Fantasy baseball is one of the most popular fantasy sports right now. But with so many sources of information floating around, it can be difficult to get the winning advantage against your competitors.
One of the best ways to gain the upper hand has got to be draft software.
Draft software is a great way to practice your skills, with some tools offering you the ability to create mock drafts.
If you’re a more seasoned player, fantasy baseball draft software not only gives you great information to work with, but can also help automate a lot of the time-consuming tasks on draft day, leaving you to focus on the most important thing: winning.
Choosing The Best Fantasy Baseball Draft Software
Best Overall: FantasyPros Draft Wizard
FantasyPros Draft Wizard comes out on top as the best fantasy baseball draft software and has been the winner of the FSTA Best Fantasy Sport Service/Tool award from 2014 to 2016.
Draft Wizard combines its Draft Assistant tool and a Mock Draft simulator to help you achieve the best possible outcomes at the end of the season.
The Draft Assistant tool comes with its own synchronization or as a Manual Assistant.
Draft Assistant uses the Draft Tracker to sync directly with other fantasy baseball drafts. It eliminates players who’ve already been chosen and ranks available players from best to worst. This feature is only available with the MVP and Hall Of Fame (HOF) subscriptions.
The Manual Assistant is available for all levels of FantasyPros subscriptions. This allows you to manually mark off unavailable players.
Draft Assistant is a tool that optimizes your draft picks and keeps track of your drafts to suggest the best draft picks at every selection. These suggestions come from consensus recommendations compiled by various experts.
Another great feature of the Draft Assistant is the ability to view the percentage odds of players being available for the next turn.
The Mock Draft simulator can complete your mock draft in minutes and customizes your baseball draft with roster positions, keepers, and scoring rules.
It doubles as a great learning tool for beginners to create a fantasy baseball draft by letting you test strategies and revert your mock draft picks.
You also get an instant evaluation at the end of each of your mock drafts.
Pros
- In-draft suggestions based on expert rankings
- Good learning tool
- Optimizes picks for your draft
- Syncs directly to most major league hosting platforms
Cons
- PRO subscription plan doesn’t support league synchronization
Alternative: RotoLab
RotoLab offers some fantastic features like drafting, roster management, and player projections.
RotoLab partnered with BaseballHQ to provide you with some of the best player predictions possible. You can use either the expert predictions or manually edit them to suit your preferred drafting needs.
Managing your draft roster is easy, with a built-in trade evaluator that predicts what you would lose or gain in each trade.
Their drafting tool is one of the easiest to use, providing you with all the league rosters, draft pool lists, budget information, positional needs, and stat category goals. All you need to do is choose your player, team, and salary and let the RotoLab software take care of the rest.
Pros
- Easy way to draft
- Insightful player projections
Cons
- No auto sync feature
Best Value: RotoChamp
RotoChamp works on Windows, Mac, iPads, mobiles, and tablets. Their cloud-based program allows you to access your data on pretty much any device with internet access.
RotoChamp is helpful for creating customized drafting, with the ability to customize the player stats and league rankings based on your drafting needs. It also boasts over 50 categories to choose from in your league settings.
After each of your players are drafted, it adjusts to give you updated projected player standings.
There are multiple projection systems to choose from, including Steamer, CAIRO, and RotoChamp.
You can also track your drafting progress by setting category targets.
All of these features are currently available for under $40.
Pros
- Free Trial version
- Cloud-based
- Customizable
Cons
- Compatibility problems on tablets
Alternative: 2021 Fantasy Baseball Draft Tool
The 2021 Fantasy Baseball Draft Tool provides a fully customizable experience for fantasy baseball players.
This drafting tool accommodates both auction and standard draft formats, both with and without keepers. Auction values are consistently updated throughout the draft, so you’re always getting the most up-to-date information.
Its key features are its fully customizable cheat sheets and projections based on your league settings, access to updated cheat sheets and current projections, and player projections for every player.
Having access to the information that these features provide will set you apart from the competition and guarantee that you draft the winning team on draft day.
