Andrew McCutchen is the type of player who could be had for less than his projected auction value
Introduction to Fantasy Baseball Auction Drafts
Congratulations! You’ve signed up for an auction draft this MLB season. Auction drafts are different from snake drafts in that you can buy whatever player you want for your team as long as you have the funds and are willing to pay more than the rest of your league mates. This is obviously a simplified definition of an auction as there are many variables at play, but it’s a good starting point.
In a re-draft auction, everybody starts the draft with the same auction budget. If this is your first time participating in an auction draft, I suggest finding a re-draft league or a keeper league in its initial year.
Joining an established keeper auction league can be tough for a first timer as many of the league members will be familiar with auction strategy, start with different budgets and have some pretty nice low-cost keepers. I’m steering my advice in this column towards players participating in their first auction, although a lot of this advice can work for anyone provided you haven’t heard it before.
Auction budgets will vary depending on where you’re playing, but it is often around $260 give-or-take a few dollars. Before you sign up for your auction, you’ll have to determine what type of league you want to join – rotisserie, head-to-head, mixed or AL/NL only, keeper, re-draft, etc. Make sure you know everything about your league’s settings well before the auction starts.
This will greatly determine how you and your league mates will value players during the draft. There are plenty of resources out there, including our auction calculator here at FantasyPros.
I think our calculator is a great tool. You can adjust how much of your budget you want to spend on hitting versus pitching and how many teams are in your league and values based on NL or AL only leagues.
Our MVP calculator goes one step further and allows you to generate values based on specific scoring categories and roster requirements your league may have. Even if you don’t ultimately use our calculator because you like values elsewhere, give it a try just to see how values change if you manipulate the settings.
There are a bevy of resources out there that have player rankings with auction values attached. I like to find a number of sources that I like and compare their values, so I have a range of values to look at while I’m drafting.
I’ll shill for FantasyPros again and say that the composite ADP data we have is currently derived from four sources to give you some pretty accurate data regarding player value at drafts. You don’t have to treat it as gospel, but I like it as a starting point for my research.
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Preparing for the Auction
So by now you’ve signed up for an auction, you know the settings/scoring and you have a cheat sheet with values, what else can you do to prepare? Participating in a mock auction can help, although you want to be sure there are enough real live “mockers” there with you so you aren’t practicing against bots or teams set to auto-draft.
Usually, if there is a bot or team on auto-draft, live participants will try to fill that team with players that are already injured for the season before the draft software has updated their pre-draft value. Zack Wheeler was injured in Spring Training last year, and it took a week or so for the software to update his pre-draft value.
In the meantime, he was being rostered by auto-draft teams for $10 or more because the live drafters wanted these auto-draft teams to fill their rosters to thin out the bidding pool. This controversial strategy of filling an auto-draft team with injured players has its place in highly competitive leagues with notorious trash talkers and close love-hate relationships, but it won’t help your “fantasy karma” and it certainly won’t help you prepare for your real auction if you do it in a mock draft.
There is value everywhere at an auction. I’ve found a lot of good early value comes with the third to 12th picks. The highest priced players are gone, and now you’re in a place where you can find a guy ranked towards the back of the top 10 that goes for slightly less than their projected value. Andrew McCutchen seems to fit that example this season.
Say he’s tossed out in the first five nominations. He’s not a top-five ranked player, and a lot of people still have money so chances are they’ll just ignore McCutchen and pass on bidding.
If Cutch is sitting there at $29 with no real action, he could be had for $30, which according to our calculator ($39 for a 12 team mixed league) is good value. This naturally varies from auction to auction, but in my experience, there’s always somebody in the top 10 picks who goes for less than their projected draft value.
The auction will continue until every team has filled their roster. The way an auction works is a team nominates a player, and bids are taken until the player is sold to the highest bidder.
Then the next team down the list nominates another player, and so on. The nomination order usually doesn’t snake, so after the final team in the list nominates a player, it goes back to the first team. Once a player has filled their roster, they are no longer eligible to bid or nominate players.
When it comes to bidding, every auction is different. There will be teams that are more aggressive than others. There’s going to be a team that tosses a bid in on every player just to drive up the price.
I like bidding to a price I’m willing to pay and then I’ll back off. You can continue to bid just to drive a player’s price higher, but there’s always a chance you get stuck with a player you don’t want.
My advice is not to let a buy like this shake you. You’ll have to readjust what you do later in the draft, but one buy won’t hurt your team. Fantasy baseball is won on the waiver wire.
Know Your Opponents
Knowing what your opponents are going to do at the auction isn’t always a given, but there are small nuances you can pick up on that will help you as the auction progresses. The simplest thing is knowing where your opponents live or what teams they root for.
Yes, the first part of that advice sounds incredibly creepy, but all you need to know is what teams they follow. I’ve found that there are at least one or two players in every league who try to acquire players from their region, simply because they see them more often.
For example, I play in a league where more than 50% of the members are from the Midwest. In our three years of existence, players from the AL and NL Central divisions generate the most interest at the auction. We have a member of our league who loves the Chicago White Sox, and at last year’s auction, this player ended up with six White Sox on their team.
Every time a White Sox player was up, this team was bidding aggressively. They didn’t roster every White Sox player up for auction, but six is still a pretty high number. There came a point in the draft where I noticed this and began nominating White Sox just so this team would fill their roster and I’d have one fewer person to bid against at the end of the draft.
I’ve also found that there is often a team that loves prospects. They’ll make one or two big buys and then sit on their money until later in the auction so they can poach all the cheaper prospects with the hope of finding the next Mike Trout or Kris Bryant. I combat this by nominating prospects earlier in the draft, so more teams in the bidding pool have exposure to these players.
It will force the prospect chasers to adjust their strategy mid-draft. This goes for any position. Keep an eye on how teams are filling their rosters and adjust your nomination strategy, so teams spend their money.
If there’s a team waiting on catchers, thin the pool a bit by nominating catchers until that team is coerced into making a buy. Nominate high-value closers, especially if you’re good at finding saves later in the draft and on the waiver wire.
The goal is to make other teams at the auction uncomfortable, so they are thrown off their strategy. There is a lot of “gamesmanship” in an auction draft, or any auction for that matter.
You’ll see it on reality TV shows that show people competing in auctions. Most of the time the “winners” of the auction are extremely confident and willing to roll with what is happening in the room.
The last quarter of the auction is where it can get interesting. At this point, I will stress that you should spend ALL of your auction money. Leaving money on the table does you no good.
If this is your first auction and you end with $1 or $2 left on the table, that’s understandable, but learn to spend all of your money. Most auction software will tell you how much money you have left to spend on an individual roster spot, so keep an eye on that counter as the auction draws to a close. I like to have four or five spots left for $1 buys in a mixed auction, but that can certainly change depending on the room.
If I could boil down my beginner auction strategy into bullet points it would be:
- Know your league’s scoring and settings backward and forward
- Generate a basic cheat sheet with values for the top 250 players
- Determine which players you wouldn’t mind overpaying for, and which players you don’t have any interest in rostering
- Participate in at least one mock auction so you’re familiar with the process
- Bid on players to a price you’re comfortable paying and don’t aggressively try to drive up prices since other teams will catch on to you
- Get some intel on your league mates
- Develop a nomination strategy that forces other teams off of their game
- Keep an eye on your money and how much you have left to spend on each remaining roster spot and determine how many $1 players you want to roster
- SPEND ALL OF YOUR MONEY
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J.P. Gale is a correspondent at FantasyPros. To read more from J.P., check out his archive and follow him @gojpg.
