(*) MASTER NOTES: LABR-Mixed takeaways

On February 11th, fifteen industry writers "gathered" online for the third annual LABR-Mixed league draft. LABR-Mixed is a 15-team, 5x5 (with BA, not OBP) format, with the standard 23 roster spots, plus six reserve spots, for a total of 29 rounds of fun on a Tuesday night in February. I had the #3 seed in the snake format.

Back in 2012, the first year of this league, I shared the championship with Grantland's Jonah Keri. Last year, I plunged to a pathetic 13th place finish. I approached this draft with the mindset that 2014 is going to prove one of those prior finishes to be an outlier.

The draft results are freely available online for anyone who wants to review them. Being mindful of Patrick Davitt's excellent piece from last week in this space about the limited utility of experts' league draft results, I won't give the traditional round-by-round draft recap. Instead, I'll offer a few of my thought processes at various points in the draft:

1. McCutchen over Goldschmidt at #3: current ADP rankings give a slight edge to Goldschmidt over McCutchen in the #3 slot, but I opted for McCutchen at #3, for three reasons:

• McCutchen has a longer, more stable track record than Goldschmidt, who was a first-round earner for the first time in 2013. Our research shows that first-time top-15 earners have a particularly low probability of repeating.
• I prefer to start with a five-category contributor.
• I'm a stickler for batting average with my early picks. You can manage a BA late in the draft, but you always have more end-game options if you can afford to take on BA risk then. I focus a lot of early attention on building a BA cushion.

My only concern in taking McCutchen at #3 was that, in looking ahead to likely options for my second- and third-round picks, I saw a lot of OFs among my preferred targets, and I really didn't want to start my draft with three straight OFs. That ended up not being an issue.

2. Freddie Freeman fell to me in Round 2: at the 28th pick of the draft, I considered this a steal. ADP wouldn't call it that, as Freeman sits at #25 in the latest ADPs. I predict Freeman will be an ADP riser in the coming weeks, as more and more drafters think through the first round permutations and move on to the second round. A month from now, it may be common to see Freeman going closer to pick 20 than pick 30. In short, it would be dangerous to look at this draft grid and say to yourself, "I'm targeting Freddie Freeman late in round two."

3. Taking two catchers relatively early: This wasn't a priority of mine entering the draft, but I was pleased with the development. I like to make watch lists, just to ease the tracking process while I'm settling into a draft. Knowing I was taking McCutchen with my first pick, I made a target list of players I was eyeing for my rounds two and three turn, and another for my rounds four and five turn. As round six crept back toward my next pick, there was still one player from my rounds four and five target list that hadn't been taken. And Brian McCann made it all the way back to me. Picking him late in round six was one of my easier decisions of the night.

My second catcher was Matt Wieters in round 10. The catcher pool is interesting this year in the way it segments itself. There are about nine catchers in the top tier. I'm not saying they are all interchangeable, but there can be a lot of different rankings within that group of nine. I knew I wanted one of those, and already had McCann locked up. But when my tenth pick came, Wieters was the last of the top nine still on the board, and I saw an opportunity to snare two of the top tier options, while exerting some pressure on the rest of the drafters. Another team had locked up two catchers already, so with the two of us owning four of those top nine catchers, 13 other teams would have to fish in the next tier for at least their second C, and several would need to get both backstops from the second tier.

It's also worth noting that in the two catchers I selected, I should have high-AB producers. Wieters is one of the annual games-played leaders at the position, and McCann should have the opportunity for additional DH and 1B at-bats in New York. One reason not to load up on catchers early in your draft is that their lower AB totals can create a drag on your counting stats. This year, there are a number of catchers who will avoid that problem by moving out from behind the plate at least occasionally. Doubling up on those catchers early is more viable if you think you can get at least 1000 AB out of your pairing.

4. Drafting seven weeks before Opening Day can be tricky: two years ago in this league, I drafted Joakim Soria and Ryan Madson as my closers, only to see both of them undergo Tommy John surgery between our draft day and Opening Day. When you draft in February, you're drafting a little bit blind. So, when I grabbed Jose Veras as a third closer, I handcuffed him with Pedro Strop in the end-game. My second closer was Fernando Rodney, and I also wanted to grab Danny Farquhar as his handcuff, but got beaten to him. Normally in the last several rounds of a draft, I'm laser-focused on throwing darts at high-upside breakout candidates. I did some of that here, but the early draft date forced me into playing some defense as well as offense in the end-game. A month from now, if Veras and Rodney are having normal, effective springs, I wouldn't likely spend a pick on their handcuff.

5. I'm not really that high on Alexei Ramirez: my draft had gone just about optimally up until my round eight and nine picks. At that point, I was scheduled to appear on Sirius/XM Fantasy Sports Radio, where the draft was being covered live. I went on the air as the eighth round started, some 10-11 picks from my next turn. After talking about the Goldschmidt/McCutchen decision for what seemed like 10-15 seconds, host Glenn Colton (also in the league) said "Okay, Ray, I see you have a pick in 15 seconds, so I'll let you go take care of that". Gee, thanks Glenn! Scrambling to avoid auto-pick, I grabbed Alexei Ramirez out of my queue. He wasn't a disastrous pick, but he was a reach at that spot. Consider this a reminder that not every pick in these drafts has solid logic behind it!

With this draft done, there's not much more to do for this team other than put it on a shelf until April and hope nothing bad happens to it.

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