The “Beat Mike Kurland” Rotowire Online Championship Draft Review

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  • By Anthony Kates

    The “Beat Mike Kurland” 12-team Rotowire Online Championship is just like any standard Rotowire OC, with one wrinkle: if you win the league, Mike will pay for your Draft Champions buy-in in 2027.

    In Rotowire Online Championship leagues you compete against the 11 managers in your league, doubling your money if you finish first overall, plus the 2879 other teams in OC leagues, fighting for the chance to win the overall and $150,000.

    Last season was my first year playing in an OC and I finished second in my league, with 89 points, 7.5 points behind the league winner, and 439th in the overall, with 18,736.5 points, a cool 7,235.5 points behind the overall champ (but hey, I landed in the top 15% of managers in my first year playing in high stakes leagues, so I’ll take that and a second place finish as a win).

    This year I chose to raise the stakes and play in an OC that I believe will be more challenging, one with multiple fantasy baseball playing heavyweights. Beyond Mike Kurland, the league features Zack Waxman, who is the player with the 51st most earnings in NFBC history; Nelson Sousa, who finished tied for 14th in the Main Event overall in 2025; Daniel Prepas, a former Main Event and Draft Champions league winner; and a handful of other NFBC veterans.

    The league will probably be my hardest fantasy baseball test yet (which is crazy, considering I’ve been playing since 1998) and the draft set the tone.

    In the past, in my competitive re-draft leagues, I have struggled to execute a strategy that I like during the draft. I can usually start out pretty strong in following my blueprint, but I tend to fall apart when more than two or three players are taken off of the top of my queue and I feel like I have to reach to maintain my strategy.

    I had no such problems here. I went into the draft knowing two things: I wanted more than half of my starting hitters to have a 15-homer, 15-stole base upside and I didn’t want to draft a single starting pitcher in the first ten rounds. Needless to say, both missions were accomplished.

    How did I come out of the draft though? Let’s take a look.

    In any league I am in, if I draft at the back-end of the first round, I want to grab one of the last elite shortstops. Normally, that would mean Francisco Lindor, but with his hamate injury, I pivoted instead to a dark-horse AL MVP candidate, Gunnar Henderson. After starting the 2025 season on the IL with a mild right intercostal strain and playing through shoulder impingement and inflammation, he is fully healthy this year. Though his power numbers took a tumble last year, he stole a career best 30 bases and saw significant improvements in his walk and strikeout rates in the second half. I was torn between Fernando Tatis Jr. and Jackson Chourio in the second, but found it tough to pass on Tatis. He has gone 25-25 in three of the last four seasons he has played (and played in just 102 games in the season he didn’t), had 91 or more runs in each of the three healthy seasons with a batting average of .268 or higher. And if Jackson Merrill can stay healthy for the entire season and Ramon Laureano is anywhere close to the offensive producer he was last season, his number swill be even better than in 2025.

    The wait from my second pick to my third was terrible, but I was more than happy to grab Yordan Alvarez with the 34th pick. Though he doesn’t have the stolen base upside of my first two picks, he has the highest home run and batting average ceiling and would have likely had his fifth straight season of 31-plus home runs in 2025 if not for fracturing a bone in his right hand. I had hoped to luck out and grab Manny Machado with my fourth round pick, but he was drafted right before my pick, forcing me to pivot to adding a second outfielder in Wyatt Langford. I believe he is poised for a real breakout in his third season, with a 30-homer, 30-stolen base, 95-run, 90-rbi, .260-batting average season a very real possibility. He made more quality contact, hit the ball harder and hard more often, lifted the ball more, walked more and chased more pitches in 2025 than he did in his rookie season.

    Though I would have loved for Rafael Devers to have dropped five more spots, landing Josh Naylor with my fifth pick is a solid consolation. He will not steal 30 bases again this season, but it would not be surprising if he led first basemen in steals again, especially when you consider he had more stolen bases in Seattle, in just 54 games, than he did in Arizona, in 93 games. The Mariners tied for the third most stolen bases in 2025 and also had the third most stolen base attempts. They like to run and give all of their hitters the green light, often (even Cal Raleigh stole a career best 14 bases). Another 20/15 with 160 combined runs and RBI would be just perfect.

    Over the course of the sixth through tenth rounds I drafted my first two pitchers: Aroldis Chapman in the sixth and Emilio Pagan in the tenth. Chapman was the seventh reliever off the board, with Devin Williams being grabbed two picks later. Other than Josh Hader (who is behind on his pitching schedule this spring), there were no other relievers drafted after the fifth round that I believed had top-5 closer upside (that are locked into a closer’s role, at least) other than Chapman, so I was extremely happy to nab him as my RP1. I nabbed Pagan as my RP2 because I considered him one of the last two or three “safe” closers. I don’t necessarily love Pete Fairbanks in Miami, the Milwaukee situation seems tenuous, Jeff Hoffman was too much of a rollercoaster last year and I don’t want to be the one who is holding the Kenley Jansen bag when he falls apart. I considered taking Dennis Santana, who was pretty great filling in for David Bednar and after he was traded or Daniel Palencia, but decided that Pagan has the higher strikeout potential and might be able to slide into the top-10 closer’s discussion this season.

    In between those two selections, I continued to fill out my offense with hitter’s who all had a 20-homer, 10-stolen base season in 2025: Randy Arozarena, Agustin Ramirez and Jose Altuve. Between Tatis, Langford and Arozarena, I should have 85-plus home runs and 70-plus stolen bases and three potential top-20 fantasy outfielders. Ramirez is one of only two catchers that I believe will hit 20-plus home runs and steal 10-plus bases in 2026. And Altuve is coming off of his third 20-homer, 10-stolen base season in the last four years and is one of the last second basemen I want starting in my lineup (the other was drafted two picks later, in Luke Keaschall).


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    February 24, 2026, 10:30 am