2019 Fantasy Baseball Draft Prep: Prospects-only draft for dynasty leagues

If your dynasty league drafts prospects independently from everyone else, this is the mock for you.

By Scott White

Jan 30, 2019 at 10:24 am ET • 2 min read

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It comes as no shock that all dynasty leagues are different, and one of the most common ways they're different is how they distribute minor-league players.

In our recent dynasty startup mock, the prospects were drafted right alongside the major-leaguers. That's one way to do it.

Another way is to separate the two: a draft just for minor-leaguers, independent of the major-leaguers.

It's how we handled things this time around. Anyone with rookie eligibility, which basically means no more than 130 at-bats or 50 innings at the major-league level, qualified for this draft. There's also a service time maximum that prevented Corbin Burnes from being drafted, but it's rarely the reason a player loses rookie eligibility.

Each team drafted 10 prospects with no regard for position. We did it with Head-to-Head points scoring in mind, mostly to even the playing field for pitchers and hitters. Rotisserie prospect drafts tend to overdo it on the hitters since the threshold for making an impact at pitcher is so much higher in that format.

For the most part, I stuck to my top 100 prospects, straying only for a couple Rockies hitters, Colton Welker and Tyler Nevin. I figure nothing raises a hitting prospect's probability like having a future at Coors Field. Other owners were willing to project a little further into the future, targeting 17- and 18-year-olds like Malcom Nunez, Julio Rodriguez and Marco Luciano in the hope they become the next wave of high-end prospects over the next couple years.

It's a viable, perhaps even advisable, approach in leagues where you can keep prospects indefinitely at no real cost. If you can see their development through to the end, the possibility for a higher impact is probably worth the wait. Of course, how close you are to contention also has a say.

But I left those hypotheticals to the ones doing the drafting. Cue the introductions:

1 - Cubby Nole, Fantasy Front Office (@CubbyNole)
2 - Chris Towers, CBS Sports (@CTowersCBS)
3 - Scott White, CBS Sports (@CBSScottWhite)
4 - Ray Butler, Prospects 365 (@Prospects365)
5 - Zack Waxman, Fake Teams (@zackwaxman)
6 - Matt Williams, Fake Teams/Turn Two Podcast (@MattWi77iams)
7 - Scott Greene, Prospects1500 (@Scotty_Ballgame)
8 - Heath Cummings, CBS Sports (@heathcummingssr)
9 - Nicky Tapas, FantasyPros (@nickytapas71)
10 - Tom Ogonowski, Future Studskis (@ProspectFiend)
11 - Donkey Teeth, Razzball (@DonkeyTeeth87)
12 - Paul Martin, Prospects 1500/Friends with Fantasy Benefits (@PaulTheMartin)