12 Team Roto League Mock Draft Review

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  • By Anthony Kates

    Last Updated on February 11, 2026 1:15 pm by Anthony Kates | Published: February 11, 2026

    To kick off draft season, I’ve been participating in mock drafts with fantasy baseball analysts from across the industry. I took part in my first 12 team roto draft recently and was “gifted” the 12 spot. The team and league setup is along the same lines as the 12 team high stakes leagues on the NFBC website, with two catchers, a first baseman, a second baseman, a third baseman, a shortstop, a middle infielder, a corner infielder, five outfielders, a utility hitter and nine pitcher spots. We drafted just the 23 starting positions.

    I will take you through each of my picks, sharing my thought process and team building strategy, with some nuggets of observation of others’ picks thrown in.

    I am not traditionally a grab a pitcher in the first round kind of guy, especially in shallower leagues like a 12 teamer, but picking at the turn changed my mind on it. I like Garrett Crochet more than Skenes in re-draft solely due to volume and wins. The ERA and WHIP should be close enough to stomach, but a five or more win difference is not. Maybe the Pirates prove me wrong and their off-season additions lead to more wins with Skenes, but I chose the relative safety of the Red Sox offense over theirs. Getting Francisco Lindor with my second pick was a no-brainer. I want to land one of the top-4 fantasy shortstops in every single re-draft league that I am in and could have just as easily leaned towards Gunnar Henderson, but I preferred the consistency with Lindor. Three straight season with 100-plus runs, 31-plus homers, 29-plus stolen bases and 86-plus RBI with no real reason to expect regression in his age-32 season. If I didn’t grab one of the two shortstops, there was only one other player I would have considered at 13 and that is Fernando Tatis, Jr.

    A round two note: I will not be drafting Cal Raleigh in the second round, even in a two catcher league. The odds are completely stacked against him replicating even 85% of his 2025 season, I would much rather grab an elite player at a much shallower position and I try not to be in the business of buying the year after a career year. I’m not discounting what he did last year, because it was absolutely incredible, I just wouldn’t pay a top-40 pick for him this year.

    If you read my first mock draft review last week, you know I want one of the top three or four second baseman or I want to wait until after pick 100 to grab one. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I drafted Brice Turang again. He was the most valuable fantasy second baseman in 2025, leading the position in runs (97), with the second most RBI (81), second best batting average (.288) tied for fifth most stolen bases (24) and tied for eighth most home runs (18), and was one of just three second baseman with 15-plus home runs and 20-plus stolen bases (Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Ceddane Rafaela were the other two). He may not reach 18 home runs again in 2026, but he should still hit double-digit home runs, steal upward of 25 to 30 bases, score plenty of runs in one of the better lineups in baseball and have plenty of opportunities to drive in runs batting around Jackson Chourio, William Contreras and Christian Yelich. I grabbed Freddie Freeman at the turn because I wanted the last “trustworthy” elite first baseman on the board. Josh Naylor was drafted 19 picks later and Ben Rice 27, but neither has the elite resume or lineup that Freeman does. He isn’t the monster producer he was in 2022 and 2023, his first two seasons in Los Angeles, but he has hit at least 21 home runs with a .282 batting or better and 170 combines runs and RBI for each of the past nine, non-Covid seasons. You just know what you get with Freeman and that’s pretty much a guaranteed top-40 fantasy player.


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    February 11, 2026, 1:15 pm