This past weekend just prior to the opening night of the 2006 baseball season was my keeper league Fantasy Baseball draft. It’s the 5th year of our league and we are up to 14 teams after allowing a new team in last year (though we didn’t charge an expansion fee and even had a very good process of making players available to the expansion team). I would say that our league is pretty deep and every year is really competitive. In fact my team came in second last season but positions 2 through 5 were decided on the very last day of the season. Part of the reason I think our pool is so deep is that after year 1 of the pool we decided to implement a minor league draft and so for those of you in a keeper pool if you haven’t done the same I highly encourage it.

In order for a player to be eligible for the minor league draft, the rules are relatively simple, he can’t have more than 80 MLB at bats or have pitched more than 20 innings in the majors. You can only hold a minor league player for 3 years, and if you do bring him up to your major league team his salary is set at $5 (by contrast a player you pick up during the season would come up with a salary of $10 - oh ya I should mention that each team has $150 to spend).

I encourage the minor league draft because while its never fun to be near the bottom of the pack when the middle of the season hits or to get to a point where you know your team is not going to be in the money, there is still a ton of strategizing that can go on. This is exactly how my team was built. In the first two years of the pool my team was not competitive so I started trading my way to having high minor league draft picks. I would get something in return player-wise but more important to me was either plucking a potential star off another team’s minor league roster or putting myself in the position to draft one myself. As I look at the team that I have this year after the draft and the team that landed me in second place last year, it has in large part been built through this method. I’ve been able to land big name players at higher prices because when I go down my roster 3 of my players at the hardest positions to fill came from the minor league draft. I was able to have guys like Jason Schmidt, Gary Sheffield and Jason Isringhausen because while I had to spend some $$ to get them my team (known as Moneyball for obvious reasons) had its roster filled out with Joe Mauer, Jose Reyes and Ervin Santana all for $5.

So if you are looking for a way to make your pool more competitive for all involved or to just make the end of the season and the off season that much more interesting adding a minor league draft to your pool can be just the thing to do it. That way on draft day nobody ends up with Prince Fielder or Ian Kinsler just because they read about him the day before on ESPN, you’ve got to think long term and isn’t that really the point of a long term keeper pool?