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.
Mike Podhorzer is the founder of ProjectingX IQ, an advanced fantasy baseball analytics platform that transforms projection data and in-season performance signals into actionable intelligence. He is the 2015 Fantasy Sports Writers Association Baseball Writer of the Year and three-time Tout Wars champion. He is the author of the eBook Projecting X 2.0: How to Forecast Baseball Player Performance, which teaches you how to project players yourself. Follow Mike on X@MikePodhorzer and contact him via email.
The exact situation you outlined happened to me in my first ever auction last year. You find yourself scrambling to spend money toward the middle of the auction because you became a slave to your values. My plan this year is to make a few calculated splashes early on, and then adjust back to finding value later in the draft.
True that. It’s not like you would trade your first and second round picks in a snake draft for a bunch of 12-14 rounders, right? It’s not like the drafter who “overpays” by $10 for the consensus best player doesn’t get to fill his roster with “free” $1-$2 players who aren’t that far from being $5-$10 players.
I like to nominate players I do not want so I can go to bathroom and assess my current status and future strategy.
you go to the bathroom 28 times during the draft?
/sarcasm
IBS is a helluva thing.
Maybe he drinks one beer per round.
Mike- great article. Question on early noms, though. If you have your sheet and you are pretty sure (based on league history, what you’ve been reading) that a certain player is going for a lot more than what you have, doesnt it make sense to nominate that player?
Dont you want to make your opponents overpay based on your valuations early? That would leave less money for you to fight against to get appropriate value, right?
In theory, yes. In fact, that’s exactly why Kendall Graveman was my first nomination. I thought he was being overhyped, had him worth like -$1 and figured he’d go for too much. But it doesn’t always work since sometimes owners are cautious early and want to spend on the top tier names, not fill their first roster spot with a sleeper pitcher or the 10th best first baseman.
Agreed, I would pick a top 20ish guy that I don’t want and nominate them the first couple of times through. Let people overpay by $5 for Jose Altuve, it gets some real money spent on someone you didn’t want anyway. I would rather them spend $33 on a $28 Altuve than $5 on a $1 pitcher (for example).
@Jason B, I agree with the Altuve nomination, but I myself avoid nominating like that because I know Altuve is going to be nominated soon anyway. If it’s somebody I want people to waste their money on, I might dig a little deeper than the top 20, since probably 18 of those 20 will get nominated in the first 2 rounds.
So for me it’s either:
(a) nominate a mid-to-high-level player (say top 50ish) that I suspect will be overvalued,
(b) nominate a value target that’s deep within a position (sometimes people scramble to locate a player in their lists that early), or
(c) nominate a targeted $1 player that you wouldn’t want for $2 (like kickers in football, or say a pitcher who is starting the season on the DL).
I, too, like Mike have struggled to spend all my money because I hold rigidly to pre-auction values, and have even failed to pull the trigger on $1-3 profits because I’m waiting for the big $5-10 profits that never come. This year I just plan on making one or two big purchases early on even if I pay a couple bucks more, just so I know I’m spending some of my money on quality hitters.
Great article. The last bit has been happening to me in my mixed keeper league. The 1st round Studs are going for $45-$55 and then mid round guys are going for super cheap, due to inflation caused by good keeps (Trout & Stanton @ $16).
Leaving $10-$15 on the table makes me cringe. I’m like you in I have a hard time buying a guy that is over the value that I set for him. Any advice for avoiding this downfall for a 3rd straight year?
The first question I’d ask you is are you sure you’re calculating inflation correctly and then taking those inflation adjusted values with you to the auction? Because the inflated values are the correct values to use for the auction. I know many fantasy owners refuse to believe in those and try sticking to non-inflated values, which will cause you to miss out on every player and leave money on the table.
Are you familiar with the site Fantistics? I use their Draft Software and enter the keepers with their values. It produces an Estimated Auction Value (EAV) and an Inflation Adjusted Value (INF). I think I may have been sticking to the EAV too much because the INF values seem too far fetched.
You got my wheels spinning and I think I may need to adjust the hitting/pitching ratio.
Thanks for the input. Also, well done on the E-Book, really enjoyed it.
Thanks, glad you enjoyd the ebook! Yes, I know Fantistics. Looks like I discovered the root of the problem. The INF are the real values that you need to use. As long as all players add up to what your league will have to spend, then they are correct.
Hoff, I don’t know if you’ve messed with the auction calculator at all here on the site but it will helpfully calculate inflation for you. In the past I always just estimated, but this had me pretty surprised at how significantly protected value upped the ante on the available guys in keeper leagues.
