Fantasy Baseball

The draft is over. Weeks, perhaps months of copious fantasy baseball research shines through when examining the results. Yet the road to claiming a championship has only begun.

Some managers, confident of their drafted squads, will simply kick back and wait for Opening Day. That's probably better than the person who has overreacted to every spring training tidbit and already made 20 moves.

After an offseason of research and preparation, it's finally here.

It's time for your annual fantasy baseball draft, and what you need now is all of that offseason research and information at your fingertips in one easy, convenient article.

That's exactly what you'll find here in Bleacher Report's 2016 Fantasy Baseball Draft Cheat Sheet.

Your fantasy baseball draft is quickly approaching its third hour, and while all the preparation you went through has paid off—you're pretty happy with the core of your team—you're at a loss as to who to take in the final few rounds.

All you know is that you're tired, you can no longer stand the sight of your fellow owners and you don't want to sit there anymore. So you start to panic, and in the process, you forget about the late-round sleepers you had targeted weeks ago.

A player can turn out to be a bust for a number of different reasons when it comes to fantasy baseball, and it's all about trying to identify and avoid those busts on draft day.

Regression is the most obvious reason for a player to bust, as banking on a player matching the previous year's production is not always a sound strategy.

Stats like batting average on balls in play (BABIP) and fielder independent pitching (FIP) serve as useful tools in predicting regression in batting average and ERA, while a player's track record also has to be taken into account.

Every season, a handful of players punch in the right coordinates and make the light speed-esque jump from promising up-and-comer to genuine star.

Arguably the most important challenge for fantasy owners is to identify those players early and snatch them up before their stock soars into the firmament.

As the exhibition slate rolls forward and we edge closer to the start of games that count, here's a look at 10 bust-out fantasy candidates.

A couple of notes before we proceed:

It's important to balance risk and upside when it comes to assembling a fantasy baseball roster, and one way to do that is by looking for signs of regression.

Production relative to players' previous track records, second-half declines and telling advanced statistics like batting average on balls in play (BABIP) can all help forecast player regression.

So who are the guys to avoid this year?

Now that spring training games are officially underway and the calendar has turned over to March, fantasy baseball draft season is upon us.

Anchoring your fantasy rotation with someone like Clayton Kershaw is great, but it's generally the next eight pitchers you draft who will determine how your season plays out.

The 2015 MLB season gave us one of the deepest and most productive rookie classes in recent memory, as a number of first-year players became major contributors on the fantasy baseball landscape.

Spring training is about to begin, and so too should your preparations for the upcoming fantasy baseball season.

While most drafts are still a few weeks away, nobody wants to be caught unprepared by relying on the preset rankings supplied by whatever site you use and haphazardly scribbled names on a sticky note that you can barely make out.

The Super Bowl is officially in the rearview mirror, and that means it will only be a short time before pitchers and catchers begin reporting to spring training and the 2016 MLB season is officially underway.

We're still roughly two months from Opening Day, but the time is now to start preparing for your yearly fantasy baseball drafts.