I'm flying to NY Thursday to attend Tout Wars for the third time. The first year, I won the mixed league by a wide margin and last year, in the NL-only group, let's just say I didn't do quite as well.

Nonetheless, I'm confident I'll bounce back, in large part because of my rigorous (and tedious) preparation for it. NL Tout Wars is a 13-team 5 x 5, NL-only expert league with two catchers, a first baseman, a second baseman, a third baseman, a shortstop, a corner infielder, a middle infielder, five outfielders, a utility player and nine pitchers. In other words, it's a league of oceanic depth in which at-bats are at a premium and deep knowledge of even fringe major-league regulars and third-tier minor league prospects is required.

To that end, I begin my research by looking at the RotoWire Depth Charts. These are updated daily and give a good overview of the team's stockpile of players at each position, including its top-10 prospects. I'll go team by team, in this case starting alphabetically with the Arizona Diamondbacks, and input each player into a by-position spreadsheet in the rough order in which I'd draft him. For example, I'll put Stephen Drew about fifth in the shortstop column (imagining off the top of my head that Hanley Ramirez, Troy Tulowitzki, Jose Reyes and Jimmy Rollins would go ahead of him, but I can always tweak it later as I get through more of the teams). Moreover, I'll click on each player's name, taking me to his player page. I'll check out his stats from the last few years, his preseason player outlook and the latest news on him.

For Drew, a couple things jump out at me: (1) While he hit a respectable 15 homers in 565 at-bats, he also had 33 doubles and 12 triples. That's 60 extra base hits, more of which could clear the fence this year, especially in hitter-friendly Chase Field; and (2) He had 12 triples (second in the NL last year), for the second straight season. He also had 11 triples in 2008. That means that though Drew stole only 10 bases on 15 attempts, he's fast. And with new manager Kurt Gibson pledging to run more, Drew could benefit. (It's worth noting Gibson was concerned about Drew's durability and Drew's his ceiling might be 15-20 bases rather than the 30 of which Gibson believes he's capable).

While this isn't enough to push Drew ahead of Rollins or Reyes yet, it's something I'll file away that might cause me to go the extra dollar on him during the auction.

I'll continue in this way on every Diamondbacks player, including ones like Chris Young and Justin Upton whose roles are set and with whom I'm familiar. I want to absorb as many details as I can about their performances and add them to the mental database that informs my decision at auction.

Once I've gone through each of the 16 teams (something that takes about 8-10 hours), and all of the relevant players both major league and minor are ordered by position in the spreadsheet, I'll tweak it slightly to reflect my research-refined rankings. Then I'll shrink the font, and re-format the columns so the entire NL-player pool fits on one sheet of paper. I'll print it out and grab a pen to cross out players as they come off the board. That's the entirety of the materials I need for the auction. I'll bring my laptop to check for breaking news during it, but while others are shuffling through multiple papers or doing complex calculations on their spreadsheets, I'll have everything in one place right in front of me and can focus my attention on the auction itself.