I have not, but I will definitely check it out. Thanks!
I like to nominate obvious sleepers and hot rookies early
and expensive SP, never pay for SP, let others waste money on that marginal return in production
I nominate players I don’t want for the sole purpose of making other teams spend their money first. Then when the players I want come up, the other owners have to bid more cautiously.
There is no real proof in this working, but you gotta love the mind games behind drafting.
The players are going to be nominated and bid on regardless, so I think it gives you a false sense of control. I get the psychology, I just don’t think it has any real effect.
Agree with Cory and it’s more than just money for a particular player. It’s a roster spot, too. Depending on the league you could end up with fewer bidders on the players you have targeted because the teams who acquired the players you weren’t interested in are focusing to fill other slots.
Which gets to Mike’s comment regarding the psychology. It would probably be completely useless in a league of experts who are using somewhat similar evaluations and strategies; however, when you have a primary home league whose members have different levels of experience and a variety of methods, the opportunity to pick up excellent players on the cheap in mid to late rounds of the auction has presented itself every year because other teams didn’t have cash or roster slots.
Great stuff and is why I am not a fan of following values strictly.
If you know you will be able to underpay later, than makes sense to throw out values early and overpay on safe players. It is basically free money.
If it is a repeating league I like to look at prior seasons draft results. See if it is top heavy with a bunch of undervalued players later. With some reassurance there will be cheap values later, it is not as daunting overpaying early.
Also, if it is a keeper league, the more inexpensive players the more potential keeper gems. A team that spends no less than $10 on a player may have some good value keepers, but is removing himself from the lotto.
Great read, thank you. A couple things…for what it’s worth.
I think that only leagues have less of a chance of the major $ increase you noted than mixed leagues. Mixed leagues, everyone has a superstar team and I think it lends itself to more overbidding.
I also don’t usually throw out names unless I want them or would take them given the right price.
I think it’s more important to get at least one top “name” star in keeper auction leagues. If you’re out of the money at the break, you have a trade chip to get good keepers for next year from someone who is in the hunt. Get one or two even if you reach by a dollar or two.
Nominate the big guns early so you get a sense of what in-draft inflation is running early and to get big money out of other people’s hands.
Just a couple things to add to the discussion, thanks!
If you build your spreadsheet such that values can recalculate dynamically as players and dollars are removed from the pool, then a slew of high-value overpays should cause every else’s values to creep up as the draft progresses.
How do you do this?
Well one option would be to delete the player record and manually adjust the total dollar pool after each pick.
Another, probably better, way would be to have a “paid” field, and enter the final bid when made. Your formulas could look for a non-zero value there, then ignore the corresponding player and deduct the value from the total dollar pool.
You would probably have to make adjustments to the total players expected to be drafted count, as well as by position, and perhaps to individual opponent roster counts if you’re tracking those also. This can all get complicated but is very doable.
First and foremost you have to know your league. What are the scoring quirks? Where can you take advantage of inefficiency? The “values” of a player are not just what that player can give you, but also what can a replacement level player give you? In a keeper, this is even more important.
My league is a 16-tm, 5 keeper, $260 budget, H2H points league where hitters outscore pitchers by a lot because IP is only one point for the pitcher. Pitchers are not dinged for walks or hits, so you need to account for that. We don’t use FAAB, so in-season waivers are so much easier to obtain talent from.
This caused me to calculate inflation, replacement values based on z-scores and see where I can get a reasonable player late for cheap, and do the stars and scrubs model. You have to know that this model is not going to be conducive to trading because your depth will be shallow until you build it through the wire. We have a 10-start max each week, which means you can throw a reliever with SP eligibility into your daily lineup and score easy points that most others do not get. I churn the bottom of my lineup quite a bit throughout the year. That’s how Carrasco, Wood, and Dickerson became cheap keepers.
My team ended up:
C- Jaso ($1)
1B- Miguel Cabrera- ($50)
2B- Kinsler ($26)
SS- Tulo ($48)
3B- Bogaerts ($7 keeper)/Headley ($7)
OF- Dickerson ($3 keeper)
OF- Betts ($17)
OF- Garnder ($16)/Desmond Jennings ($5)
Util- Encarnacion ($49)
SP- Carrasco ($5 keeper)
SP- Alex Wood ($8 keeper)
SP- Collin McHugh ($6)
RP- Benoit ($1)
RP- McGee ($1), Boxberger ($1)
SP- CJ Wilson ($1), TJ House ($1), Brett Anderson ($1), Jaime Garcia ($1), Chase Anderson ($1), Jason Hammel ($1), Cingrani ($1)
It’s shallow, and if injuries strike I’m in trouble, but that is a team that can win a lot of games in my format.
