Auction Draft Strategies

I remember LL draft. It was always a fun yet competitive process among the coaches. We took it pretty seriously and would create our own "draft board" ahead of time. Our method was pretty low-tech by today's standard! We start with the list of the players who'd signed-up. At the try outs, each of our team coaches would be making notes on their list. We'd then make up a 3 x 5 card for each player, talk about our notes and transfer comments to the cards along with any other info we knew about the player. Then basically start shuffling the deck to get the available players in our best-pick sequence. The final cards were put in a file box and put under lock & key until draft day! During the draft, as kid's names were called by other teams we'd pull their cards so we always knew who our next selection would be, yet there was no list laying on the table for the guy next to us to peek at! Made the whole process very easy. The key of course was having a good source of information about players! Phys-Ed teachers were always the best source!

Good Luck with your draft!

CADad....can't give you any draft advise, but want to tell you that going to Pony was a great move for us. In this highly competitive So. AZ baseball environment....not one Pony player failed to make the HS team....it was better game than LL.....and prepared the kids better for HS ball. Good luck.

RHP05,
I went over my list with the owner of the local batting cage and we talked about point values for each of the kids he knew. He gave me some guidelines and then said that he went over his guidelines once for some kid named Jared Weaver. It didn't hurt them too badly.

CADad -
Batting cage, now that's a great source too! The key is to find those "sleeper athletes" that know one else knows about! Yep, looking back those were fun days. Thanks for bringing back the memories. Keep us posted, but remember the competition may be listening so don't give away all your draft strategies!

Everyone knows the first round guys. They are no-brainers. Like RHP says, finding the "sleepers" in the later rounds will make your draft. When we would draft we always looked for the "projectable" kids too. Not necessarily how good they were right now at 10, but what would they be when they were 12. We did a decent job, won league two years in a row, but we made our mistakes too. The kid who has a lights out tryout, but really isn't that good. But I miss those drafts, like RHP says it was so much fun, building your team, draft boards, and the expectations of the coming season. What what fun, to try and out think the other coaches, and the guy you take first is always the best in the draft, every coach thinks that. Good luck.

dadchs,
What makes this kind of draft interesting is that the first round guys don't necessarily go in the first round. It is an auction and you bid on players in the order that you and the other managers put them up for bid. People won't necessarily put the players they want up for bid right away.

Last year was a straightforward serpentine draft, full redraft, and people were playing games, trying to get people for alliances. I knew all the kids and picked a pitcher, a catcher, a coach and went on from there. The team won easily.

CADad.....

You might want to take a look at the moms prior to the draft!!

Grateful, you bring up something I totally forgot about. Wife used to say that we should do a "psychological profile" on the parents of the players we were drafting. If kids were of equal value and talent, and one set of parents was a pain, we would definetly draft the other kid. Made for a much "easier" season. No kidding.

The owner of the batting cage and a friend who managed there last year made some recommendations on parents and kids to stay away from. Unfortunately you can have a really nice parent or kid paired up with a real pain. I also found out who had a relative playing mlb and got an unsolicited recommendation or two on glm's.

Fortunately my son has a glm so I can focus on playing ability when drafting.