing in Japan, injured — they’re not playing this year.