Double Bill: NFBC Auction and The Return of the Place-Holder All-Stars

As you may recall, the Annapurna that we have been preparing to scale this season is the NFBC Auction Championship: mixed league, 15 teams, 5×5, standard-issue 23-man roster with a 7-round snake draft for reserves. Well, we had our auction last week, and it was…humdrum. Somewhat to our surprise—about which more below–bidding was restrained and prices were temperate. Once we caught on to this—Bryce Harper for $41 and Mike Trout for $44 did the trick—we accomplished most of what we set out to do, and don’t think we overpaid or underpaid by more than a dollar for anyone. Possible exceptions are noted below. Our roster is barely worth reporting, and certainly not worth analyzing in detail. Nonetheless, for the record, here it is, with our picks listed in order of acquisition by way of giving you an idea of where we went with our endgame. As always, we invite your comments:

Miguel Sano, 18
Nolan Arenado, 38
Corey Kluber, 26
Wade Davis, 19
Edwin Encarnacion, 29
Marcus Stroman, 14
Curtis Granderson, 6
Ben Revere, 17
Billy Hamilton, 16
Stephen Vogt, 8
Alex Gordon, 6
Welington Castillo, 7
Daniel Murphy, 8
Howie Kendrick, 3
Arodys Vizcaino, 5
Taijuan Walker, 10
Marcus Semien, 8
Jake McGee, 9
Phil Hughes, 2
Mike Fiers, 4
Nori Aoki, 2
Kyle Gibson, 2
Hector Olivera, 3

Chris Owings, R
Michael Saunders, R
Luis Valbuena, R
Robbie Ray, R
Tyler Duffey, R
Chris Coghlan, R
Chris Bassitt, R

Just a few notes: (1) Third-base market report: Arenado $38, Donaldson $37, Machado $37, Bryant $35. (2) Many would say we overpaid for McGee, but we expect him to be worth the same $15 or so as any other good closer, and didn’t mind paying $9 to get him, Coors, injury risk, and all. (3) New Dodger manager Dave Roberts, who appears to be an OBP guy, likes Howie Kendrick as a leadoff hitter, which means Kendrick is a steal at $3 if he can get healthy. (4) We did indeed overpay for Semien, on whom we’d have stopped at $6 if he’d come up earlier in the auction. But we like him, we needed a shortstop, and it was clear that we wouldn’t need a couple of dollars that we’d set aside for pitching. (5) We could probably have gotten Olivera for $1, but $3 was what we had left. We’d dismissed him, too, until we read, the day before the draft, an article reminding us that (a) the Braves know what they’re doing, more or less, and (b) gave up a whole lot to get Olivera. Worth a shot, we thought.

For us, the apparent tameness of the bidding was the big story. It surprised because we paid more attention than we probably should have to the Tout Wars Mixed Auction, held a couple of days before ours. Some, even most, of the Tout Wars prices for premium players were, to our eyes, hefty. But we reasoned that the gap between Fantasy experts and the kind of person who signs up for the pricier NFBC events isn’t large, and thus that the Tout Wars prices were a better indicator of what we should expect than, say, the Average Auction Values that Mastersball and Todd Zola generously made available to all and sundry. We’re happy with our $38 Nolan Arenado (who went for only $34 in Tout Wars). But are we happier with him than a $37 Donaldson (Tout Wars $39), a $37 Machado (Tout Wars $42), or a $35 Bryant (Tout Wars $37), not to mention a $40 Goldschmidt (Tout Wars $47), a $41 Harper (Tout Wars $48), or a $44 Trout (Tout Wars $46)? We hope to explore the reasons for this kind of disparity during the season. For now, though, we’ll just say that it seems unwise to us to use expert auction prices as a barometer for your nonexpert auction, and that the disparity that renders it unwise isn’t merely or mostly attributable to the Touts’ using OBP rather than BA, although they do, or having spent less for pitching, although they did.

