Loving the rooks

All this rookie draft talk had me acting crazy in the AUBL. Roster limits in the AUBL are 23. I had a position quandary, as I picked up Randy Johnson off the DL and he had been off the DL for three starts. You can keep a non-DL guy on the DL (not terribly kosher as Commish to do so) as long as you don't make any roster moves. I noticed that the Giants had called up Tim Lincecum. Take a look at those stats. For a fantasy baseball player, that's the equivalent of getting a gander of the SI Swimsuit issue in middle school. I couldn't drop Randy Johnson's 4500+ career strikeouts, so I released Greg Maddux instead.

It's my extensive, and borderline obsessive, study of the Zealots Field rookie drafts, which led me to make such a move. I don't want to completely give in to the rookie draft craze, so I'm only looking at 16 of the 48. Most of them have started, and here's what I discovered about some of the first-round prizes. I didn't compile stats on the "Big Three" (Adrian Peterson, Calvin Johnson, Marshawn Lynch) because they're pretty stable and I have zero chance of landing a top-three pick. Here are the ADPs for most of the first round. This is based on 16 Zealots rookie drafts. Please pardon my third-grade HTML.

Here are the ADPs for most of the first round. This is based on 16 Zealots rookie drafts. Please pardon my third-grade HTML.

Player	ADP
JaMarcus Russell	4.875
Brady Quinn	9.4375
Brandon Jackson	6.0625
Chris Henry	10.6875
Michael Bush	7.8125
Dwayne Bowe	8.125
Robert Meachem	8.0625
Dwayne Jarrett	13.2

I just traded for LenDale White in one league, and to complete the matched set I have to get Chris Henry. I have the 1.09 pick. It's going to be dicey. In six of the sixteen drafts, he goes eight or higher. It's bad enough that I have to dump a high pick on a sketchy running back; I can't trade up and dump more picks in a WR-heavy draft when my WR corps are terrible. Right now my WR2 is either Greg Jennings or Kevin Curtis.

So far my draft strategy is to wait for value. Especially with the IDPs, I don't really know who has the best situation. I can't be excited about Patrick Willis in San Francisco's 3-4 when Jonathan Vilma's value tanked when the Jets changed schemes. After the second round, it's either the top IDPs or the 11th RB/WR. Guess where the value usually is.