A big mistake a lot of people make is confusing value with bid limit. They wonder why all these $10-and-under players are going for $5+ below their projected value, but they don’t have any roster space left for more than one or two of them because they loaded up on $15-$20 players. Hell, I’ve made this mistake myself many times. Reading Larry Schechter’s book woke me up to what I was doing and actually prepare for it rather than try to adjust to it on-the-fly, by which point it’s too late to reallocate some cash to the elite players. And though I think his method is a bit crude, I’ve developed my own slightly-less-crude method (yes I am naive enough to think I know better than Larry, haha) which helps me put proper bid limits on players. Once this is done, the huge price for the top players makes a lot more sense.
If you have a player you like and are willing to pay up to 2$, do you nominate him for 1$ hoping he slides by, or nominate straight at 2$, or wait for someone else to nominate him for 1$?
If you have a player you like and are willing to pay up to 2$, do you nominate him for 1$ hoping he slides by, or nominate straight at 2$, or wait for someone else to nominate him for 1$?
Sorry for the double post (under 2 names) something wierd happened
Id probably wait for someone else to nominate on the small chance nobody does, everyone gets down to min bid and you can nab him for a buck.
If you are willing to go to $2, than I dont like option 1 because there is a good chance someone else is willing to go to $2 as well. If thats the case and $2 is your limit he’s gone.
Good question. But can you really say you like this player if $2 is your limit?!
A few comments:
1) Nominating players you don’t want is generally a (slightly) good idea because it will get money off the board and make the players you want get nominated (slightly) later. Since the top and early-nominated players (often one and the same) are usually inflated more than the others, this could help a little. On the other hand, if your league is an anomaly and the early-nominated players are going for below their inflated values, then you should bring up your guy to try to get him for a slight bargain. On the third hand, you don’t want your guy to be the last “good” player on the board, because the teams that didn’t budget well and have a ton of money to spend will bid him way up, well beyond his inflated value.
2) Agreed on having your sheet dynamically calculate inflation. To do this you have to record what each player sells for. This can be a lot of work and doesn’t give you much time to stop and think, but is worth it.
3) I think the most common error that “good” players make is to leave money on the board, because they know what the players are worth and refuse to pay more than that. You will get bargains later on, but of course that doesn’t do you much good if you’ve got $80 left and buy $50 worth of players for $20, leaving $30 on the table.
My general rule is to bid fairly aggressively at the beginning. I could probably come up with some formula, but essentially I’ll bid up to (inflated value – $3) for the first few stars. If I don’t get any, increase to (inflated value – $2), and so on. At some point I might have spent a few bucks over my inflated value but that’s a lot better than leaving $30 on the table.
The other rule is not to be picky about your superstars. If you say “I’m only going to spend $30+ if it’s one of these 3 guys” then you’re setting yourself up for trouble.
I try and nominate the good players I don’t like early. I know I won’t get stuck with them and they will reduce competition for the players I do want. I also like to nominate players who I believe are overhyped or who I believe my leaguemate over value. But, I’ve gotten burned too many times nominating sleepers I don’t like and hoping they’ll go for more than they are worth. Best case scenario is someone will overspend by a few bucks, but in the worst case scenario I end up with a player I don’t like sucking up a roster spot. Not worth it. Every year it seems that my league becomes more top heavy. I had to pay $60 of a $300 budget for Cutch last year. I’m prepared to pay $65 for him this year. The league is relatively shallow and we don’t have many bench spots so average players are a dime a dozen on the waiver wire meaning top players are worth their weight in Trouts.
Using the Fangraphs Auction Value Calculator for a pretty standard roto league, Mike Trout is valued #1 at about $50. Down the line at around #60 there is a cluster of guys worth about $11 such as McCann, Butler, Choo, Zobrist, and Andrus. All of these guys are roster-worthy but there is no way in any form of afterlife that anyone trades a $50 Trout for five McCanns, Butlers, Choos, Zobrists, and/or Andri. Pre-draft valuations are good for ranking players but they do not represent real-life auction value (your auction does that).
Add up the stats you’d get from 5 Choos and compare them to what you’d get from Trout and 4 replacement level players. If the Choos come out ahead, then they are certainly worth more than Trout.
