Fantasy baseball: The lost art of shadow mocking

Last week, I published Lessons from a Mock Draft Decathlon, featuring the results and my observations after organizing 10 mock drafts. Each was a standard ESPN league with 10 teams and 5×5 rotisserie scoring. The original plan was to discover the optimal draft spot to carry out a specific strategy, but like so many scientific endeavors, this one inspired multiple follow-up experiments.

However, planning and executing another series of mocks was impractical — especially since one of the goals of this project is to develop a process that anyone can do. Certainly, not everyone can fill ample mocks with enough live bodies to render valid results. That’s where average draft position (ADP) comes in. Granted, ADP has its flaws. That said, if you can find an ADP that reasonably represents the market for your league, that will suffice for this exercise.