The Tier Ranking System

The tier ranking system is one that I have used for the past few years in all of my fantasy baseball leagues.  It has helped me along to countless championships, and many playoff finishes. 

 

The basic idea of the tier strategy is to rate players by position, not overall.  Instead of creating lists of the top 100 players, you create a list of the top 20 1^st baseman and so on.  You can do as many as you want I usually chose to do about 20 players at each position, except for OF and pitching where I usually do about 75 of each. 

 

With all positions in fantasy baseball there are the stars, the above average contributors, the average Joes, and the duds.  The idea behind this fantasy baseball strategy is to find where these “invisible” lines between the stars and the average players are.  Another important concept behind this is how big of a drop-off there is between tiers. 

 

Lets say you are looking at the shortstops for the fantasy baseball season 2009.  We all know who the three super stars are, however after Hanley, Jose, and Jimmy; the drop off is absurd.  There is no one even close to the talent that these three put up.  It is safe to say that the difference between the first and second tier of short stops is substantial.  However when it comes to shortstops this fantasy baseball season the 2^nd tier is full.  If you don’t get one of the big three it will be okay, as the 2^nd tier, most of which will be drafted after the 7^th round is all about the same.

 

This fantasy baseball ranking system is incredibly useful, let me show you how.  Lets say that you are in the 4^th round of your 12 man H2H league.  Suddenly someone does something out of the ordinary and chose’s Jonathon Papelbon.  The next guy then chose’s K-Rod, the following fantasy baseball manager chose’s  Joe Nathan.  It’s your selection next.  It’s getting awfully scary when you look at what is left for closers.  There seems to be no one left in your tier one list of closers so you look at tier 2.  You quickly realize that tier 2 has almost 15 names in, all of which will most likely put up about the same numbers.  So instead of going for a closer you fill in your 3^rd base slot with Kevin Youkilis.  This is important because instead of drafting a 2^nd tier closer way to early you filled in a hole on your roster that needed patching.  Now you can wait till much later in the draft to begin chasing closers. 

 

Using the Tier system is a great way to make sure you have the best possible roster for your 2009 fantasy baseball team.