Blake Meyer | Thu, Feb 15th 2024, 6:35am EST

Fantasy Baseball Mock Draft: 10-Team, Middle Pick (2024)

If you’re anything like me, the FantasyPros Draft Wizard has been your best friend as of late. I participated in my first EARTH league draft with some friends from the industry, and I’d be lying if I said I did any less than seven mock drafts leading up to the start of the draft.

At the end of the day, It’s always best to be prepared. Going into these drafts, you want to have tried out every draft strategy you can think of. Whether it’s ones you’ve never tried and are curious about the end result or you’re looking to see how long you can wait on certain positions, it’s always a good idea. It can also be pretty fun, too.

This draft season, FantasyPros is providing fantasy baseball mock drafts from a few of us to give you guys an idea of what you can expect from a draft. It can help you peak inside our minds to see who we target in certain scenarios. For this 10-team mock draft, I decided to start myself out with the sixth pick.

Picking earlier in drafts can be easier, so I wanted to show what to expect when you have to wait a bit for your first pick.

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10 Team Mock Draft (2024 Fantasy Baseball)

Early Draft Strategy

In a 10-team league, almost everyone is going to have a great-looking team. Unless you play in a league with oversized rosters, essentially every pick is going to be of a valuable player. In these smaller drafts, it’s important to key in on the guys who can give a slight edge each round. Draft strategy also plays a bigger factor in the smaller leagues compared to most. There isn’t likely to be much of a difference between you or your buddies’ roster once the draft ends.

For me, I wanted to focus on guys who were going to give me great production in at least three categories for my first few rounds. Corbin Carroll, Ozzie Albies, and Michael Harris II all give you a solid floor of batting average, home runs, and stolen bases. They also just so happened to combine for 288 runs scored last season, which is a great base for your first three hitters.

Spencer Strider early in the second round is about preference. In a smaller league format like this, you can wait a round or two and grab someone like Pablo Lopez as your SP1, but I really wanted to get the great mustachioed one. Cementing my early draft with a top-five OF and top-two SP was going to separate my team from most right out of the gate. Strider should be the only pitching option you contemplate that early in a 10-man.

Cole is someone I wouldn’t take before the early third round in this format.

The Middle Of The Draft

The next few rounds were about two things. The first was getting another top-tier SP to compliment the Strider pick. The second was about locking in saves. If you’re in a categories league and want to lock up saves, focus on getting two of the elite options. Only if you’ve given yourself a solid base of early hitting and a good enough SP1 to use those earlier rounds on closers. The only guys I’m considering here are Josh Hader, Emmanuel Clase, Devin Williams and Jhoan Duran.

Following that, it becomes about drafting a mix of guys with a high floor and guys with top-of-the-position upside. For me, guys like Lane Thomas, Josh Naylor, and Ian Happ are all guys who are pretty “boring” but amazing fantasy options. They’re going to come out and give you the same stat line year after year, and their floor is high enough to still give high-end fantasy value. These are the guys you want to make sure you lock up. Don’t be the guy trying to hit a home run with every pick (pun fully intended).

An Amazing End

When it comes to the end of a draft, this is where you get to reach for some upside. Now, in a 10-team, there are still going to be plenty of great options, as I said. Do not pass up on a “sure thing” for a “what if.” You certainly want to get some of those high-upside guys, but you have to be realistic.

For me, at the end of this draft, I was pretty locked in on a few guys. Ke’Bryan Hayes and Bryan Woo are two guys you can get late that can be potential top-end starters. They have enough upside that they’re going to be those guys everyone else wishes they’d drafted by year’s end. Brandon Pfaadt‘s floor is incredibly low (he had some veeeery rough starts last season), but if we get the Pfaadt who showed up in the playoffs, this pick becomes one you brag about.

High upside second and third-year guys with questions about how low their floor is should be an end of the draft strategy you use. Even if it’s just the final two or three picks. Remember, you won’t keep everyone you draft for the entire year. Some will get traded, some will get dropped, some will just flat you suck.

So, instead of using those picks on a guy with a low ceiling, go after the guys with the potential to blow up. Best case, you made a great pick. Worst case, drop them for someone outperforming them on waivers.

I hope this mock draft analysis was useful for you. It’s the type of strategy that’s helped me be highly successful over the years, and it will work for you, too. But be sure to try out as many different strategies as you like. There’s no such thing as being too prepared for your fantasy draft.