What’s a Keeper?
Keepers are players who were on your roster at the end of a season (no matter how you got them: drag, trade, or free agency) that you want to keep for the next season. The rest of the players on your end of year roster get released into the draft.
Example: You want to keep players who are inexpensive to keep vs their free market value. For example, if you draft Henry Rowengartner as a rookie for $5 and he wins the AL Cy Young, his free market value would be significantly higher (let’s say $30). But you can keep him for $5 in the first season. After that, he get’s a little more expensive.
Draft Advantage: You start the draft with $260 minus the price of up to three keepers. If you keep Rowengartner then you start the draft with $255 ($260 – $5 for Rowengartner) and gain value because Rowengartner would be worth $30 if he was drafted in the auction.
How to Set Your Keepers
Start by reading the league Keeper rules.
Open a Yahoo! tab with last year’s draft results
- Visit your Yahoo Fantasy Dashboard
- Find the menu item draft > last season’s rosters
Scroll down to your team to see who you can keep and approximately at what price.
Anyone with a “-” or a value less than $5 can be kept for a minimum of $5 (see the rules).
Open a tab with last year’s Baldelli’s Keeper spreadsheet
To get the exact dollar amount, you also need to check if the player gets a raise. To do that, open the league keeper spreadsheet and scroll right to the latest season. The first year you keep a player they do not get a raise. The second and third years you need to increase their salary by $5 respectively. After the third year a player cannot be kept.
You start the auction draft with $260 draft dollars (fake money), which disappears at the end of the draft. Email me when you know your keepers and I will confirm the prices. You must email me the keepers or they will not be kept.