In the just-completed Tuesday mock draft (NFBC-style, 15 teams mixed, 5x5), I had Miguel Cabrera fall to me with the fifth pick. I had decided beforehand that if I got him (and his projected 3B eligibility) or Jose Bautista in that slot, I was going to try an experiment: focus on multi-position eligibility as a way to mitigate the risk of injury and maximize upside picks.
The premise is simple: if you have multiple players who qualify at the same position, losing one of them hurts that much less. Rather than a limited pool of potential replacements you can simply shift players around to open up a slot for your best bench bat or available free agent regardless of where they play. Having that kind of flexibility also allows you to take a few more chances on upside, since if one guy flops you can get him out of your lineup fairly easily. The deeper the league (and the uglier 'replacement level' becomes) the more utility this strategy can have, and a 15-team mixed league is just deep enough to make it work.
With that in mind, here were the results (extra positions and round selected in brackets):
C- Wilson Ramos (10), Chris Iannetta (20)
1B- Cabrera (3B? - 1)
2B- Brandon Phillips (3)
3B- Edwin Encarnacion (1B - 11)
SS- Emilio Bonifacio (3B/OF - 9)
CI- Ike Davis (8)
MI- Yunel Escobar (13)
OF- Mike Morse (1B - 4), Jason Heyward (6), Cameron Maybin (7), John Mayberry (16), Alfonso Soriano (17)
Ut- Jason Bourgeois (19)
Bench- Domonic Brown (OF - 24), Tyler Greene (2B/SS - 25), Anthony Rizzo (1B - 30)
P- Cliff Lee (2), Stephen Strasburg (5), Jordan Walden (12), Ervin Santana (14), Hiroki Kuroda (15), Ryan Dempster (18), Matt Harrison (21), Vinnie Pestano (22), Rick Porcello (23)
Bench- Greg Holland (26), Danny Hultzen (27), Felipe Paulino (28), Philip Humber (29)
The obvious thing I didn't do, which would seem to fit this strategy, is take a catcher who will also qualify at first base: a Carlos Santana, Mike Napoli or even a Buster Posey. I did actually have Posey targeted for my first catcher, but he got snapped up in the fifth round just as I was adding him to my sixth round target list. Taking one of them would have also required drafting a third catcher to be useful. Of course that third catcher would have been Josh Donaldson, who in retrospect I should have taken with my last pick instead of Rizzo anyway. C'est la vie.
Otherwise things went just about according to plan. Catcher and second base are the only positions that aren't backed up with plenty of redundancy. An injury to Phillips combined with Greene not winning a starting job in St. Louis would leave me scrambling. But if, say, Davis' Valley fever is worse than the Mets are letting on? I can move Morse to CI, or Bonifacio, and activate whoever on my bench is hot at the moment. In fact, players like Bonifacio (who qualifies at a middle infield position AND somewhere else) are probably the true key to making this strategy pay off, as MI slots can be the hardest at which to find adequate replacements.
Aside from the players already mentioned, other names I targeted but didn't get include Mark Reynolds, Sean Rodriguez, Eduardo Nunez, Jed Lowrie and Brandon Belt. I probably shouldn't have let Ryan Roberts fall to the 15th round either.