Collette Calls: Market Watch

The LABR mixed draft took place this past Tuesday night online at RTSports.com. While the AL and NL LABR leagues have unique roster restrictions, the mixed league plays out as it does for everyone else with standard roster construction, a six-man bench, and free movement between the active and reserve list.

Paul Sporer and I co-own a team in the league, which is not very challenging because we share the same fantasy baseball brain. Our history goes back nearly 15 years now; he's Anakin while I'm Obi-Wan if you will. The LABR draft is different from the AL and NL leagues because it is a draft and it is online while the other two leagues are auctions and held in Phoenix, Arizona. The upside of that is those people that do drafts rather than auctions get a very early look into how the experts are drafting players. This is important because the experts have an influence on ADP reports - not to the extent that Nate Silver influences political coverage, but it does happen.

Before looking at the LABR draft, let's take a look at the biggest changes in the NFBC ADP Report. The following 10 players had the largest drops in their ADP over the past week:

Storen and Clippard were direct results of Rafael Soriano's new deal with the Nationals. Corey Hart fell because of the uncertainty of his return date. Brian Wilson and Carlos Lee are going to continue to drop until they sign a contract somewhere while Carpenter's drop will free fall from here now that he has announced he will not pitch in 2013. It is worth noting that the 10th largest drop was only half a round in a 15-team draft.

Conversely, here are the 10 players who saw their value rise the most over the past week:

Again, more closer news impacts these rankings as Astros manager Bo Porter said Jose Veras is the leading candidate for the closer role. Rondon still has the job in Detroit by the latest reports while Soriano's new deal was further realized by mock drafters who were already assuming he would at least get the closer role in Detroit if not Washington as a Boras client ends up in one of those two places. Like the players who fell, there was not much variance with most player as only Grili, Berkman, and Veras moved up a round in their ADP.

The 15-team mixed LABR draft took place in between the ADP reports from NFBC, but frankly, it would not have mattered. The draft threw ADP out the window as soon as Justin Upton and Bryce Harper were both drafted in the first round. The average change in a player's ADP between the NFBC reports was just -0.07 while the difference between the NFBC report from 2/14 and LABR was -5.32 and -5.53 from the report on 2/7.

In all, there was an equal distribution of players who went above or below their NFBC ADP with only 37 players coming within even two points of their published ADP. These were the players whose LABR draft position fell the most compared to their NFBC ADP:

Only one of those players, Hart, had his spot fall due to injury. The rest of the players are position players that went four or more rounds below where everyone else has drafted them in NFBC mock drafts. It is rather astonishing that Myers continues to have such a high ADP given the fact the Rays will undoubtedly send him to the minors to stall his service clock if he does not sign a team-friendly deal before the start of the season.

Here are the 10 players that zoomed up the charts in the draft the other evening:

Each of these players went at least six rounds ahead of their ADP and yours truly rostered three of them in Carter, Rosenthal, and Ramirez.

Lastly, these were 39 players that had ADP's of 450 or better in the NFBC report that went undrafted in LABR. Chris Carpenter was the obvious player there but the following players joined him: Darin Ruf, Nolan Reimold, Brian Wilson, Eduardo Nunez, Josh Donaldson, Zack Wheeler, Miguel Gonzalez, Mike Zunino, Bronson Arroyo, Ervin Santana, Luis Cruz, Ted Lilly, Gerardo Parra, Wilton Lopez, Kyle Kendrick, David DeJesus, John Danks, Geovany Soto, Donovan Solano, Ivan Nova, Derek Norris, Ryan Hanigan, and John Mayberry. Of that group, Eduardo Nunez and his steals are likely the biggest miss while Mayberry's power and Nova's strikeout abilities are certainly rosterable skills.

If you would like to see the complete report for the NFBC data and how it compares to the LABR draft, it can be found here.