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Many owners scour preseason magazines and online fantasy previews hoping that someone else will tell them who to draft and who to avoid, and most publications and websites are happy to oblige, telling you that this guy will smack 50 homers or that guy will be a major bust. We prefer a different method.
It’s your team. You make the decisions. Sure, in our tiered position rankings, we’re going to tell you how we feel about each player listed, and we’ll make plenty of statistical predictions as well. But understand that, for the most part, we’re all just guessing here. You’re guessing when you choose Player A over Player B in the first round, we’re guessing when we say Grady Sizemore is a better pick than Manny Ramirez, and the writers at every single leading fantasy magazine and website are guessing when they tell you that Howie Kendrick is due to break out or Mark Teixeira will rebound from his disappointing year. Some guesses are more educated than others, but nobody’s got a crystal ball.
Our job is to provide you with information, analyze the numbers, support our hunches and give you our best guess. It’s up to you to make the decisions that will ultimately dictate your team’s degree of success. Don’t take Grady over Manny simply because Bullz-Eye.com or some other magazine told you to. Do it because, after sifting through the information and considering several different opinions, you concluded that Grady was the better choice. Follow your own hunches and draw your own conclusions.
So our fantasy baseball preview may be a bit different than the previews you’re used to. We’ve ranked hundreds of players based on our projections for the upcoming season, but rather than making definitive predictions, we’ve provided you with pros and cons and best-case/worst-case scenarios. You take it from there.
Tiered Positional Rankings
We've got rankings for more than 250 players, broken down by position and into tiers. Why tiers? It's easy to say that this position is deep on talent or that position is thin at the top, but when you're in the middle of a draft you need to be able to read and react to the remaining depth at a certain position. What if you're eyeing your favorite sleeper shortstop in the 10th round but there's only one more starter-quality second baseman left on the board? You'd better fill a positional need before playing a hunch or you could wind up with Mark Ellis as your starting second baseman. Ouch.
First Basemen  |
Second Basemen  |
Third Basemen  |
Shortstops  |
Catchers  |
Outfielders |
Starting Pitchers  |
Relief Pitchers  |
1. Alfonso Soriano 2. Carl Crawford 3. Vladimir Guerrero 4. Carlos Beltran 5. Grady Sizemore |