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

Guest: Steve Gardner

2023 LABR Auctions

Strategy Section

• General Auction Preparation
  • How does it differ from snake drafts?
• Position scarcity in auctions & punting
• Live auctions vs. online auctions
• Mono league auctions
• How does auction strategy and future FAAB spending tie in together?
• How should you prepare yourself mentally for the auction?
• What should you do during auction breaks?
• Scouting other league members
  • How does this affect the way that you should auction?
• How to create auction values & strike prices
  • When should you bid over your values?
• How much should you spend on hitting vs. pitching?
• Stars & Scrubs vs. Spread the Risk
• In-draft adjustments
  • In-draft inflation
• Nominations
  • How do you determine who you should nominate next?
  • Controlling a room with nominations
• Money Management
  • Pacing yourself throughout the auction
  • Having the hammer at the end
• Bidding
  • How often should you bid on players?
  • Price enforcing
  • Starting bids
  • Freeze bids
  • Bid on the ‘9’s?
  • Timing of bids
  • $2 bids
  • Sneaking $1 players in early

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The Mets & LABR Update Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Adam Ronis

Softball Team

New York Mets

• Thoughts on deadline acquisitions
• Mets postseason bullpen
• Mets consistency
• Jacob deGrom rest of season
• Injury Guru’s Trivia of the Week
• How many wins will the Mets accumulate in 2022?

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The Expert League Recap Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Matt Williams

LABR Reacap

• Overall thoughts
• Closer strategy
• When to drop out of bidding wars
  • How much is too much to pay?
  • The economincs of waiting to nominate desired players in the auction
• Nomination strategy
  • Nominate players that you want to buy or players that you don’t?
• Franmil Reyes
• Catcher strategy
• Draft regrets

TGFBI Recap

• Noticeable trends
• Grabbing players earlier than ADP
  • Akil Baddoo
• Big decisions

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Earlier this week, I examined some of the reserve round picks in the AL LABR auction. Today, I’ve moved to the NL auction. To put it simply, the player talent took a significant step down from the AL options. So many players were rostered who will never make it to the majors this season or are just plain bad. For example, Nomar Mazara, who has yet to sign with a team and never had a productive major league season, was rostered.

Here are all the reserve picks

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Every year, USA Today’s Steve Gardner hosts four LABR drafts and auctions. The LABR draft happened a couple of weeks ago with the three auctions (12 team AL, NL, and mixed) happening this past weekend. I was lucky enough to participate in the 12-team mixed auction (more on it later), but the most useful information is digging into the reserve picks. Sometimes I’ve never even heard of them. I’m going to dive into some of these end-game players from the AL auction and look for any hidden gems.

Here are all the reserve picks

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On Tuesday night, the competitors of the LABR Mixed draft virtually congregated for our annual mid-February 15-team draft. Drafts this early are challenging. On the one hand, the early timing benefits the prepared and the more highly skilled. On the other hand, there remains a great many unknowns that we need to make educated guesses for at best, and complete shots in the dark for at worst. In addition, and during a normal pre-season period, the extra time between the draft and opening day (versus leagues that draft a week to three before the seasons begins) means more opportunity for injuries to decimate your roster before the season even begins!

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The Healing Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Ron Shandler

LABR Congratulations

Strategy Section

• Dealing with the current injury frequency level in baseball
  • Roster construction
  • Risk management
    • Broad Assesment Balance Sheet (BABS)
  • Reasons for injury frequency by team
  • Risk-adjusted pricing vs. managing to a risk budget
  • First round picks
    • Fernando Tatis Jr.
    • Ronald Acuna Jr.
• How to think about Binary Risk
  • Jacob deGrom
• Playing fantay against “Power Drafters” who take on more risk
• Is the market still right to draft risky elite starting pitching?
• Is the market overpricing stable closers in early drafts?
• How to value prospects in drafts?
  • Bobby Witt Jr.

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Introduction

Well, we are down to the final week of fantasy baseball. After a short 60 game season in 2020, we are blessed to be approaching game 162 here in 2021!

We here at RotoGraphs, are hoping that you are right in the thick of the competition for your league’s fantasy championship title. For me – I am right in the middle of an intense battle with one of the legends of rotisserie baseball, Ron Shandler, as well as our own Jeff Zimmerman.

The league that I am referring to is the Mixed Auction LABR league. I was one this division of LABR’s inaugural members back in 2020.

Above is a photograph of some of the participants of the live 2020 auction draft from Tampa, Florida. Due to COVID, this year’s draft was held online. LABR is one of the longest running (if not THE longest currently running) expert leagues of rotisserie baseball. It is an honor simply to be invited to compete.

The Mixed auction LABR league is a very standard 12-team 5×5 rotisserie league. We use the standard scoring categories (R, RBI, HR, SB, BA, W, K, SV, ERA, WHIP), and standard rosters (14 B, 9 P). Scoring periods are weekly, trading is allowed, and the initial draft is of the auction variety. Last year, I went into great detail recapping my draft – a two-part article that can be found here and here.

As many of you might already know, as a risk management actuary – my day job consists of running simulation models to recommend purchasing decisions to the upper management of my company. I simulate possible fires, hurricanes, medical malpractice claims, and other liabilities that we may be on the hook for.

Borrowing several actuarial methods, I adapted some of these models in order to develop a proprietary in-season fantasy baseball tool. It is a probabilistic final standings simulator. Using the current league accumulated standings, a source of projected ROS statistics, a volatility and a correlation model – I run 4000 iterations of what might happen for the remainder of the season.

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The Miami Marlins Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Craig Mish

LABR Mixed Auction Update

Working in the Business & Playing Fantasy Baseball

• Craig Mish Personal History
• Advangates gained for fantasy baseball
• Thoughts on Marlins GM Kim Ng [later in the show]
• Working as a beat reporter in COVID times [later in the show]

Miami Marlins

• Closer situation
  • Yimi Garcia
  • Anthony Bass
• Trade Possibilities as sellers
• Jazz Chisholm Jr. outlook rest of season
  • Rankings game
• Trevor Rogers
  • Innings Limit
• Sixto Sanchez Update
• Marlins Prospects
  • Edward Cabrera
  • Jake Eder
  • Max Meyer

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The Lineups Episode of the Beat the Shift Podcast – a baseball podcast for fantasy baseball players.

Guest: Steve Gardner

Strategy Section

• Lineups
  • 5 games for a star vs. 7 games for a scrub
  • When should you start paying attention to categories when setting your lineup?
    • When should you be playing the Jon Berti types?
  • Monday morning decisions for injured players
    • What are the key words/terms that managers use that you should pay attention to when making your decisions?

Fantasy Baseball in 2021

• How does 2021’s lower batting average environment affect how you play fanasty?
• What does the 2021 pitching environment mean for player values?
• Should we change the rules of rotisserie baseball?
  • BA vs. OBP
  • Saves vs. Saves + Holds
  • Wins vs. IP vs. Wins + Quality Starts

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