Auctions and Keepers

Welcome to my all new '09 Season blog! In this blog you will find my thoughts on:

• various fantasy topics.
• my team this year.
• other teams in my league.
• transactions that happen in the league.
• general fantasy strategy.

Why create such a blog and post it for all of the other managers to read? Why expose my innermost thoughts on potentially sensitive issues? Mainly because I want to start getting my ideas/strategies for fantasy down in writing and I'd like to have something of an audience to see what others have to say on my thoughts. The only people who might have an interest in reading this are probably those in the league, and MAYBE people out there who want insanely helpful championship winning fantasy baseball strategy. While I am going to avoid putting down my every last thought, to not completely tip my hand to the league, I will be forced to give away quite a bit of what I am doing this year. So if you care to know the random musings of the person winning the league this year, do read on.(Hint: sarcasm...mostly)

A new era has emerged in the Wallace Invitational this year as we have done an Auction draft and are instituting keepers for the first time. I did four live auctions in preparation for the real deal and it probably wasn't enough. I was mainly winging the practice auctions to get a feel for what players go for and what I can get away with while still maintaining a decent team. Anyone who knows what I like to do in FBB knows I am all about stacking up on R, HR, RBI, and AVG(OBP this year) and worry about the pitching later.

Auctions give me the unique ability to go HOG WILD on nearly everyone I want on offense and really push the limits of just how decent a pitching staff I can put together with little resources. In one practice auction I got four of the top six offensive players(Pujols, Utley, Wright, Braun) amongst other fine offensive players(Holliday, Morneau, Youkilis, Carlos Lee) and ended up with a staff far better than what I ended up with in the Wallace Invitational (Harang, Myers, Bedard, Carpenter and more). Granted this was a much more casual auction compared to our league, with at least four people not in attendance for the auction, so it can be taken with a grain of salt.

What made the Wallace Invitational auction a lot tougher, and quite a bit different, was the following:

1. OBP instead of AVG changed quite a few player's values.
2. Keepers.
3. More people in the auction knowledgeable enough to drive the prices up on certain players, Gus being the most on top of it.

In normal leagues I have always been a huge AVG guy. I hate having guys on my team who put up a ton of 0/4's on a daily basis. Especially in head to head leagues where streaky players like Soriano will hit 7 HRs in a week and be shitty in a majority of weeks. I want my power guys to at least put up some hits during the times they aren't bashing. Factoring in OBP though turns a lot of these low average power hitters into OBP monsters because some of them walk a ton when they aren't bashing. Some do all of the above, namely Pujols, who is basically on base every other appearance. But the real value in the auction comes when people don't realize that Thome hits for a shitty .250 AVG but has a .380 OBP. I'm too lazy to figure out where that puts him if you rerank everyone based on OBP+Stats but I know its pretty insane combining it with his 30+HRs and solid R/RBI. There were a ton of guys like this going undervalued in the auction, and I was able to get some of them.

Keeper strategy is something I haven't put a ton of thought into as I have a general feeling that I will have too many people I want to keep anyway so why bother thinking about it now. Our settings are that we get to keep four players at whatever they were drafted at +$5 for a max of three years. My other general feeling on keepers is that I want to win now and I don't want it to affect me to the point of making too many moves I wouldn't normally make. I think I failed a bit on this point, being tempted into buying Joba(13), David Price(12), and Wieters(12) at prices I wouldn't dream of in a normal league, and arguably bad buys even for the following year with the keeper cost. Essentially they will have to put up their highest possible production, or show signs that they will next year, in order for me to keep them at the prices I got them at. I have the most faith in Wieters, and if he puts up the type of numbers he's capable of, .390's OBP 30ish HR 90+ RBI/R's, I think he will be a great value at $17 next year. Or he could turn into Alex Gordon and I'll be kicking myself waiting forever for him to show his talent at the major league level.

I always worry about pitchers and hate how they can never stay healthy, one reason I only spent $57 on pitching, but if I'm gonna sink some money into one I prefer to shoot for the stars and get the highest upside guys. I figure every pitcher brings serious risk, compared to a hitter's risk to get hurt, so why not gamble. Sinking $20+ into any pitcher I find to be a very dubious proposition when you just never know who is going to go down, and someone always does. Think Chris Carpenter in '07 back when he was shut down in April for the season or Peavy in '06 where he put up a 4+ ERA following consecutive <3 ERA seasons. You can find a ton of examples. I cannot be having such risks at $20+ on my team, and thus I am forced to have a scrubby pitching staff full of as many upside gambles that I can muster. Think Cliff Lee last year, if you paid attention to spring training '08 you probably had an inkling to take a gamble on Lee at the end of the draft. I did so and he won the Cy Young...granted I traded him for M. Young but that's another story. That is what I'm looking for when I draft a pitcher, maybe not Cy Young material, but within the realm of possibility.

This is too long of a post already, so I'll end it here...expect another one shortly on the Auction itself where I will get into my pre-auction strategy, its execution, and some of the interesting things that happened.