(*) MASTER NOTES: Laptops at Draft

Recent discussions on our BaseballHQ Radio podcast have sparked an interesting conversation at the BaseballHQ.com subscriber forums about using laptops at draft.

Both Todd Zola and I had said on the podcast that we don’t use laptops. Todd doesn't use one at any draft, and I don't use one at Tout Wars (more on which in a moment).

This news prompted a Forums member to say he was “frankly shocked.”

I’m frankly shocked that he’s frankly shocked. Keep that man away from loud noises!

Just because I don’t use a laptop at Tout Wars doesn’t mean I think it’s a bad idea in general. I think it’s a good idea under some circumstances and a bad idea under others. So I think the only “right answer” to the question of whether using a laptop at draft is a good idea is, “It depends.”

I’ve been using a laptop for years. I started back in the early 1990s, using Lotus 1-2-3 to build a worksheet (they didn’t have tabbed workbooks back then) that calculated the projected standings and money situation for all 12 teams in my AL-only home league draft.

The problem was that my computer at the time was a little laptop with 640 Kb of RAM, a floppy disk drive and an 8086 processor.

Using that underpowered computer for a draft was like driving a Toyota Tercel in the Indy 500. I entered the first player’s name into his team and hit “Enter,” and that little machine just couldn’t keep up. It might still be trying to put Greg Gagne’s stats onto Cal’s Clan.

Later on, as the computers got better and the software improved, I developed and improved an elaborate Excel workbook that now lets me:

• Track league standings, with empty roster slots temporarily filled by the average production of remaining available players
• See the Standings Gain Points and cost per SGP of all remaining free agents
• And monitor my opponents’ money situations: How much each team has left to spend, how many roster slots each team has to fill, and all their maximum bids.

It’s a hell of a handy package, if I say so myself, and it has helped me be pretty successful in my home league.

But...

Using my Excel book or any software means I need time to input data at the draft table—to put the player’s name and salary onto the correct team.

In my home league, that’s not a problem. It's a 12-team keeper league where most teams come in with 10 or more roster slots already filled. We have to nominate and auction only about 140 players or so over the six hours of draft, and there's plenty of time between player nominations to enter the player and salary data into the master list.

Tout Wars is a different story. Tout is a non-keeper 15-team league with seven reserve rounds, so we have to distribute 450 players—three times as many as my home league—including having to auction the 345 active-roster players. All in roughly the same amount of time.

As a result, the Tout auction is maintained at the relaxed pace of the Black Friday sale at Wal-Mart. And that lightning pace just doesn't allow me to enter data quickly enough.

I could do it, but I fear the cost would be too great. I wouldn’t be able to watch the other guys at the table. I wouldn’t be able to just think about what I want to do in response to what’s going on. And I wouldn’t be able to kibitz.

In short, while other guys at Tout use laptops, I have found it impractical—for me, under those circumstances. (I also had a laptop screen fail at Tout one year.)

So I don’t use a laptop at Tout.

I think I might try to use a laptop this year just to track the money and roster slots. All I need to do is enter a salary into a slot, which shouldn’t take more than a second or two. But I’ll abandon even that if it means I’m being taken out of the moment at the table.

So if I end up just using my grid and cheat sheets from the BHQ Custom Draft Guide, don’t be shocked.

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