Minor League Players

It's two days before my freeze date, and there's a lot of talk about trading picks.

If you're in a league that doesn't carry over from year to year or if you don't have a farm system, you'll never get to know the pleasure and rewards of "scouting" a player, following his progress through the minors, and then watching as he puts up great stats for you at a bargain price.

If you are new to a league (or new to leagues with "farm systems"), it's easy to underestimate or overestimate the impact minor leaguers can have. Early on in Roto, I was in a number of leagues where I could grab two great minor league players. As with everything else, the proliferation of information has made it next to impossible to steal Andrew McCutchen from under everyone else's nose and stash him on your farm system until he made The Show.

Since there are already a number of great resources out there about minor league players and how to scout them, I'm not going to parrot that information. If you're not already aware of him, John Sickels is a great resource for minor league information. His book is admittedly a little arcane for the casual fan, and you'll wind up seeing profiles of hundreds of players who will never see the major leagues unless they buy a ticket or rent an airplane and a parachute.

What I'm interested in is talking about how to use those picks and how to value them when your fellow owners start asking about them in trades.

A lot of this discussion depends on how your rules are structured. My non-expert league allows us to keep up to four minor leaguers at the conclusion of the auction. I can keep a minor leaguer as long as I like. So if I decide to draft Hank Conger this year, I can hang onto him until 2011, when he'll surely be the Angels' starting catcher. I probably won't do that, since a lot can happen in four years and Conger might never make it for all I know.

We used to be able to keep an unlimited number of minor leaguers, but one owner wound up with something crazy like eight minor leaguers in his system because he'd draft guys like B.J. Upton and just hold on to them forever. We wanted to find a balance between allowing an owner to draft a few young kids and hold on to them and allowing all owners in the league the opportunity to draft some good players in the farm draft.

So the idea of whether or not you should draft a player in AA or AAA versus the kid who played in the Pioneer League last year does hinge on your league's rules. Some leagues only allow you to keep a minor leaguer for up to two or three years. Don't waste your time in leagues like this with a high school kid. In leagues with no time limit, I still recommend being judicious with these types of picks. Justin Upton is still worth a high pick, but you don't want a farm system filled with Justin Uptons. Anyone who drafted Ian Stewart when he was the hottest thing going can tell you that these young players are more likely to disappoint than a player who has made it to Double-A and continued to thrive.

A common mistake I see owners make is drafting minor league veterans who aren't prospects. I'm not talking about guys like B.J. Upton who bounce up and down. I'm talking about 27-year olds with great stats who clearly will never make it for one reason or another. A few years ago, Mat Olkin of USA Today as well as Baseball Prospectus were talking up Graham Koonce as a player who would be better than a lot of 1B/DH/PH in the majors. I saw Koonce play on my trip to Arizona in 2003 and I saw immediately why he'd never play in the majors, not even for the Moneyball A's. Lumbering and slow around the bag, Koonce was a guy whose size doomed him to the minors unless he developed Paul Konerko-like power. Koonce was more of a 20-25 HR guy with low batting averages and decent on-base percentages.

Don't get sucked into guys like this. Baseball Prospectus spends a lot of time talking about why guys like this belong in the majors. I agree with them. But that doesn't change the reality of the game, and you're buying a lottery ticket that's not going to pay off.

Another rule of thumb I have is that I tend to rank hitters over pitchers, most other things being equal. The pendulum in leagues tends to swing toward pitching whenever a rookie pitcher is lights out. I'm willing to bet that my league sees a significant number of farm picks used on pitchers because Jered Weaver and Francisco Liriano were lights out last year. I used to avoid rookie pitchers entirely, but I do agree that there's too much value to be had to ignore rookie pitching. However, I would rather have a hitter in most cases. Baseball America, for example, rates Philip Hughes ahead of Brandon Wood in their rankings. I love Hughes, but if I had a choice between both players, I'd take Wood. Rookie pitchers are less likely to turn into Jered Weaver right out of the gate. Matt Garza, one of the most highly regarded young pitchers in baseball, struggled last year and might struggle again this year. Wood might also struggle, but he won't torpedo two categories in the process.

Establishing trade value for your picks is, without a doubt, subjective. It is common sense that you don't want to trade a top pick for a marginal freeze. More commonly, I'm confronted with the challenge of an offer of a borderline or slightly advantageous freeze for a low pick.

In theory, I should take the freeze if it helps with my team's value heading into the auction. In practice, I don't always do this because I feel I can still find value in the minor league draft.

One of the most important things about minor leaguers in my league is that they're often included in dump deals. I've seen strong enough minor league players get dumped straight up for pretty good players. Even if you can't pull that off, having a minor leaguer or two in hand to sweeten a deal is a good thing, since you're not trading any current stats.