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
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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.
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.
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.
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 …
The Auction Strategy episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.
Guest: Jeff Erickson
Strategy Section – Auction Strategy
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The Outfield Part I & Utility Only Preview episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.
Guest: Brian Entrekin
Strategy Section
ATC Undervalued Players
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The LIVE from First Pitch Arizona episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.
Guests: Tristan Cockcroft & Derek Carty
Strategy Section
2024 First Round
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2022 was the worst year I have ever had as a fantasy player. I played in 16 leagues and did not cash in a single one. The hard part is that I didn’t even know what went wrong. I had teams I really liked coming out of the draft and some that were doing very well throughout the season. I could have easily brushed it off as a bad season or beaten myself up over it. However, I worked my butt off to get better.
