Back from Costa Rica (after nearly being swept out to sea in a rip tide), It's about 10 days until I leave for LABR and time to dive into baseball full bore. Here's what I'm looking at.

1. RotoWire Latest News. Before I even begin the process of building my own cheat sheet via the site's depth charts, I'm already reading all of the latest news each day. If I were to restrict myself to only one source for my draft prep, this would be it. The latest news feed conveys every relevant fact nearly in real time. Cheat sheets, rankings, projections, sleeper lists, etc. are merely opinions - always fallible and quite often wrong. I'll look at them occasionally for ideas, but 95 percent of my prep work is about familiarizing myself with the facts and trusting my own fallible interpretation of them.

2. RotoWire Depth Charts. I detailed my method for building my cheat sheets above. The latest news is great, but it's also important to understand it in context.

3. Other sources: I'll read the RW blog most because I'm in charge of editing it, but also the feature articles on the site, both of which almost always contain facts about players I hadn't known. The conclusions don't matter much to me, but DDD, Bernie, Erickson, DVR, Regan, Benkard, Sickels, etc. are great sources of ideas - things to look at that I might not have considered. Outside of RW, I don't read a whole lot. I'll check out the stuff on Yahoo. I'll occasionally stop by Fangraphs or ESPN - usually when prompted by a link. I'll also check out Baseball HQ from time to time.

The bottom line - I really don't care about anyone else's opinions, but I do care about their observations. If someone tells me Player A is a stud, that matters a lot less than hearing them say Player A hit a 450-foot home run in spring training off a pitcher who was dominating that day. I don't care where someone puts Player B on their cheat sheet so much as hearing that the reason why they bumped him up was his post-injury power surge in August and September.

By this time next week, I'll know the American League cold and will have more to say about specific players. In a week or so after that, I'll learn who's playing for the Padres this year.