This software is available for Microsoft Excel and is consistently updated. A great feature that has been added in past updates is projections for holds for starting and relief pitchers.
Pros
- Players pre-populated for you
- Consistent software updates
- Fully customizable based on your league settings
Cons
- Compatibility is limited
Best Budget: RotoWire
RotoWire is one of the best fantasy sports tools available on a budget, costing around $9 as a one-off yearly payment.
The software is customizable for your league, allowing you to track your entire draft and other player picks.
RotoWire stores all your data on your PC, and can be used offline until draft day. Updating your draft is easy, and only requires you to connect to the internet when using the “update projections” tool. This will pull up the newest league projections.
You can also use RotoWire for multiple mock drafts. One limitation with RotoWire is not being able to run mock auctions as part of your mock draft.
If you’re already subscribed to RotoWire’s paid baseball subscription, you get unlimited access to their draft software for free.
Pros
- Transfer drafts to other devices
- No internet connection required
- Can run multiple drafts
Cons
- Doesn’t run mock auctions
- No direct synchronization to league hosting platforms
Alternative: DraftBuddy
DraftBuddy is a two-in-one drafting tool, including DraftBuddy and a baseball compiler tool.
The baseball compiler helps you to create custom cheat sheets, while DraftBuddy manages the other aspects of your draft. Both tools support draft picks, auction leagues, and fantasy point scoring systems.
The draft manager can be used to manually input draft picks in real-time. DraftBuddy eliminates players from your cheat sheets as they are knocked off, and updates various reports like team rosters.
Player projections are updated throughout the preseason and include projections from authorities like RotoChamps.
DraftBuddy is a completely free option for a great drafting tool. It’s listed as an alternative to our budget pick because of its limitations in manually inputting data.
Pros
- Regular updates to reports and player projections
- Free
- Projections sourced from experts
- Available cross-platform for Windows and Mac
Cons
- Manual data entry
How To Choose The Best Fantasy Baseball Drafting Software
Drafting your fantasy baseball team correctly guarantees your win.
To choose the software that best suits you, you need to know a few drafting tips that could help influence your decision.
Drafting Tips
Everyone who has ever played fantasy baseball knows that your drafting strategy comes from your league settings.
When you begin your draft, knowing the scope of your league’s framework means knowing how to dominate your draft picks.
A good place to start is to find out what positions you need to start, and which players qualify for these positions.
There are standard categories for positions like hitting and pitching. Having a good knowledge of all of the players’ skills and stats will help you pick the perfect player for that role.
Hitting categories are commonly split up into batting average, stolen bases, home runs, and runs batted in.
Similarly, standard pitching categories are saves, strikeouts, earned run average (ERA), wins, and how well a pitcher has kept runners off of their basepaths. This is known as WHIP and is calculated by dividing the total numbers of innings a player has pitched by the sum of their hits and walks.
Good fantasy coaches know that it’s not enough to just know your players’ stats. You have to know how to build a team that works well together.
That means you can’t just throw together a team of players with great stats. You carefully select players that have stats that complement one another to give you the best team in your league.
On that note, make sure you have your own rankings. Using draft board rankings may be easier, but having your own makes it easy to keep a cool head if there are any split-decision picks during the game.
Mock drafts aren’t only a practice run for the season.
You need to keep up to date with player predictions and player projections, as well as the parameters of your league’s auctions. A great way to put this information to the test is to run as many mock drafts as possible before draft day.
Choosing Software
With these drafting tips in mind, choosing software that suits your league specifications is a cinch.
The best software is one that provides reliable player stat information, predictions, and projections and can make drafting easier by continuously updating player rosters.
Conclusion
There is no question that the software that incorporates almost every tool you’ll need to draft the best team possible is FantasyPros Draft Wizard.
Not only can you optimize your draft picks, track your draft, and receive draft recommendations from a team of experts, but the ability to simulate mock drafts could be the key to your success on draft day.
Mock drafts can help to map out your team and strategy with no risk, allowing you to make the changes you need to ensure your players are set up for victory.
The bonus here is the automatic synchronization that can move your mock draft to your league draft effortlessly.