How to Dominate a Yahoo Fantasy Baseball Draft

So, you've signed up for a Yahoo fantasy baseball draft. They may not be the pinnacle of fantasy competition, but they can still be fun.

Here's my approach the standard Yahoo formats.

Yahoo hews more closely to the traditional fantasy scoring than ESPN does, which gives you a little less room for exploitation.

1. Look for ADP discrepancies

Yahoo publishes their default rankings and ADP, and these will be primary drivers of other teams' behavior in the draft rooms. You need to mine these for values.

DraftKick, of course, has Yahoo ADP loaded in it, so this is pretty easy. You just need to notice which players' projected ranks are farthest off from their ADP.

There's not necessarily any rhyme or reason to it, but there are some things to look for: Drafters tend to get overly excited about young and unproven players. They tend to undervalue steady veterans who put up good (but boring) numbers every year.

There can also be discrepancies if you are in a points league, which brings me to #2.

2. Don't ignore SP

Yahoo added points leagues as a public league option in 2025, and quietly set it as the default option as well.

Their initial rankings and ADP were still based on categories/rotisserie, which offered an arbitrage opportunity for points leagues. At the time of writing, it seems like that have now shifted to reflect points, which offers an opportunity for categories/rotisserie drafters instead.

But I think their ADP and rankings still make a big mistake, even for the default points leagues. In Yahoo's points scoring, pitchers score less than hitters. But don't be deceived by total points! We only care about points above replacement. Compared to the replacement level pitcher and hitter, the respective positions are still at their normal levels.

The current Yahoo ADP has pushed down SP values across the board, and I suspect it's because people are naively looking at raw point totals.

In either points or categories/rotisserie, I think the current strategy is to tilt heavy on good SP, at least while prices are low.

We'll have to see how this plays out, though. And maybe the values will shift again before the season starts.