For those putting together a team on Diamond Mind Online, there’s no more fun day than Draft Day. After all the set up and player evaluation, it’s now time to make your choices and put your team together.
Diamond Mind offers a variety of options for how you run your draft. The following looks at those options, as well as an overview of the draft for Standard Leagues.
Drafting Guide and Tips
For those in Standard Leagues, all drafts run “snake style,” with the order reversing each round. Draft position is selected randomly. There are 28 rounds in a standard draft to fill 25 active roster positions and three Injured Reserve positions.
Each person picks one player per round. After each team picks 23 players, teams can select the “pick least expensive player” feature to speed up the draft. This option may not be available in leagues with limited draft pools.
Ways to Manage the Draft
The following options are available for drafting players on Diamond Mind Online.
Automated Draft
In the automated draft, you select a player by clicking on a position, then going into the player selection system. Sort the players anyway you like – it can be done by last names, years played, teams, and a wide variety of performance criteria. Those criteria include traditional ones such as batting average and fielding percentage, and more complicated ones such as Runs Created vs. League. Take advantage of what the system offers to make the best selection.
Add a player to your roster by clicking on the player’s name. Every team makes 28 choices (including eight pitchers, four of whom are starters). You drag and drop the player you most want for your pick. In case that person is taken, you also can add an alternative. These alternative choices must have a salary equal to or less than the first choice. This process is repeated for all 28 picks.
When the automated draft runs, it automatically takes your alternative pick if your first choice is gone. If both are not available, it then will move to your next pick. For example, if your second round pick and the alternative are both gone, the system picks your third round pick to fill the second round slot. At the end of the draft, the system assigns you players who are the most similar but not yet drafted for the skipped pick.
You complete draft forms by finalizing the order, then confirming it.
Manual Draft
Custom Leagues can draft “old school” – one pick at the time, team by team, just like in the real draft. You go to a Manual Draft HQ where every player can monitor the league’s draft in one place. You can see all your picks to date, as well as everyone’s picks for the last two rounds. You use the same process as in the automated draft to pick players. Every league member gets an email when it comes to their turn to pick. There’s also an option to get notified every time a pick is made by every team in the draft.
A 24-hour period follows each draft during which no free agent moves or trades occur. This allows time for every league member to look over other teams and make sure everything is correct before moving on to make additional moves to strengthen your club.
Strategies in Drafting
Strategies in simulation baseball depend on the type of league being played. But there are some general rules when it comes to managing budgets and building a winning team.
Build a team for your home park. Take advantage of short right-field porches (such as in Yankee Stadium) with power hitting left handers. Cavernous park like Dodgers Stadium? Load up on fly ball pitchers.
Find value. Each round presents the chance to grab someone who provides great value at a discount price. Whether automated or manual, make choices that target at least one or two of these players throughout the draft.
Take chances late. Don’t gamble early. Wait until the late rounds to “take a flyer” and pick a longshot player with upside potential.
Get players you like. It’s more fun if you have a team where most of the players are ones you enjoy watching play, not the superstar on your favorite team’s archrivals.
Don’t sleep on pitchers. People love power and speed, sometimes pushing pitcher selection to later rounds. But there’s typically a huge drop off in the quality of starting pitchers. You want to build a rotation around at least one or two pitchers on the good side of that divide.
Most of all, have fun. Diamond Mind Online is set up so you can join Custom Leagues for particular years or Standard Leagues, but whatever way you go, the idea is to enhance your enjoyment of baseball.
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