RJEL Minor League Draft results:

[GwynnInTheHall]

I'm one of those bucking the trend. I got me a plan, we'll see if it's crazy or not......probably is.

[Sour Masher]

If pitching is that cheap, it is surprising Urquidy went that high. I know he is a proven commodity, but it isn't like he is a stud arm or has a really high ceiling.

[mjl]

Unsurprisingly there's a variety of opinions here. A couple more things to take into account:

1) Up front, it's true that hitters/hitting prospects are worth a lot more, so if your intent is to take players to trade them, you probably ought to get hitters even if they're slightly less good.

2) Like the NFBC, the league has lineup changes twice a week, on Monday and Friday. Unlike the NFBC, you can also change your pitchers. What this means is that if you have five hitters on your bench, they're probably not playing unless someone gets hurt or you actually make the effort to have players with distinct platoon advantages and swap them in as appropriate. That sounds hard. If you have five pitchers on your bench, they're probably all playing every week. If you have thirteen pitchers, eight SP and five RP, as long as it happens to work out that your SP are split up conveniently you can have four SP and five RP in the first period, then swap out all your SP and have four SP and five RP in the second period. This should mean that all pitchers are more valuable than in a normal league... sort of. Obviously there aren't more pitching points available, but it means that if you have thirteen good pitchers, you can kind of make up for not having top-end SP, but that doesn't really work for closers. Having extra competent SPs is nice, since it means you can more easily reallocate toward closers.

If you assume that I want to have 8-9 decent or better SP, I'm going to end up with a couple Urquidy-equivalents, and a lot of them go in the 5-8 range (last year, guys in that range were Wacha, Weaver, McCullers, Woodruff, Samardzija, Teheran, Newcomb, Gausman, Godley, CAnderson, Eflin, Matz, Minor, Wood, MPerez, TWilliams). So taking Urquidy is giving up on some future top-end value, but buying $6 or so in auction dollars for this year. Is that good? I'm not really sure. Could I trade Corbin Carroll for someone better than Urquidy immediately after the auction? Probably not week 1, and in May I'd have to take whatever the appropriate guy is that one of the few teams that's already dumping has available, so although this plan might be giving up some potential value, it's also a lot easier and has immediate results.

also for what it's worth, FG has Carroll at 99 and Urquidy and 101 and Monte Harrison at 102, so maybe I'll try to trade Harrison right after the auction and let you know how that goes.

[Teenwolf]

I went with a similar strategy to the Urquidy pick last year in an NL only, taking Toukki Touissant with a 1st round pick because he was projected for a rotation spot with a chance at SP3 numbers. It didn't work out too well.

I'm on the no pitching prospects bandwagon at this point. My major league squad is 8 hitters plus $9 Boyd and $3 Jiminez, farm is 15 bats.

I love young pitchers breaking out and becoming cheap aces, but they're so hard to gauge as prospects. But I also see myself taking much riskier picks than I used to, as the entire league shifts towards younger and lower probability upside hitters and away from safe picks.

[The Dane]

But I also see myself taking much riskier picks than I used to, as the entire league shifts towards younger and lower probability upside hitters and away from safe picks.

Yup. This is where the zig vs. zag exists in RJEL.