Random Auction Musings

I’ve been playing in auction leagues since about 2001 and believe it to be far superior to snake drafts. Why choose a draft format that immediately prevents you from acquiring players as soon as you know your draft slot isn’t number one? I want the opportunity to buy Mike Trout for $48 damn it! Okay, enough standing on my pedestal and rehashing why I think auctions are best. Let’s just talk about some random things that have popped into my head since my Tout Wars auction on Saturday.

No, He’s Not a Sleeper, But He Is

Wait, what? Yeah, it’s English, but the first He refers to Player A and the second He refers to Player B. See, rather than go with that familiar line that sleepers don’t exist anymore, I’ll concede that they still do. But, they just aren’t the guys you think they are. When every single web site, magazine, Twitter account, etc, shares their sleepers, don’t you see a pattern? They are all the same names! To be honest, I don’t even know what the definition of a sleeper is anymore. If it’s simply some youngster you think will be available for cheap and has upside to earn you a profit, that’s pretty silly. Every player has the potential to earn a profit! And every youngster has upside…and downside too.

Marcus Semien is a sleeper, right? Umm no, he went for $15 in AL Tout. That’s a “he must have a breakout year to just break even for his owner” price, which immediately removes the sleeper label. Drew Hutchison is a pitcher us bold predictors have been boldly predicting great success for this year. It’s bold because he’s a sleeper, right?! Wrong! He went for $12. That’s not a sleeper price. Could he earn a profit? Sure! But at $12, you have far less room for it than the more sleepery price of a mid-single digit bid, something his mid-4.00 ERA from last year should have resulted in if he wasn’t so sleeperific. How about James Paxton, another pitcher I’m quite enamored with? He went for $9.

Now maybe you want to argue that hey, this is Tout Wars, the industry guys, the fantasy nerds who supposedly know the entire player pool inside and out. It’s unfair to judge the existence of a sleeper by using this league as an example. You have a point, sort of, as sleepers are heavily league dependent. BUT! Sleepers still do exist. At the risk of tooting my own horn, witness my $1 bid of Devon Travis. Now Travis, he’s a sleeper. I got him at a sleeper price and he didn’t even have a job in hand at the time. But the opportunity was apparent and if he won the job, he had the skills to hold it and earn solid fantasy value. A quick Google search of his name and the word sleeper yielded just one article that included him in a list in which sleeper was in the article title.

So the lesson — don’t go into your auction targeting your so-called sleepers, thinking you’re going to get this guy cheaply or that guy cheaply after reading about him all over FanGraphs. It’s unlikely to happen. Sleepers have been a slowly dying breed of player and you’ll have to go deeper to uncover that next layer where the true sleeper-worthy players are hiding.

On Always Nominating a Player You Don’t Want

You’ve read about and heard that basic tenet of auction strategy — always nominate a player you don’t want. Why? I’ve been doing auctions for nearly 15 years and have never once read anything into who nominated which player. I don’t care who you nominate. I have my value and I stick to it. Whether you want him or not, I don’t know, and I don’t care. I’ll bid on a player if he remains below my value and stop when it gets above it. Period. So I don’t get the strategy.

But the real reason I wanted to discuss this was to bring things back to the two mistakes I made in Tout. Feel free to nominate whoever you feel like, whether you want the player or not. But, when money gets tight near the end game, do not, DO NOT, nominate a player for a buck that you don’t want if there’s any sliver of a chance you hear crickets. The upside of achieving your objective of filling your competitor’s rosters with players you don’t want just isn’t enough to risk filling your own roster with said player(s). You don’t get do-overs in auctions, so getting stuck with a player you don’t want and/or who throws off the rest of your auction could be a killer. I was lucky and things kind of worked out in the end, but they could have easily not have. So don’t get cute and just play things straight up. Worry about your own team and hope for the best.

Battling a League Full of Stars and Scrubsers

After the Tout auction ended at around 1:30, I stayed for the mixed auction at 3:00 as well, moving in and out of the room, and watching most of the proceedings. After it finally ended, I shared my belief with several of the other Touts that I would never have survived this auction. Why? Because five players went for at least $40 and another two for $39! Our own auction calculator values just one hitter above $40, or perhaps two if you round that second batter up. What’s happening here is that the gap between Mike Trout and everyone else is much larger than the prices indicate. In a snake draft, there’s no such indication what that value gap is between picks. You’ll only know such a gap if you calculate values. So the owner who bought Trout at fair value actually got a bargain, relatively speaking, as the rest of the first rounders were all significantly overvalued.

I’ve mentioned this a hundred times already, but I’ll say it again — I’m a strict value guy. It’s a near guarantee I would have been sitting there for the first hour in absolute shock at the prices these players were going for with nary a player on my roster. But all these overpayments meant that those extra dollars would be taken away from some other hitters. And who was that group of hitters? The bottom tier of course. The Stars and Scrubsers pushed up the top tier and pushed down the bottom tier. All of a sudden, the $10 players now become $1, $2 and $3. And golly were there a slew of absolute bargains during that last hour.

If I were in this auction, I would have left $30 on the table. Well, maybe. Perhaps I would have been smart enough to recognize that I better spend my money on someone expensive just because I still need to spend that $260. But that is no sure thing to have happened. It takes a bunch of players going well above their worth to realize what’s actually happening and to adjust.

So what does one do? You can’t remain patient and plan to scoop up the bargains later. Because your first goal is to spend your entire $260 budget. Waiting might result in you getting excellent value for the money you do end up spending, but that could simply mean you spend just $210 and got $265 of value. Or heck, you spent just $23 on 23 $10 players for $230 of value! That’s some serious profit there, but your team is still going to stink!

The only logical plan is to overpay by less than everyone else. It’s very difficult to know this before hand, but when you see that non-Trout first rounders have been going for $5 over your price, then be part of the bidding even if it’s a buck or two above your value. Then cross your fingers, close your eyes, and hope the auctioneer says sold before anyone else goes the extra buck. It’s extremely difficult to convince myself to overpay for a player, but sometimes the situation dictates that it’s the best move. As long as you overpay by less than every other owner, you still maintain an advantage.