Your fantasy baseball drafts are serious business. It doesn’t matter if you’re playing high-stakes NFBC or a simple home league with you and, what your significant other casually refers to as “your idiot friends.” You may have invested money in an MLB Draft Guide or, due to budgetary restrictions, just spent countless hours researching players and draft strategies online on your own. Whatever the case may be, winning a fantasy baseball championship takes a massive amount of work and it’s a six-month long, daily grind. So, when it comes to your draft, you need to be well-rested, 100-percent present in the moment and ready for war. Any sort of deviation from the plan could spell disaster.
Unfortunately, this pandemic has wiped out the concept of an in-person draft. Those were the best. It wasn’t just the excitement of a live draft and the camaraderie found at the gathering – loads of fun, for sure. But, unless you were hosting the draft, you had to get your shit together before heading out. You printed your rankings, charged your laptop, built spreadsheets, had extra pens and paper, grabbed a bite to eat, took a dump; whatever you needed to do before leaving your house, you took care of business. Those who didn’t were at a disadvantage and that showed by the end of the draft as your team looked amazing and theirs looked like that dump you left in the toilet.
Nowadays, everything has changed. With it all being done online, drafting from home sucks. Maybe you left your laptop at work and you have to use the family computer which is sitting right in the middle of your living room. That’s fine if no one is home, but your stupid kid is sitting there playing Call of Duty all afternoon and screaming obscenities into his headset. Or how about when you go to print your rankings and realize that you’re A. out of paper and B. after you run to Staples and pick up a pack, you come home to find out you’re also out of ink because your daughter printed out some ridiculous online drawing she liked? Makes you want to slam your head in a door a thousand times, doesn’t it?
Despite drafting from home, you have to treat it the same as any other draft you’ve done in years past. That means your pre-draft work is done at least an hour before your draft starts. You need a clear mind and body. You print those rankings out well ahead of time. You make sure you have a few extra pens, some scrap paper and all your research materials handy. If you need to eat, then do so beforehand. You don’t want to be dealing with food while sitting at your computer. That meatball parm sandwich can get messy and you certainly don’t want to have to run to the bathroom in the middle of the seventh round. Water, beer, cigarettes, weed, whatever you prefer to have at your draft, make sure it’s all right there for you so you don’t have to spend any time looking. Your focus is your draft, not “why can’t I find anything in this house when I need it?”
You also need to be comfortable. You need to secure a safe space. If that means locking yourself in the basement or the guest room, so be it. If you have to pick a fight with your wife so she stops talking to you for the next six hours, pick that fight. Yell at your kids for no reason, send them to their rooms, tell them to think about what they did wrong and you’ll be back to hear their answers after your draft. After they walk the damned dog, that is. You need to be left alone so you can concentrate on all aspects of the draft and a cacophony of whining and crying voices will only distract you from the task at hand.
Drafting from home can create a deluge of problems for you. Even if your family and friends mean well, they are only going to get in your way. Who wouldn’t love for someone to bring them a snack or a beer during their draft? But even those fifteen seconds you sacrifice to say thank you and answer the question “how’s your draft going?” could mean the difference between winning it all and humping a garbage, fourth-place finish.