Hi, my name is Jack Thaler and I will be doing a weekly fantasy baseball column throughout the summer. I am a 15-year-old kid who loves baseball. I started getting into fantasy about a year ago and I found that I love fantasy just as much as I love the real game.
The love of the game all began with my dad; he has been doing a fantasy league for almost 20 years and started teaching me about strategies and how the game works. Eventually I understood it well enough to start playing and my interest in it grew even more. With our shared passion we have joined the high stakes platinum league in Las Vegas. My dad had already done the league a couple times before and thought it was a good idea to have me come and help him. The league is NO JOKE. There are people who save up money just to get a chance to try and win because they are very talented and here, I was the only kid in the room. I was very nervous, but me and my dad had worked out a decent strategy. That strategy proved to be on point. We ended up finishing in 4th out of 15 teams and we were in 1st a couple times throughout the year. In fact, with a week to go we still had a chance to win it all.
While it didn’t end with a victory like we had hoped it would, I still got to learn a very important lesson. THE GAME IS NOT WON AT THE DRAFT. While the draft is still very important it does not match the importance of the waiver wire. Having a good draft doesn’t mean anything if you aren’t going to work on waiver pickups. The biggest mistake I made which led to us not making a profit was allowing myself to lose focus. Sure, the baseball season is a long tiring 162 games but that doesn’t mean you can allow yourself to fall asleep and completely lose focus. In the platinum league the waiver wire is every Sunday, and we missed multiple of these Sundays. This led to us missing multiple players who were at the caliber of league winners.
Now that I have told you about the biggest mistake not to make, I will talk about the draft strategy that got us so far into the league. I will start by asking you a question. Have you ever heard the name Phil Dussault? If you have not, then I shall explain his story. He had what people call the greatest fantasy baseball year ever by winning almost all high stakes league he joined. How did he do it? He did it by focusing on the undervalued positions. Back when Dussault first joined all those high stakes leagues the common strategy was to not draft a pitcher early. But Dussault thought differently and decided people were undervaluing pitchers by not drafting them at the start of the draft and decided to only draft pitchers at the beginning stages of the draft. His strategy of course worked and then everyone tried to replicate it by drafting pitchers early just like Dussault did. Me and my dad saw this and decided that it was crazy and that now hitters are being undervalued as a result. So, we decided to only draft hitters until we finally took Tanner Bibee as our ace in the 7th round. This strategy seemingly worked as we shot up the standings past all the pitcher heavy teams.
After a decently successful year we decided to enter the league again for a second try in 2025. We decided to alter our strategy and take one pitcher early so we don’t have to worry so much about our staff during the course of the year. So, we took Dylan Cease in the 3rd round. So far, our team looks decent as we are sitting in 9th place, but we are waiting for some mid-season additions that will help. Roman Anthony was just called up this week and Sean Manea is on the way. After this happens, we should shoot up the standings like last year.
Now that you have heard my story I will focus on helping you dominate your fantasy baseball league next week.