Building a roster through the draft center process is probably the single most critical element to SimLeague Baseball. It also may be the most fun and interesting as there are over 60,000 player seasons and more than 5,000 careers in our database. To be eligible, players must have had at least 50 at-bats or 25 innings pitched in the season. For a quick glimpse, you can view our historical team & season list. Some helpful hints are to follow, but here are some ways to maximize the draft center.
There is an option to load players from a previous SLB team or a real-life team. Real-life teams are usually the top 25 players from the actual team that season. All teams must draft at least six pitchers and twelve position players on the 25 man roster.
In the Draft Center itself, users may limit their searches based on first and last name, position eligibility, season, type of season, team or franchise, awards and handedness as well as up to ten different stat categories.
At the bottom of the page, there is a Player Search Preferences section that can be toggled between Beginner, Normal and Advanced. In Beginner, the categories are all set to the default for the player type and the options are limited. In Normal, the options for Min and Max are still limited, but more stats are available. In Advanced, all stat options are available and users may (and must for any category they would like to use in the search) enter a min and max for each stat.
Selecting Restore Last Search will maintain the last search in the draft center by player type. So if one were to search by catchers with 500 plate appearances or more and then enter the first basemen search, it would be set to 500 or more plate appearances by default.
Clicking on Search Player Database will return the top 50 players (more on other pages if max matches is greater than 50). To draft the player, click on the green plus sign. Clicking on the number, will pop-up the player's BaseballReference.com page. Clicking on the player's name will pop-up his player profile with other draft eligible seasons and deeper stats including defensive stats for each position.
You do not have to draft your entire team all at once. We save your draft picks, so if you want to come back and finish you draft, you can.