Wolfman: In the CBA, we are allowed each year to draft one player who does not receive either a printed or computer card in the new set. Once you have this player he is yours to keep.  I can use a few examples of players we have on the 2015 Skokie Wolfmen who we are keeping as we don't expect to contend in 2015 but we do in 2016.

From our team last year, we traded for Danny Hultzen, who was ranked in the top 100 prospects but then he was injured for the entire year and has not yet gotten a Strat card since he has not reached the majors. He is with the Seattle Mariners and we expect he will pitch in 2015 and be a great addition for our 2016 team.  In the 2014 CBA draft held last year we picked as our 1st pick, George Springer from the Astros, as our un-carded pick.  Of course for the 2015 Wolfmen he will be one of our key young outfielders and we see him as power hitter for the future and a player people have asked us about in trade talks alot. Just saw Rotochamp lists him in the top 20 as a RF with a projection of 30 HRs.

Additionally, we also picked Matt Davidson who did have time played in 2013, so he had a card but the White Sox choose not to bring him up in 2014, so we still have control of him as Aramis Ramirez our starting 3rd basemen is getting on in his career. Lastly, we traded down a draft pick to also get control of A. J. Grifffin of the A's who was out all of 2014 with arm trouble as his former team would have cut him (we get to protect 24 players before our draft) but we have the expectation he will have many future years as a very good starting pitcher and we are stockpiling young pitchers for our 2016 season (i.e. - doing what the Chicago Cubs have been doing collecting young stars to compete in 2015 or 2016; and since Skokie is a suburb of Chicago, heh!).

We find having this opportunity via your league to get these young players and keep them before they become very good players helps to build a solid team for the future. For those who did receive a copy of my e-book which I wrote about how we saw our way to the 2012 CBA Championship (using a process to rebuild playoff teams in 7 of our first 8 years in the CBA with four world series visits); we now are going in the other route and hopefully it will be taking us three years to rebuild to get back to the playoffs.

My main disappointment in this process is during our 2013 season however. We didn't have a team to go to the playoffs so we went after quite a few young players and there were five players we picked or traded for that are doing fantastic now. Most of these players we grabbed just before they were ready to take off and becomes stars but we traded them all to get back into the world series for older established veterans who had good cards and filled our teams whole. We didn't win the 2013 world series (as we didn't have enough hitting and on-base in a pitcher's park) so was it worth it or did we go too far and now our team is hopelessly one of the worse?  We went from one of the best to worse ...  Here are the names of these five players:

Andrew Cashner SP; Wily Peralta SP; Avisall Garcia OF; D. J. Lemahieu 2B (1); Anthony Rendon 2B/3B
(plus we also had Brett Gardner LF, as in 2012 he was injured hoping he would help us too in 2013) - so you can see if we would have kept these players plus the others one we have - we would be competing in 2015.  This is always the choice, to go all out to win (and let the Wolfman inside of you come out) or to work hard to build a team of good young players that will provide for you pleasure, joy and excitement of teams to run for your league championships for years to come.  It is hard to sit on the sidelines but then you don't know if you will ever have another chance to win your league's championship either.

I mention all of this here because if your league gives you this capability (or might consider to expand the rules of your league and add this possibility in the future), I have three good sources you can consult to find these type of players:

http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/prospects/watch/y2014/#list=prospects
(MLB.com lists what they consider the top 100 prospects.  In the CBA many of the top 20 of these prospects are already spoken for.  I did a research and looked back into the prospects discussed at the end of 2012 for the 2013 season and also at the end of 2013 for the 2014 season and many of these players already have strat cards and are key players for their major league teams. So if you want to know who is going to be the new hot young players watch this list. I always copy the full list to a spreadsheet with all the data given here so in one file I can review them.)

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2209149-mike-rosenbaums-official-year-end-top-100-mlb-prospect-rankings
(Bleacher offers its own 100 prospects via Mike Rosenbaum, and it is just interesting to see how they compare to what is given via MLB.com. But also Bleacher is constantly offering all type of articles and analysis they you may want to visit. They obviously are doing a good job as we see some of these reports on MLB.com.)

http://fantasyrundown.com/2015-mlb-prospect-rankings/
(This site was given to us by Tony Brizzolara, as one of his leagues allows you to draft these young prospects. We haven't had time to review this site before publishing this December 2014 issue but you may want to take a look. Anyway you have about two months to study these three sites to become an expert on all the good young players coming up!!)

Wolfman's Note - In studying the top 100 Prospects which MLB.com recommends, there are a few of those players who did get into MLB in the 2014 season who had cards - you may want to quickly grab those players in the draft. You can see this because on MLB.com it shows in 2014 how the players performed in the minor leagues and the major leagues as well.

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Another quick announcement from the Wolfman ... I hope for January to discuss again various baseball sources who talk about predictions how players will perform in 2015. We will be reviewing in January, the 2015 Bill James Handbook which has such predictions in a special section. MLB.com will release next year a list of the top 800-900 players for 2015 which will be offered in the same format at the top 100 Prospects, that will contain similar information (comments on each player, how they did in years past and what they are expected to do in 2015).  And I know of a few other on-line sources I will discuss next month as well.

I have had a few email conversations with the editor of Baseball HQ (see the interview with Matt Beagle who is one of their writers) and they also offer a lower paid subscription (before the baseball seasons begins) that also includes 2015 projections. We are grateful to Baseball HQ for sharing with their registered members about our newsletter and giving to our members access to a free newsletter as well.  Anyway, if you take your league teams seriously and want to improve your performance, just as the GM's in the real world have to do each year (as shown in the movie, Money Ball) and as they were doing in the recent Winter Meetings with all the players who just changed teams, this research is very important. And thanks to Stats Inc. started by SOM gamer John Dewan and people like Bill James, that there is enough information out to drive you crazy to look at every aspect of baseball and each player's abilities and performance but I assure you, all of this information can help you build your team.  This is the reason why I mention it here and share what I can in our newsletter when I can. These insights are for the future stars of Strat-o-matic Baseball play ... do your homework :-)

WOLFMAN SHAPIRO
editor of the "Ultimate Strat Baseball Newsletter"