Fantasy Baseball Draft Cheat Sheet: Rankings, Strategy & Advice (2023)

The 2023 fantasy baseball season will be here before we know it. That means it’s time for you to prepare for your fantasy baseball drafts. Beyond our draft prep articles and mock draft simulator, we will have you covered with 2023 fantasy baseball rankings, tiers, and overall strategy advice.

Fantasy Baseball Draft Cheat Sheet: Rankings, Tiers, Strategy

You can find our updated 2023 fantasy baseball expert consensus rankings here.

2023 Fantasy Baseball Draft Rankings

2023 Fantasy Baseball Rankings powered by FantasyPros

2023 Fantasy Baseball Mock Drafts

Categories

Points

Salary Cap

12-Team

AL-Only

10-Team

NL-Only

10-Team

2023 Fantasy Baseball Strategy & Advice

How to Approach Early, Middle & Late Rounds

The first rule of fantasy baseball drafts is to acknowledge (and accept) that someone in your league will absolutely, without fail, draft a player you were planning to roster this season. Every cheat sheet you make and every plan you create can go out the window as early as Round 1.

Rather than a specific plan for your draft, you need to establish an approach as to how you want to fill your roster, where the hidden gems are by ADP, and when it’s okay to reach. In a regular snake draft, you cannot irrationally outbid anyone to get your guy. (Ah, the benefits of salary cap leagues.) You need a general understanding of which players you’re drawn to and where to get them.

How you approach the start, middle, and end of your draft is up to you. We will look at them as three separate drafts and offer tips on how to approach each one.

Philosophy of Fantasy Baseball

My dad was a Yankees fan until I came along, and it makes sense why. He was born in 1950, the year before Mickey Mantle entered the league, and New York won the World Series in eight of his first 12 years of life. He was raised in a town of 495 people in Iowa, and as so many children do, they pick the best team they hear about or see and decide to cheer for them.

Baseball fandom lineage stories typically follow the, “My father cheered for this team, so I cheered for them, and when we had hard times, we could always come back to our love of that and find common ground.” It’s a sweet narrative, but it’s not our narrative.

I came along in 1980 and grew up in an Iowa town twice the size of my dad’s hometown. With it being 30 years later, we had TV and cable. And on cable was WGN. Starting at the age of 5, I missed very few Cubs games in the summer afternoons. My parents, being teachers, were right there with me, and my evil plan worked exactly as I wanted it to. By the time I was 8, my dad was a Cubs fan and has never looked back.

5 Things to Monitor in Spring Training

Spring Training is coming up quickly, fast and in a hurry. What should we monitor in spring training? Spoiler Alert: It is NOT the stats.

We are going to break down some of the things you should be monitoring in spring training that could be the difference in getting a leg up on the competition in your fantasy leagues.

More Fantasy Baseball Advice:

Beyond our fantasy baseball content, be sure to check out our award-winning slate of Fantasy Baseball Tools as you prepare for your draft this season. From our free mock Draft Simulator – which allows you to mock draft against realistic opponents – to our Draft Assistant – that optimizes your picks with expert advice – we’ve got you covered this fantasy baseball draft season.