For the last several years, I’ve played almost exclusively in auction leagues. It’s a personal preference that isn’t unique or “correct.” I have a lot of reasons for this preference. That’s not what we’re going to talk about today, though. Instead, let’s spend some time touting one of the virtues of traditional snake drafts – the sublime schadenfreude of sniping other owners’ picks.

Obviously this can happen in auctions, too. The traditional draft structure just lends itself much more easily to the practice. Until you’ve blown your budget in an auction, you can at least in theory have any player on the board you want. In a snake, you can only watch in horror as your rivals, seeming to have a direct pipeline to the NSA agent currently monitoring your home, demolish your queue. Everyone reading this knows the feeling of utter helplessness. When you’re on the other end, though? Delightful.

On Wednesday, I participated in an early mock draft with 11 of my RotoBaller colleagues. You can find the results here. We’ll have articles covering the blow-by-blow over the next couple of days, so keep an eye out for those if you’re so inclined. It’s a convenient jumping off point for this discussion, given that I likely won’t participate in too many more snakes this year.

That means I will largely miss out on the moments when the draft chat fills with capital letters and swear words after a pick. It’s most fun to see the room collectively groan when you’ve made the pick in question, but it can still be entertaining when someone else inspires jealousy. Provided, of course, the player wasn’t someone you wanted.

A well-timed snipe is a thing of beauty, but it’s not easy to pull off. You need to parse a lot of information quickly. How many teams still need to fill a given position? Do the default rankings on whatever draft client you’re using make sense, or are they tilted into the realm of the absurd? What about ADP? Have the other owners in your league expressed a fondness for this player, consciously or otherwise? Are your rivals susceptible to hype, or are they risk-averse? Is anyone inebriated? (Somebody is always inebriated.)

You also have to be careful about trying too hard. Reaches often actively harm your roster, but more importantly for this exercise, you’ll have failed to successfully troll your leaguemates. You want that to be the source of their derision, not the fact that you misread the room and took Byron Buxton way too early. It’s an occupational hazard, but it also defeats the purpose.

The best time in the draft for a snipe is the middle rounds. At that point in the draft, all the obvious choices are off the board, and almost everyone’s priorities are different.  It becomes more acceptable, more interesting, and arguably safer to make bold choices. This may not hold true for owners who assembled a volatile portfolio with their early picks, but in general, the middle of the draft is when you begin to see more people taking caution and chucking it deep.

Mocks and ADP data are useful to a point, but there’s a lot of value in “get your guy.” After all, if you’re right about his 2018 performance, you’ll feel even better about the pick at the end of the year than you do right now, listening to your competition grumble about how they were totally gonna take that guy next. Don’t get me wrong – while it wasn’t premeditated, I thoroughly enjoyed how many of my colleagues were dismayed by the Ronald Acuna pick. When my next pick rolled around and Ozzie Albies was still available, I cackled at the reaction of RotoBaller’s resident Braves fan, Max Petrie. But I also made those picks because I believe in those players. That’s what makes a snipe truly satisfying.

Those two certainly made me feel a lot better about both Noah Syndergaard and Zack Greinke going to the teams that picked right before me in those rounds.

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