Whether or not anyone would actually trade Trout for them is a different story, but value is value. Quantity can absolutely make up for quality.
If you give up roster versatility and ignore the value of a roster spot vs stat production you may be right.
On the other hand, given your proposed strategy, you should pay $55 for a $50 Trout and then trade him for a bunch of riff-raff someone else paid $10 for but you had pre-aution valued at $60 – and you could run out the deepest bench in your league.
A Choo, a Trout, and a replacement level player walk into a bar…
Part of the reason nobody would ever actually do that, is because they don’t have 4 empty roster spots waiting for all of those extra Choos. You’d be trading Mike Trout and losing 4 players, which you might have valued at $4 apiece. And it can’t simply be the worst 4 guys either, you need to take position into consideration. So If I’m losing Trout ($50) and 4 mediocre guys worth a total of $15, I’m losing $65 worth of value and getting back $50. So of course I won’t do that trade. But if it’s five $13 players…. maybe I’d do it, if it doesn’t screw up my roster construction.
Yup, exactly what Jon said. Well stated.
You were wrong when you made it your strategy to simply seek value — players who will produce more than what it cost to purchase them.
You were equally wrong when you wrote, “Because your first goal is to spend your entire $260 budget.”
The goal is neither surplus value nor spending your full budget. The goal is to win, and what that means in the context of a fantasy auction is to assemble a team that will produce more than any rival team using your league’s scoring categories.
A simple, illustrative example in a three team league in which there is no trades or subsequent roster moves after the auction.
Team A spends $240 on players that produce $260.
Team B spends $260 on players that produce $250.
Team C spends $255 on players that produce $265.
Team A obtained the most surplus value – $20.
Team B was the only one to spend all its money.
Team C won the league even though it left money on the table and didn’t get the most surplus value.
Again, the goal is to win. When you understand precisely what that means, you end up with more helpful approaches:
(1) The extent to which you seek surplus value rather than production depends on where your team stands relative to your rivals. If I have a great keeper list that is the class of the league, that becomes a reason to seek production because otherwise the production I need may run out before my budget does. If I have a crappy keeper list, then I must find more surplus value to vault my team into contention. Similar adjustment should be made within the auction itself.
(2) You need to consider the trade elasticity of your league and the extent to which free agent of value will be available. My primary league, for example, is very deep — 480 players on 12 teams for A.L. only. Free agents of value are infrequent. Many of my co-owners are trade-adverse. All that makes it more difficult to improve categories of weakness, so in our auctions, you are wise to seek balance. In a more shallow league or one that is more trade-friendly, you can acquire production at the auction even it it is stockpiled in certain categories.
If you have a guy you are only willing to bid $2 on, then I don’t see why you would care if someone else bid $2 on him, cause they will be someone else you like @ $2.
if you want a guy at $2 because he has a lot of upside.. what’s the difference between $2 and $3?
Well, it’s one more, innit?
“The only logical plan is to overpay by less than everyone else.”
This is the truth. In my league, it’s closers.
Seems like the majority of people have suggested, “I throw out players I don’t want early. This gets money off the table, fills up other teams’ roster spots, and reduces competition for the players I want.”
There is merit to these statements, but I think it oversimplifies things.
This strategy does two other things:
While it does reduce competition in terms of the number of other owners, it also reduces the supply of players. You can’t just assume that because there are fewer teams competing that you will get cheaper prices on the players you want to target. As the supply of good players at a position dwindles, the competition/demand for those players will increase. You could easily find yourself in a bidding war as other desperate teams try to get that targeted player. So you’re faced with losing money on the player or needing to let your target slip away with few alternatives to address the loss.
Somewhat related to this is you increase the likelihood of pigeon-holing yourself into a roster construction you don’t want. If you have a draft plan that revolves around specific players, it can be devastating to wait until the end to find out you will not get those important players.
I used to follow the “throw out guys I don’t want” approach, but I’ve switched completely. I’d rather throw out guys I do want early. That way I’ll know if I’m going to have those important cornerstones early in the draft. If something goes awry and I miss out on them, I’ll have more “outs” available to me where I can still build a strong team.
This can be tricky to other owners as well. Sometimes those key pieces to your plan are $8-$12 players. When those guys come out early in a draft a number of teams will just pass because they’re looking for the higher priced guys. Or because the market hasn’t been set nobody knows how the middle-tiered players will go for.
There are arguments to both sides.