Fantasy Baseball Mock Draft: Early-Round Strategy & Picks (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. Here is some advice specific to the XXX rounds of the draft. You can find the full mock draft here.

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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.

Corbin Carroll game-tying triple!

Kid is good pic.twitter.com/4fz1h2TLGa

— Talkin’ Baseball (@TalkinBaseball_) June 13, 2023

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.

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