Draft to Win: Head-to-Head and Rotisserie Leagues

Thanks to your fantasy baseball experience, know-how and also our fantasy baseball rankings for a little extra help, you already know who to draft. That's the easy part. But, have you ever thought about the math involved in winning your fantasy league? Believe it or not, your overall draft strategy has to go well beyond who to draft. You have to decide how many position players to draft versus the amount of pitchers you draft.

Also, the type of league you're in - head-to-head or rotisserie - makes a big difference on draft day. Based on your league's scoring system, you'll want to draft a ton of pitchers, or you'll need a delicately-balanced roster across the board on offense and pitching.

Draft Strategy for a Head-to-Head Fantasy League

If you're in a head-to-head league, you're probably in a regular, public 5x5 league: 5 batting categories and 5 pitching categories. Here's what you need to remember:

• Batters play every day
• Starting Pitchers play every 5-6 days
• Relief Pitchers play between 2-5 times per week

So what, you ask? Here's what, daddio. Here's how you're gonna win your public 5x5 fantasy baseball league every year. That's what.

Knowing WHO to draft is the easy part on draft day. Knowing HOW MANY pitchers to draft may actually be more important.

Draft a Ton of Pitchers

We've lamented repeatedly on our site about how stupid it is to use Total Strikeouts as a pitching category in 5x5 leagues (as opposed to K/9). After all, ERA and WHIP are both stats based on averages for pitchers, so why don't we use an average for strikeouts, too? Even worse, we're at the mercy of the MLB scheduling Gods to give a pitcher two starts in a single, fantasy baseball week. It happens all the time: your ace will pitch one, great game with 8 strikeouts, while your opponent will have some scrub get two starts, but he'll rack up 9 total strikeouts. He'll have a terrible ERA and WHIP, but you'll lose 5-4 that week all because he beat you in total strikeouts.

Because of this, and because pitchers are limited in their appearances every week, you want to draft as many pitchers as you can in a head-to-head 5x5 league and put them in your lineup every time they have a start. Doing this, you can win the strikeouts category every week, even with mediocre strikeout pitchers. On top of that, you can rack up Wins more easily as well - the more chances you have, the more wins you'll likely get. Plus, you're not penalized for a loss, so why not take the chance?

In short, draft a ton of pitchers on draft day and watch your strikeout totals and Wins dominate all season long.

Another bonus benefit to this is that you'll only want to carry 9 batters on your entire roster. That's right: no backups. When one of your batters gets hurt, you address it then, but not before. Best of all, there's never any second-guessing on which guy to start at which position. Your offense stays the same all year long and you just keep cycling in any pitcher you have who's starting that day. That, my friends, is how you can win with minimal effort in a 5x5 head-to-head league.

Draft Strategy for a Rotisserie League

The good news is that, for those of us who like crunching the numbers and analyzing statistics, drafting for a Rotisserie League is way more fun. In a rotisserie league, you have to draft to try to win every category possible. As opposed to a 5x5 league where you can dominate 6 of 10 categories every week and win the whole league, you can't do that in a rotisserie league. The stats are kept all season long and every single stats counts just as much as the next.

Draft an Extremely Balanced Team

The things to look for first in a rotisserie league are the guys who have the potential to go 30/30 while also hitting for a high average. After those guys are gone (in the first round), you'll need to go after specialists: base stealers, guys who hit for average, guys who solely hit home runs.

Then, you have to draft pitchers carefully, too. The first stat you go after is WHIP. Since all other stats are reliant upon a pitcher's ability to keep guys off base, a pitcher's WHIP is your most-reliable predictor of his impending success (or demise).

Yahoo's draft interface this season has a cool feature where it scores your "standings" during the draft. Based on last year's stats or their pulled-from-thin-air 2015 projections, it will tell you where you stand in terms of your competitors' rosters. In other words, if Team A has 400 Runs amassed in the first 7 rounds based on last year's stats, and you only have 360 runs based on last year's stats, their Standings tool will show you where you're deficient, statistically at that point in the draft. Is it perfect? No. Is it pretty helpful? Yeah, it actually is.

Injuries KILL Teams in Rotisserie Leagues

Honestly, this is the only reason why we hate rotisserie leagues: if your best player(s) get injured, you're screwed for the rest of the season. Period. Once you have a guy in the lineup who you're counting on for 35 HR and 100 RBI, then he goes down for the season with an injury in May (or whenever, really), you're screwed. You can't replace a guy like that with someone of the waiver wires, nor can you make up that ground elsewhere. You can't really predict injuries, for the most part, so losing one or two guys to an injury mid-way through the season will make you lose interest in your rotisserie league very quickly.

Nevertheless, you have to prepare to win, so you must draft a perfectly balanced team in order to have a chance at winning a rotisserie league. And that includes drafting a couple of sleepers who absolutely must pay off, and, of course, everyone must stay injury-free all season long.

Oh - also, draft a head-to-head team, too, so that when your rotisserie team is doomed for imminent failure around June, you'll have another fantasy team to occupy your time.