The Gimps usual draft strategy is to play for year 2, scooping up card-lite discounts with a future when others are taking platoon complements or one-year playable cards.

The wrinkle in the Champions draft that gave us strategic fits however was the bifurcated Premier and Championship league format. With only two teams going up/down each year, it seemed like teams who started out in the Premier league were likely to stick there for a bit. With the 6 playoff spots offered to Premier teams, missing out on a starting berth in the Premier league seemed like a mistake.

So what to do?

We decided to try to aim for the bottom half of the Premier league, mostly focused on 2024 value and beyond, but with enough 2023 value that we would make the Premier cut off and hopefully stick there.

Our first pick was Juan Soto, who fits all strategies nicely.

From there, things got a bit trickier.

Tyler Glasnow was pick #2, we liked that he was off to a huge 2024 start and had a good amount of 2023 value. Plus coming off surgery, hopefully his arm holds together for a while.

Pick #3 was Luis Robert, very solid card and young enough that he hopefully has lots of future value. Was surprised he was there for us.

Picks #4 and #5 were hard ones, with a lot of baby splitting. We went with Max Fried, who was looking good in 2024 and we felt had a lot of future value but had a limited card in 2023 and Dansby Swanson, who had a lot of WAR and a 1 fielding rating in 23, but seemed to be off to a hopeless start in 2024.

I’ll spare you a further pick by pick recap, but we focused on decent now/good later for the most part, and were generally quite pleased with how things went.

Where the draft went from a good one to one we were very happy with began surprisingly late. We scooped up a lot of absolute lefty destroyers- Stanton, Jake Rogers, Michael A Taylor, Josh Donaldson and also some nice one-year cards vs righties like Brandon Belt. Stanton even had a little 2024 value going.

Mega City Gimps 2024:

This left us with two very good lineups:

Vs righties-

C Langeliers

1b/DH Belt/Ohearn

2b Ryan McMahon

3b Jake Burger

SS Dansby Swanson

LF Juan Soto

CF Luis Robert

RF Lars Nootbar

Vs Lefties-

C Jake Rogers

1b Jake Burger

2b Edmundo Sosa

3b Josh Donaldson

SS Dansby Swanson

LF Juan Soto

CF Luis Robert

RF Michael A Taylor

DH Giancarlo Stanton

Both lineups featured plenty of offense and very solid defense, especially up the middle.

So how did the pitching turn out? Obviously weaker, but good enough perhaps?

Starters:

Glasnow

Fried

Dunning

Darvish

Wacha

Morton

Bullpen:

Brasier

Santos

Soto

Raley

Cruz

Bummer

Feels a little short of where I’d like it to end up, but certainly good enough to run out there for now.

Gimps have high expectations for the coming season!