A part of me feels like I need to provide some credentials if I’m dishing out fantasy advice. I’ve been waiting all year just to see if following my own advice would pay off. I played in four leagues, and the results are in:

1st place – 10-team roto, auction (League of Women Voters)
1st place – 10-team H2H roto, snake
2nd place – 10-team H2H points, snake
3rd place – 10-team H2H points, snake

The most important victory to me is the first one, in the League of Women Voters, a league in which a bunch of my dad’s friends have been playing for decades. I want to look back and 1) try to remember my exact draft strategy; 2) see how well I adhered to it; and 3) see where I went wrong.

I went into the draft knowing I would target a very specific and short list of players. This did not allow a lot of room for flexibility, although I did leave a couple of outfield spots open that I would fill on the fly. I can tell you right away I wish I was stricter on those last two outfield spots. I also did not target any specific category, although I did punt saves for the most part. Although I simultaneously led every offensive category except for stolen bases for most of the summer, it became obvious to me that I accidentally loaded up on batting average and undervalued steals.

What I did right:

• $1 for Yan Gomes. I guaranteed Gomes would be a top-10 catcher with the chance to break the top 5; he finished No. 4 on ESPN’s player rater. (I also drafted Victor Martinez, and once he gained catcher eligibility, I dropped Gomes. It happened early in the season — too early for me to know better — but I wish I hadn’t.)
• $16 for Jose Abreu. There’s no way I knew he’d be this good, but after snatching up Yoenis Cespedes off of free agency in the first week of 2012 and drafting Yasiel Puig to my bench in 2013, I pledged to gamble as much as $20, maybe more, on the MLB’s most recent Cuban import.
• $13 for Martinez. I think he’s perpetually underrated, but I can tell you that not a single person in the world knew V-Mart would hit 30 home runs, let alone 20. I won’t pat my back on this one. I normally wouldn’t keep him, but I may have to in the off-chance he’s pulling a late-career Marlon Byrd on us (in terms of power, that is).
• $1 for Corey Kluber. My love for Kluber is well-documented. I tempered my expectations and slotted him as my No. 32 starting pitcher, but I vastly underestimated his innings total (45 more innings than I projected), his wins (17 to 10) and, of course, his strikeouts (10.3 K/9 to 8.4 K/9). But I’m glad I took a conservative approach; the most important takeaway is that Kluber clearly exhibited the talent to be at least a middle-tier fantasy starter with upside. And boy, did everyone underestimate that upside.
• $11 for Cole Hamels. I liked this play at the time, and I still do: I waited maybe a month to get a potential top-10 starter at about half-price. He’s a possible keeper next year ($14 on a $260 budget), but the Phillies’ inability to help him reach double-digit wins is troubling.
• $2 for LaTroy Hawkins. He’s terrible, but at least I wasn’t the idiot who overspent on the perpetually inept Jim Johnson. How he lucked into more than 100 wins in two seasons is beyond me.

What I did wrong:

• $51 for Miguel Cabrera. It was the most a player had ever gone for in the league, at least since the Rickey Henderson days. It was hard to predict such a massive drop-off in power — maybe 30 home runs was understandable, but only 25? — and I didn’t leave myself any room for savings. That is, I paid full price instead of looking for bargains, the latter of which was my game plan from the start.
• $37 for Ryan Braun. An even worse bid, in hindsight, and another instance of paying full price instead of finding the bargain.
• $10 for Everth Cabrera. Cabrera was a keeper, and he may have gone for more at auction. But wow, what a bust. Again, tough to see something like that coming, especially such a steep decline in on-base percentage.
• $10 for Brad Miller. I made a bold prediction about Miller before the season started. I think the only thing more amazing than his plate discipline completely vanishing is how much owners in my league were willing to spend on a largely unknown quantity. I really thought I was being sneaky on this one, especially so late in the draft. This was a case in which I was too sold on a guy to budge and take a different name — especially when Dee Gordon and Brian Dozier were still on the board.
• $12 for Shane Victorino. Was 2013 a flash in the pan or what? I don’t know if this guy’s legs will ever be the same again.

I’m excited to start preparing my projections for next year. I have made some revisions, tweaked some formulas… I’m looking forward to how the projections turn out.

And now I have a concrete idea in my head of how I should approach my ideal draft.