2019’s Fantasy Baseball Auction Bargains

Winning Fantasy Baseball is All. About. Value.

Introduction:

Several years back, a friend of mine was preparing for his fantasy baseball auction. He asked me a simple question –

“How much is Lorenzo Cain worth according to your projections?”

That was a straightforward question for me to answer. I ran the ATC Projections through my valuation model. I set the league parameters to match his specific league settings, and I generated a value for Cain of $18.

A few days later, my friend came back to me and said,

“Ariel, I bought Lorenzo Cain at my auction for $18! Isn’t that awesome?!?!”

I responded “No, that’s awful. If Lorenzo Cain is worth $18, you need to only pay $14 or $15 or $16.”

I often like to remind our readers that the key principle to succeeding in fantasy baseball auctions is to maximize the value of your accumulated roster. Purchase players at discounts. You need to make a “profit” on as many roster spots as you can.

Each team is handed $260 at the start of the auction. If you buy every player for the value that he is worth, you will have paid $260 of auction dollars for $260 of value. What you will have is an average team. You won’t finish last, but you won’t finish first. Instead, with your $260 – you need to buy some $290 or $300 or $310+ of total value.

Suppose that you competed in a live NFBC fantasy baseball auction this year. Let me ask you a seemingly easy question:

Which player should you have bought back in March?

Mike Trout (OF, LAA)

OR

Trey Mancini (1B/OF, BAL)

Before you give your response, let’s take a quick look at the final 2019 stat line for the two players in question:

Well, Trout has more HR, SB, R and RBI than Mancini, and he has the same batting average to the thousandth decimal place. This seems like a slam dunk answer of Mike Trout, right?

Well, let’s now take a look at the full season dollar valuation comparison of the two:

Once again, Mike Trout’s $33 is objectively higher than Mancini’s $25.

But the correct answer to the above question is … Trey Mancini.

What is key is not the value of the player in question. It is the value of the player relative to what you paid for him.

At NFBC auctions, Trey Mancini cost owners an average of $3 to acquire. On average, he would have earned his owners $22 (= $25 – $3) of fantasy profit. On the other hand, Mike Trout was purchased for a whopping $51 to the average fantasy team in March. As Trout earned $33 of roto value this year, he was a value drainer, losing $18 for the average owner.

Please be aware that my argument that Mancini was the better purchase as compared to Trout, does not imply that a $51 Mike Trout purchase is a poor one. Earning roughly two-thirds of the price paid for him is not necessarily a bad thing. Mike finished as the ninth best hitter – a clear first round player – which is a fine result for fantasy teams.

However, the Mancini purchase was unquestionably the one which was more efficient.

Methodology:

Let’s define three quantities:

• $Value – The full season 5×5 roto value of each player. For this, I am using the FanGraphs auction calculator on YTD 2019 stats, with NFBC standard settings (15 teams, Mixed AL/NL, scaled to a $260 budget with positions – 9 P, 2 C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, CI, MI, 5 OF, U). This represents what a player was worth for the full season of 2019.
• $AAV – The average auction value for each player from all auctions conducted by the NFBC during the month of March 2019. This will represent the cost that it would have taken to acquire a player. For the players who were not drafted, or who were only drafted as a reserve, we will set a nominal price for them of $0.10. Please note that NFBC only provides rounded AAV data; all amounts are whole dollars.
• $Bargain – The difference between the $Value and $AAV. This represents the profit that each player had provided over the 2019 season, relative to their initial pre-season draft price.

One important note. The empirical hitter/pitcher split based on NFBC $AAV data was roughly 63%/37%, which has a pitcher tilt. As for the full season values – the FanGraphs auction calculator (which is a Z-Score based method of valuation) inherently determines the hitter/pitcher split of the auction dollars, and the result came close to 70%/30%. I have decided not to make any adjustments to the final value hitter/pitcher split in this analysis. This will make hitters seem a bit more profitable and pitchers a bit less profitable.

2019’s Biggest Bargains:

Below are the top 35 most profitable hitters for 2019:

Here are the top 25 most profitable pitchers for 2019:

Assorted Hitter Notes (in no particular order):

• DJ LeMahieu was the top hitter bargain this season. He was typically purchased at NFBC auctions either late or not at all, with an AAV of $1. He was a player who was widely available on league waiver wires for most of April. LeMahieu’s price was depressed at 2019 auctions due to the seemingly crowded Yankee infield to start the season.
• To compare to last year, LeMahieu’s bargain of over $29 exceeds the $25 of profit earned by Javier Baez in 2018 (last year’s most profitable hitter). Last season, Baez’s cost to acquire was similarly depressed due to a perceived “crowded” Chicago infield.
• Danny Santana was the most profitable hitter who was not drafted, making him the best full-season waiver pickup of the season.
• The other non-drafted hitter bargains in the top 25 were: Christian Walker, Giovanny Urshella, Bryan Reynolds, Yordan Alvarez and Kolten Wong.
• Santana and Wong were the only players on this list that had more than 20 SB this season – and they were both undrafted. Speed was certainly at a premium at 2019 auctions.
• Three of the top 20 hitter bargains were catchers (Mitch Garver, Christian Vazquez and James McCann). 2019 was a very good season to stream catchers, and a year not to spend large amounts at the auction. There will be more on that in an upcoming article.
• Of the top 35 most profitable hitters, Cody Bellinger amassed the most roto dollars, returning a $Value of $41. He was also the most expensive player to buy on this list, with an $AAV of $26. Anthony Rendon was the next most expensive to purchase pre-season.
• The huge bargains this season typically came from players who cost just $3-7 pre-season. To compare, last year I noted that this range was $2-8. This leads me to believe that having an extra $1-3 dollars to spend on each of your final few hitters at an auction may lead to some of the best bargains of the season, as opposed to buying the single dollar players.
• The average cost of the top 35 hitter bargains (including undrafted players at $0.10) was $4.6. The average returned value was $21.4.

Assorted Pitcher Notes (in no particular order):

• The most profitable pitcher of 2019 was Liam Hendricks, who was undrafted in NFBC auctions. For a FAAB pickup, Liam earned owners a full season value of close to $19.
• Hyun-Jin Ryu was the most profitable of the drafted pitchers this season. A $7 cost earned fantasy owners $17+ in profit. Since Hendricks is a relief pitcher, Ryu was the most profitable starting pitcher in 2019.
• Of the top 10 most profitable pitchers, only 4 of them were drafted. None of the ten were drafted for more than $7.
• Justin Verlander ($44 $Value, $35 $AAV) is the only pitcher of the top 25 pitcher bargains to have an $AAV of over $14. Gerrit Cole (not shown) finished as the 30^th best pitcher bargain. He cost $36 pre-season and returned $41 of value. There is a large void of highly profitable pitchers from $14 to $35, which further supports my contention for avoiding the middle of the road SPs in drafts/auctions.
• Jacob deGrom who was the 2018 NL Cy Young award winner, earned a -$11 profit (i.e. a $11 loss) despite finishing as the 3^rd highest earning pitcher. He amassed $29 of value but cost $40 at auctions.
• Stephen Strasburg was “Mr. Even Steven” this season. His $AAV was $24, and he earned exactly $24 in 2019.
• There were only 3 pitchers in 2019 who cost at least $20 to roster yet turned a profit. They are (in order of cost): Gerrit Cole, Justin Verlander and Zack Greinke.
• About half of the pitcher bargains earned saves during the season (i.e. were relief pitchers). This is typical.
• The average cost of the top 25 pitcher bargains (including undrafted players at $0.10) was $4.0. The average returned value was $15.7.