Fantasy Baseball Mock Drafts Open on CBS Sports!
CBS continues to assert its leadership in fantasy baseball. With Yahoo and ESPN barely even thinking about Fantasy at this point, Sportsline has opened up an impressive mock drafting system. I used it a couple of times today and was pleased so decided to put up a review for it. NOTE: I did have some trouble getting the console to load completely when first entering the draft lobby. If this happens to you simply hit “F5″ and you should get a full load.
Sportsline gave their mock drafts an entire section on the site. The Mock Drafts home page features fantasy baseball drafting articles, Draft Prep links, and a mock drafting console that takes you into a currently running mock draft with one click. I suggest not clicking on “Join the Next Mock Draft” in the console because it takes you into a draft that is already running. Instead, click on the draft lobby link. That will take you to a page that looks like this:
The times listed in the lobby are Eastern. That’s important to know so that you don’t think you have to wait hours or so that you don’t click on one that is already going, depending on where you are. I don’t know why CBS doesn’t tell us this, but we’ll cut them some slack. They offer a ton of drafts – 5×5 roto NL/AL, heads up, AL only, NL only, and all of them are prescheduled. The traffic, as of today, does not keep up with the number of drafts starting. Therefore you end up with a lot of AI players in your drafts. I had a draft earlier today that had 4 slots out of 10 filled and another draft where I was the only player. Players also come in and out of the draft due to the “Join a Draft Now” feature, which is a bit annoying.
Choose the draft that looks good to you and then wait for it to start. When it’s time for it to start the draft window doesn’t open automatically – you have to click “Join Draft” on the Home or Lobby pages or the “Draft in Progress” link in the horizontal navigation bar. The draft lobby loads instantly and smoothly. If it does not fully load for you hit the F5 key to refresh. I’ve had to refresh many of my lobbies today. The Draft Room is pretty straightforward, which is appreciable. There is a lot of information to pack into this one little room. Here is a screenshot:
The drafting experience can be confusing at first, especially if there are a lot of AI “Autopickers” in your draft. The drafts move very quickly because the Autopickers draft immediately. If you are the only person participating in the draft it will almost always be your turn. You have to use much of your 45 second time clock looking at who the computer just drafted. Once more players are participating in the drafts this won’t be an issue.
The draft has four major sections – Sortable Available Players list, Queue, Sortable Drafted Players list, and a chat box. You can sort available players by position, projection, and three year average. You can sort drafted player by team and round. When you click on an available players name a window pops up immediately. This window gives you the ability to draft the player or queue the player. It also gives you a helpful preseason outlook and a graphical fantasy trends analysis. This extra information is a very cool addition to the mock drafting experience. I felt like I was learning while I was drafting.
When my first draft was over I was expecting to get an option to send the draft results to email (like on MockDraftCentral.com). That option never appeared. I searched the site for an option to see draft results and didn’t find that either. Maybe I just haven’t found it, but this was my biggest disappointment with the system.
Overall CBS Sports’ Mock Drafting is a nice addition. I’m happy to have another venue to practice mock drafting, even though MockDraftCentral.com still has a much superior product. Both sites have plenty of room to make improvements, and I’m sure we’ll see some improvements to both sites as the fantasy industry grows. Please leave a comment if you guys know of any other Mock Drafting options available now (Mid January). Thanks!