The Value episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Larry Schechter

Larry’s new book – The History of Fantasy Sports

Strategy Section

• Auction Draft Strategy
  • General Strategy
  • Bargains & Relative Bargains
  • High priced catchers
  • How to bump up catchers for replacement level
  • Valuing closers
  • Preparing with market values
  • How to incorporate risk in your values
    • Baked into player projections via playing time
    • Aggregating risk
  • Using projections
• Mono vs. Mixed leagues
  • Valuing players in a mixed league
  • FAAB
• In-person vs. online auctions

Waiver Wire

Pitcher Preview

Injury Update

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Tonight, I will be drafting my second $1500 NFBC Auction Championship team. This is a 15-team, 5×5 Roto league with an overall prize pool. You can see the live draft board here.  Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight, I will be drafting my first $1500 NFBC Auction Championship team. This is a 15-team, 5×5 Roto league with an overall prize pool. You can see the live draft board here.  Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight, I will be drafting my third and final $150 NFBC Online Auction Championship team. This is a 15-team, 5×5 Roto league with an overall prize pool. You can see the live draft board here.  Read the rest of this entry »

The Draft & Auction Recap episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Justin Mason

Strategy Section

• TGFBI
  • What is TGFBI?
  • KDS Selections
  • Draft plan & execution
  • Freddie Freeman as a 1st rounder
  • Nico Hoerner as a draft linchpin
  • Relief Pitcher darts at the end of drafts
  • How much risk to take on, and when?
  • TGFBI Average Draft Position trends
• Auctions
  • Differences between snake drafts and auctions
  • What is it like to draft against?
    • Ariel Cohen
    • Justin Mason
  • Adjusting draft strategy based on other owners’ tendencies
  • Coming to auction tables with market values
  • Hitter / Pitcher % Split
  • How to handle Ronald Acuna Jr. in auctions?
  • Online vs. in-person auctions
  • 12-team vs. 15-team auctions
• LABR Mixed Auction Recap
  • Justin
    • Stars & Scrubs hitting
    • Low cost pitching
    • Late game / low valued injury darts
    • 3 Closers
  • Ariel
    • Big catcher spending
    • High value starting pitching
    • How to make up for the loss of Devin Williams
  • Trading leagues vs. non-trading leagues
• Tout Mixed Auction Recap
• Drafting as a proxy for a team’s owner
• Tout Head to Head Recap
  • Do you need to follow the market’s Hitter / Pitcher % split in points leagues?
  • Nominating catchers early on
  • Salvador Perez’s value
  • Factoring in the HTH playoff format into player valuation

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Every year, fantasy analysts from around the country gather for a collection of leagues called Tout Wars. This year was the 27th season of Tout Wars. This year, I was in the 15-team mixed auction league where I finished second last season, losing the lead on the last day to Bret Sayre of Baseball Prospectus. 

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One of the most common questions I get is, “Who are you targeting for $1 at the end of auctions?” I find this to be a particularly tough question to answer. The guys I am hoping to get for $1 I am often willing to pay more for. And guys I sometimes think should be more only go for $1. But five of my leagues have completed drafts this season, so now I have data on who is available for $1 and who I like.

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I talk a decent amount about inflation. It comes up in my rankings intro, I have discussed in on the Keep or Kut podcast, and it is a regular topic of debate in the Ottoneu Slack community. But that is hardly the only thing that impacts player prices and it is not the only factor I consider when preparing for an auction.

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Introduction

In 2018, I introduced a game theory approach for comparing baseball projection systems. Proudly, the original article was nominated for Baseball Article of the Year by the Fantasy Sports Writers Association (FSWA). Today, I am proud to release the same in-depth research for the sixth consecutive year!

This is not a typical statistical analysis. There won’t be any Chi-squared tests, nor will I calculate Type I or Type II errors. Forget about mean squared errors or any hypothesis testing.

My methodology does not incorporate a statistical model. Instead, it looks to determine the profitability potential of each projection system by simulating what would have happened in a fantasy auction draft. It games the projections.

What do I mean by this?

Let’s think about what happens in a real fantasy [pun intended] baseball draft auction.

Suppose that Jared Cross himself (or anyone exclusively using the Steamer projections) walks into a rotisserie auction prior to the 2023 baseball season. Let’s say that Jared decides to participate in an NFBC auction league. Mr. Cross would take his projections and run a valuation method through them to obtain auction prices. He would generate a list that looked something like this …

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The Auction Strategy episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Jeff Erickson

Strategy Section – Auction Strategy

• General Auction Strategy
  • Rules to live by
  • Differences to snake drafts
  • Online vs. in-person auctions
  • Time of day
  • Other players’ tendancies
  • Looking around at the auction table
  • Most important items to keep track of during an auction
• Nomination Strategy
  • Have a purpose
  • Reasons for nominating who you are most interested in buying
  • Plan A / Plan B nomination
• Market Values
  • Assessing the market
  • AAVs / ADP$
  • Hotspots
• What to pay for players
  • Strike Prices
  • Paying more for players who fit your team’s build
• Money plan
  • Hitter / Pitcher % Split
  • Stars & Scrubs vs. Spread the Risk
  • Unorthodox strategies
• Money management
  • Pacing yourself in the auction
  • Buying out of “the break”
• In-draft adjustments
  • Tracking scarcities
  • Tracking inflation
• Bidding
  • General procedure
  • Starting bid
  • +2 bids
  • Bidding often
  • Timing of bids
  • Price enforcing
• Other tidbits
  • Pay attention to the other bids
  • Clogging the DH spot
  • Shohei Ohtani is still pitcher eligible
  • Need to get bargains

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