Let’s move on to a different aspect of draft preparation, which is identifying players that no one knows about who might do you some good this season if your draft is deep enough to accommodate them. Here, in descending order of probable usefulness, are six guys who (at least as of this writing) aren’t listed as having an NFBC Average Draft Position, which means they’ve been chosen in no more than four of NFBC’s 421 drafts so far. Immodesty compels us to mention that, as we told you, this selfsame approach led us to Joey Rickard in our NFBC slow draft back in February.

1. Rafael Ortega, OF, Angels. He’s a speedy 24-year-old left-handed contact hitter (.286/.367/.378 with 17 SBs in AAA last season), signed as a minor league free agent this winter. He’s getting rave reviews, and seems to be edging out Todd Cunningham for the last spot on the Angels’ bench, yet it’s Cunningham wno’s got the ADP. He’s worth attention because the Angels’ unprepossessing left-field platoon of Daniel Nava and Craig Gentry could disintegrate very quickly.

2. Jeremy Hazelbaker, OF, St. Louis. A 28-year-old left-handed hitter with some power, some speed, and some plate discipline who seems to have figured something out last season (.313/.385/.531 in AA/AAA) and has kept hitting through the winter (.321/.382/.506 in Venezuela) and spring (.289/.357/.474). He, too, has been getting rave reviews. True, the Cardinals’ outfield is crowded. But try out this not-completely-implausible scenario: Matt Adams can’t hit enough to play first base anymore, Matt Holliday is a full-time first baseman, the real Brandon Moss is the one who played for Cleveland last year, and Hazelbaker is summoned from Memphis to be the strong side of a left-field platoon with Tommy Pham.

3. Matt Bush, Right-Handed RP, Texas. See it now, before the TV movie comes out. You may know the story. Bush is a former first-overall draft pick of fabled alcoholic incorrigibility, which eventually led him to 31 months in prison for DUI with Great Bodily Injury. He’s 30 now, and is getting the kind of umpteenth chance you get when you can throw a baseball 100 miles an hour. This he has done repeatedly throughout the month, leading the Rangers to think that, after some time in the minors, he can be a dominant setup guy. Take him if you believe, as we do, in the possibility of personal transformation and redemption, or you insist, as we also do, on the disconnect between the human beings who play baseball and the proper-names-with-stats-attached who play Fantasy Baseball.

4. Pedro Ciriaco, Utility Infielder, Texas. He’s had an unbelievable spring: .442/.434/.519 (sic, which tells you all you need to know about his nonexistent plate discipline). He’s also 30, and a known quantity: good speed, better than average bat (.268/.294/.368 in 649 major league plate appearances), but worse than average glove, which is why he’s starting the season in AAA while Hanser Alberto gets the meal money. And the Texas infield is real good and real durable, plus which Ian Desmond is around if Josh Hamilton is copacetic and one of the infielders gets hurt. Still, if there is an injury and Desmond stays in the outfield, we predict that Ciriaco gets a starting job. If he gets 200 at-bats this season, he’ll get you 10 stolen bases and (for a middle infielder) a plus batting average.

5. Junior Lake, Outfielder, Toronto. It seems like he’s been around forever, tantalizing and then disappointing both Fantasy and real baseballers with his power-speed combination. But he’s only 26, has a good shot at sticking with the team because he’s out of options, and consistently puts up minor-league numbers that make everyone think there’s more there than his major league record suggests.

6. Jose Urena, 24-year-old right-handed starting pitcher, Miami, and a favorite of ours. He set a little-known but potent major league record last season: Highest ratio of fastball speed to strikeouts-per-nine. How a guy can consistently throw 97 miles an hour and miss so few bats (4.2 K/9 in 61.2 MLB innings) continues to puzzle both the Marlins and everyone else. Forgotten in the hand-wringing over this is the fact that Urena’s a pretty good pitcher even without the K’s. You like Adam Conley? Us too. Strikeouts aside, Urena’s AAA numbers last year were comparable.