Archive of SportingNews.com's old SOM Baseball forum

I'm going to participate in my first live draft (2008 newbie league), and I can see from the FAQ how things are quite different from the salary cap leagues that I've done. Not having a salary cap is changing how I evaluate players a whole lot! Plus the way we can pick up players during the season without worrying about the salary loss.

So, in a couple of the other threads, different points have been raised about drafting high injury rated players, with Furcal being kind of a flash point player for the topic. In a live draft league, does it make sense to draft high quality, high injury players since my bench can be enormously expensive in the live draft leagues? Obviously I'll go for Albert Pujols if I can, but there might be some interesting options with the higher injury players later in the draft.

What are your thoughts?
Thanks,
dharmabums

Absolutely. Don't worry too incredibly much about drafting a player because of his injury rating. I wouldn't get crazy and draft a whole training room full of Furcals (the rosters are only so large, and there will be a drop-off between starters and backups), but a few should serve you well.

Some top injury prone guys to consider:

Chipper Jones
Mike Napoli
Rafael Furcal
Carlos Quentin

Don't forget this concept also applies to guys with a "1" injury rating that don't have 600 PAs.

Alex Rodriguez
Mike Fontenot
Andre Ethier


Good luck, dharma!

Do you suppose the team would survive with just I6s? :)

When you use many high injury rated players you could be in trouble. You could being playing alot of games with 20 percent less salary or even more and that is a major disadvantage. I like to get at least 2 players with over 600PA (can only miss 3 games). If I get 1 with 680PA then I don't even need a backup as they can't be injured. I picked N. Perez in the 99 league just so I don't have to worry about a backup at SS. You will find that every high salary player will be gone and the free agent pool will be thin when there is no cap. Mike