Fantasy Baseball Dominance: 3 Quick Tips to Winning Your League

As hopefully all of you know, the man in that picture is none other than Matt Kemp. Kemp surely propelled many fantasy owners to league victory last season, seeing as how he excelled in basically every statistical category.

However, anybody could sit here and tell you to draft the Matt Kemps and Miguel Cabreras of the world. We both know that wouldn't do you any good.

What I'm going to do instead is give you three tips that have helped me dominate my fantasy leagues for a long time. These are tips that I'm sure some people use, but the majority of people don't quite understand on their own. As I said already, anybody can draft the best players at the top of the draft, and that obviously includes the other people in your league.

These tips will help you in the mid to late rounds and will help with your overall draft strategy. For reference, I'm basing this article off the type of league that I play. These are the settings of that league and off which this article will be based...

Batting: Runs, Hits, HRs, RBI, SBs, Ks, TB, AVG, OPS

Pitching: IP, W, CG, SV, ERs, Ks, ERA, WHIP, QSs 

Choose One Type of Player and Stick with It

The first tip is to choose which way you want to go with your hitters. Once you get passed the fourth or fifth rounds, there won't be many more players that can help you with five to six categories. This is when people start to go wrong.

What most people often try to do is take guys that help a little bit in many categories. This is what I like to call the C-list five-tool players. What they are going to do is help you a little bit in many categories, but not help you a lot in any specific category. I have routinely observed that this is the wrong way to go.

What happens is that opponents that do specialize in certain categories beat the pulp out of you in those, and if they manage to have a good week in some of their lesser categories, they also beat you in those because you lack big numbers. Now all of a sudden with an average week, you lose hitting stats 8-2.

The way I see it, you can go one of two ways (based off of the categories in the first slide). You can go with high contact, speedy type guys (i.e. Michael Bourn) or you can go with big power, big RBI guys (i.e. Mark Reynolds). This is my favorite part of the draft.

Mark Reynolds is going to drop to the ninth or 10th round because of his low average and high strikeouts numbers, but what you're going to get is 35-plus homers and 80-plus RBI out of your 10th-round pick. I would call that a steal.

As for the former example, guys like Bourn, stolen bases are the easiest fantasy category to win. If you grab a bunch of high average lead-off guys, you're never going to win home runs or RBI, but you're routinely going to win runs scored, hits, average and SBs. I won a league two years ago with my biggest home run total being 14.

Like I said, after the fifth or sixth rounds, it's all about choosing a type and specializing. Guys who can't decide on a type often don't make it too far in the playoffs, because that's when you only need to win by one category to advance.

Draft Starting Pitchers Early

This actually goes against what some prominent fantasy baseball minds believe, but it has never failed me yet. If you use the offensive strategy of specialization as I explained in my last slide, then you will be able to build a good offensive team in the middle rounds, thus leaving your early rounds available for pitchers.

Now don't get me wrong, there are some very quality arms to be found late in the draft, as anyone who took a flyer on Ian Kennedy last year will tell you (I did that), but what you're buying in the early rounds is consistency.

Sure, the Ryan Dempsters of the world will give you a great eight-inning, 1 ER, 10 K performance every now and again, but in between those rare starts, they will be all over the map. Clayton Kershaw had three months last year with an ERA in the 1.00's.

Do you have any idea what that does for a fantasy team? Forget about the fact that he averaged more than a strikeout per inning.

What I'm trying to say here is that you can get some helpful arms later in the draft, but you should definitely take the opportunity to get guys in the early rounds whose numbers and consistency just can't be matched.

Take it from my championship-winning rotation last year of Kershaw, Lee, Shields and Cain. My best hitter on that team was Jay Bruce, who I drafted in the fifth round, I believe. It is said that pitching wins championships, and I believe that still holds true in the fantasy world, as well as the real one.

Closers Are About Quantity, Not Quality

Take a look at one of my favorite men from 2011, Brandon League. Brandon's average draft position last year was 264. Despite that making him, on average, the 21st closer drafted, League finished the year tied for 9th in the majors with 37 saves.

I'm going to let you guys in on a little secret about closers. Nothing besides their saves really matters. People tend to think that closers can help you lower your ERA and WHIP, while the opposite is usually true.

The fact is that they throw so few innings per week that their positive contributions rarely matter, but if they have one bad inning, give up four or five hits and/or three or four runs, now your ERA and WHIP suffer because they don't throw any more innings to make up for it.

Now you're probably all thinking, wouldn't that mean I would want to draft the better closers? What you have to realize is that again, because of how few innings they pitch, a full point difference in closer's ERAs could be the result of one pitcher allowing only six or seven more runs than the other. Over the course of an entire 162-game season, that doesn't really matter much.

What I like to do is fill my hitters and starting pitchers in the early rounds, and then load up on closers late. If you are in a league with two SP slots, two RP slots and two P slots, draft five closers. Obviously, you put two in the RP slots, but then you can also fill your P slots with three more.

This way, you have pitchers that have the chance to throw every day and load up on saves. All you have to do is keep rotating your starting pitchers in the SP slots when they actually start games. And if you ever have three pitchers all starting on the same day, just throw one in a P slot and take out a closer. You have four more and it's only one game.

This strategy allowed me to go undefeated in the saves categories in a few leagues last year. I literally had three leagues in which I didn't lose saves a single week all year. Some examples of closers this year who best represent this strategy are Frank Francisco, Ryan Madson, Sergio Santos, Jason Motte, etc.

Follow these three simple steps and fantasy titles shall be yours.