How much did the first five picks matter?

First snow in Fairbanks, October 1st Introduction The following post probably won’t be of much interest to people outside of the fantasy baseball community, and maybe not even then, but I play in a 10 team fantasy baseball league composed of players scattered around the United States that are friends with Ned Rozell, aka Chicken Stanley. I used to play as the Swingley Athletics, but when John Fisher moved the team out of Oakland I was disgusted enough to become the Phanatics in support of my wife’s Phillies. I’ve long wondered how important the draft is to success or failure in the league and made the bold claim to Ned that I thought the top five picks would either make or sink your season. It turns out it is nowhere near that simple (of course). The following analysis looks at how the draft and all the decisions we made throughout the year contributed to our success or failure. Method Data. Everything comes from the Yahoo Fantasy API. I pulled every team’s roster for every day of the…