CBS SportsLine's Fantasy Guide for 2007

Whether it's exchanging commodities or playing Fantasy Baseball, you've heard the money phrase "Buy low and sell high." That might sound nice and all, but unless you know exactly how to do it, it's a pretty cheap cliché that renders nothing.

Until you buy what we're selling.

We here at CBS SportsLine, in addition to offering the best Fantasy games and products in the universe, pay very close attention to helping you win. Whether you're playing against your friends or taking some "units" from people you could care less about, we can help you.

And we won't just give you an instruction booklet, like others might. You get the entire tool kit, with hammer and chisel.

Skeptical? You should be.

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It's a good trait to possess and precisely what keeps us digging under the hood of players and their projectability. We invite you to take a look.

With the help of colleague David Gonos, we have put together a tight collection of Fantasy Baseball strategies to winning your league. We debate and compare players until ... well, until we're distracted by one of the women from sales ... and then we usually forget what we were talking about.

But, seriously, we stay focused on baseball all of our waking hours on every calendar day of the year and pass as much information on to you as our time allows.

Whether it's an auction or a draft -- Head-to-Head or Rotisserie -- Gonos' experience helps him outline the strategies that win. He presents them in a four-part draft preview. Meanwhile, yours truly has spent countless hours this winter studying how to find breakthroughs before they happen. There's always a why behind the what.

It's about finding those latter-round players who produce at early round rates. The sleepers, if you will.

But like the "Buy low, sell high," the buzzword "sleeper" is just as empty. What exactly is a sleeper?

Other than the guy who gets bored an hour into your draft and does a face plant on the table, the sleeper is a player who slips through the cracks on Draft Day. It's valuing the undervalued.

Now, to just name a few sleepers is a pretty worthless way to go about helping you find them. Because after all, when a player is hyped and everyone is ready to target him, how can he really slip past people?

(If a sleeper falls in the early rounds, and he's not there to be picked later, does it make a noise? We suppose he would if he cracked his head on the edge of the table.)

Frankly, it doesn't matter what you think of a player. It matters most what everyone else thinks, because if everyone likes him much less, you get him much later. Again, valuing the undervalued.

We will tell you how in a five-part draft series this spring. Instead of just baby feeding your league a Top 300 list of players to target without explanation -- so everyone now can over-hype them -- we meticulously define how players who fall through wind up breaking through.

Often it's a function of three specific factors -- age, talent and opportunity -- and the culmination of them is success. History and Vince Lombardi say so.

Age is a fact, talent is something we report on and opportunities are like our operators. They're standing by.

• Someone thrust into an expanded role (last year's Chris Ray).
• Someone coming off a quiet rookie year that has them overlooked (last year's Brian McCann, who you might be surprised to know is now our third-ranked catcher).
• Perhaps a talented pitcher who finally finds his niche in Year 3 (last year's Aaron Harang, Bronson Arroyo and Erik Bedard).
• Or perhaps a change of address (last year's Chris Young in spacious San Diego).

We give you rankings, rules of thumb, experts drafts and analysis and up-to-the-minute news in our beefed-up player updates, which we started last spring.

Here's a true story of what we can do for you. A reader-slash-critic of our website sent us feedback -- which we read all of, by the way.

He wanted to know why we "watered-down" our player updates to report every nit-picking time last February the Mets' Pedro Martinez was:

• Spending time in the trainer's room ...
• Throwing long toss ...
• Saying how much his toe hurt ...
• Throwing from the front of the mound ...
• Getting on top of the mound ...
• Trying new shoes ... seriously ...
• Saying how much he would like to pitch in the World Baseball Classic.

Well, if that reader had just read that string of player updates instead of complaining, he would have caught something from the quotes from Pedro.

If you read our analysis last season, signs pointed to Pedro having shoulder issues. (Getty Images)

"Because I want to have my arm in good shape, I need to have my legs in good shape," Pedro had said. "Without a leg, there is no arm. ...

"I know it could affect my shoulder; that's the bad thing that could happen. If I don't protect myself down here, everything reflects on the shoulder."

We know how this turned out. Like a Big Papi blast on Lansdowne Street, we're dropping a bit of irony on you here.

Pedro, who was picked in the early rounds last spring, was able to pitch with some toe pain, get off to a hot start and then develop a calf problem. By the All-Star break, he was useless for Fantasy owners. By the end of the season, he was on an operating table.

And somewhere that reader was asking himself why he complained about knowing every little nuance of spring training.

Following the game every day like we do can help you predict the future almost as Pedro did. He needed surgery on a torn rotator cuff and labrum and is out until at least the All-Star break. (Uh, you might want to avoid him on Draft Day 2007!).

This Pedro example is a true story. We get criticized for helping people too well at times.

Some of the best chuckles during our work days -- save for the times we bumble one with the ladies -- is when we get an e-mail like we got just a few days ago.

"I think it is ridiculous that you basically help people run their teams," it read. "... It is not fair that if some of these owners are so stupid that you should be giving them an edge by telling them what they should do. It is one of the things I have always hated about this site and always will."

People hate us. And we are perfectly fine with it.

But, when they suggest we should not have written the column that anticipated the arrivals of talents like Jered Weaver, Cole Hamels and others, we can't help but to laugh. They get mad when our content helps someone scoop them on the waiver wire in their league.

We enjoy their pain so much, we consistently search for new ways to inflict it.

But, between chuckles and e-mail barbs, we dig into the depths of the AL and the NL. We also make it clear that we never guarantee what will happen, but instead focus our efforts on projecting what might.

When buying commodities, you will want to buy ones that mature. With that in mind, we wish you luck on your choices for Fantasy Baseball in 2007 -- make CBS SportsLine your league's choice -- and leave you with a quick-hitting list of the top Fantasy Baseball hitters under the age of 27 on opening day:

You can e-mail your Fantasy Baseball questions to DMFantasyBaseball@cbs.com. Be sure to put Attn: Dear Mr. Fantasy in the subject field. Please include your full name, hometown and state. Be aware, due to the large volume of submissions received, we do not guarantee personal responses or answers to all questions.