How do you set up auto-draft rankings for Fantasy Baseball?

Backstop

I may have to miss my draft. I know that people generally get screwed by the auto-draft unless they set up the player rankings carefully. I don't know what "carefully" means. What are the general guidelines for setting up rankings? Why does the auto-drafter sometimes draft a terrible unsigned middle reliever with the fourth pick when there are eighty-five great players left?

So obviously the method of ranking all players #1 to #500 and going with that is poor.

One thing I think is maybe set the best-ranked of each position in order with #1 through 12, then repeat with the second-best with 13 through 25 and so forth. Like:
#1 1B, #1 2B, #1 3B, #1 SS, #1 OF, #1SP, #1RP, #2 1B, #2 2B, #2 3B...

Another thing might be to take the best three or four guys at each position, and put the positions in order of where you normally get the most points:
#1 OF, #2 OF, #3 OF, #1 1B, #2 1B, #3 1B, #1 3B, #2 3B, #2 3B... and then repeat with #4 through #7 at each position.

Any advice?

Wiley

If I were you I would start by creating a list of the top 12 players at each position except OF and Pitcher, which I would do top 36 and 60. I would then take those lists and create a top 250 or 300 from them for the auto draft to use. The truth is, it will be hard not to have the auto-draft do worse than what you would have done because a good draft relies heavily on reading the other picks and being able to know whether you need to take a second outfielder or a second starting pitcher at that point due to quality of the remaining pool.

Backstop

it seems like the difficulty is that the automation tries to fill in positions before going for depth. This causes it to take a crap SS when Torii Hunter and Jacob Ellesbury are available. There has to be a way around it.

Gdiguy

There should be a options - I know ESPN you can default it to either pick for position necessity, by average draft position, by pre-draft rankings, by projected points, etc

Which has its own problems; the reason it does positional scarcity is because you don't want the reverse either - usually for fantasy, outfielders/1B/3B will have higher rankings (because it's all offensively based), and you'd wind up with a team of 20 left fielders and have to pick up a terrible SS later