Fantasy Baseball 2013: Auditing an Auction Draft

Photo courtesy of Todd Awbrey.

Last Sunday night, Clave, Dixon and I all participated in an auction draft. Dixon suggested that perhaps I audit the league draft. Of course I am not going to go player by player, that would be tedious and we’d be here for a long time.

But we write a lot about drafts and auctions. It’s easy to speculate on things but now that’s one’s actually been done, it can actually be a lot more helpful to see what different players have gone for, and whether it was a good price or not. That’s what I’m going to do today, and I’d also like to show you how to do this for your own drafts.

Before getting into the players, we need to go over some basic things. Most leagues out there are 10-12 teams, with 25 total roster spots (22 starters 3 bench spots plus one DL) They also only use the basic 5×5 categories and in an auction draft each manager gets $260.  he league we drafted for is a 12-team league, with 23 total roster spots )17 starters, 6 bench plus 2 DL spots).  We also begin with $300 in our draft wallet.  There are also many more intricacies to this league, but they’re not relevant to this post.

So I did some simple math to find out the relative dollar amounts for these leagues. Overall in a typical league you have $10.4 to spend per player. In our league we had $13 per player. I divide $13 by $10.4 and I got 1.25, which I will use to figure out the relative amount paid per player.

For instance I got Jon Axford for $11. I simply divided $11 by 1.25 and i get 8.8. After rounding and adding a dollar sign, I paid the equivalent of $9  in a typical draft.

According to our Draft Kit, Axford should have been a $4 player in a 10-team league.  there is, of course  a small markup for larger leagues as more auction money is available.

So let’s say he should have gone for $6, I paid a little more than I should have. However according to the site we play through Axford should have gone for about $10 in a 12 team league, so I actually saved buck. One thing we must acknowledge is that this is not an exact science because there are many variables that attribute to how much we bid on players and why, BUT, I hope this gives you a little primer for the rest of this article.

Overpaying by a couple of dollars here and there is not bad at all in an auction draft. What you want to avoid is overpaying by a lot, and of course just as bad, losing out on a player because you didn’t want to overpay by a few dollars and leaving money on the table at the end of the draft, which I did.

The idea is that you use up all your funds, get all the players you wanted, and of course win your league. So, what is overpaying by too much?  Well, if you pay $2 for a $1 player, you paid double the “market value”. However an extra dollar to get a guy like Jayson Werth is a great deal, which Clave lucked out with on in Sunday’s draft. Let’s say you double pay for a guy like Sergio Romo, which one owner did (cough) Dixon (cough). This is a bit of a bigger hit on a bankroll because Romo was $10 according to our rankings and $8 in our site’s rankings.  Dixon paid $20 for Romo which if we do our math: 20/1.25=16

He still overpaid, right?  Well on paper and technically speaking, yes he did. However in the same auction draft Jason Motte went for $20 as well. Motte was ranked $13 and $14 dollars on our rankings and on our site’s rankings, respectively. But is Jason Motte really worth 3-6 dollars more than Sergio Romo? Hardly. Our site had him worth $3, which I can understand, However Jason Motte is not $6 better than Romo, no way. And remember I paid $11 in that draft for John Axford. Even though Axford when he is on, provides a heck of a lot of Ks as an RP, he has been on the decline the past couple of seasons.

So in terms of the market value on closers during our draft you have to understand that the price tag did not meet what guys were going for.  The best auction drafters are those who can spot that right away in drafts and go with it. On the other end, you have guys that are sucked into a bad market on players while drafts are going on.

A few of the early pitchers went for a too much in my opinion. Cliff Lee went for $36, Matt Cain went for $33 and Gio Gonzalez went for $31. For the sake of your leagues, our math says the following: Lee= $29 Cain= $26 Gio= $25.

In our projections we valued them at: Lee= $22, Cain= $25, Gio= $18. Cain was closest to his and was a good price over all. However Lee and Gio were purchases made in haste, because of the appearance of a rapidly dwindling market on starting pitchers. Had the owners passed and waited 20 minutes or so for the action to slow down they would have been able to get guys like: Mat Latos for $21 or Dan Haren for $14. Much more adequate prices for those types of pitchers.

Of course I do not know exactly how the extra money spent on those pitchers affected their owners through the rest of the draft.  I am sure mentally they were more aware of their lack of funds and perhaps pulled out of bidding on a few guys here and there, but they are likely never to admit that to anyone.

However my strategy for nominating players early in auctions is to nominate guys I want no part in because I know that people are more apt to over bid early, therefore I want as much money out of guys wallets early as I can get.  I know I have overpaid plenty in my day, so the one thing I always remind myself is to learn from my past mistakes. That’s really the most importan