Fantasy Baseball Auction Drafts don’t have to be overwhelming

I still love a good fantasy baseball draft, but as anyone who has done an auction before will tell you, auctions are just . . . better. You want to get Mike Trout and Paul Goldschmidt? Cool. You want to grab five of the top 10 starting pitchers? Have at it. The world is your oyster.

My first fantasy baseball auction was in 2006. I grabbed a random magazine off the shelf, used its values as a guide, kind of randomly filled in my team, and had a pretty decent season. That was a lot of fun. The next seven seasons of using that same strategy and leaving the auction with a team that had no shot of finishing higher than sixth? Not quite as much fun.

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Heading into the 2014 season, I was seriously dreading my league’s auction. Thankfully, that offseason, I discovered the book, “Winning Fantasy Baseball” by Larry Schechter, one of the all-time great fantasy baseball auction players. I devoured it, tabbed it, and read it again. And, believe me when I say, I have not had a single fantasy baseball auction since that I left feeling unhappy about my team. Not one. It’s almost impossible to leave an auction feeling like you screwed up if you follow the book’s teachings.

So, my number one piece of advice, if you are serious about succeeding at your fantasy baseball auction, buy Winning Fantasy Baseball and model your auction preparation and execution after it. But, truthfully, it will involve an INCREDIBLE amount of time and preparation to do what the book advises. So, while I would still recommend buying and reading the book, I understand that ~95% of you won’t have the time or desire to become the next Larry Schechter.

Thus, my second piece of advice is to follow this article. I absolutely base my preparation and strategy after the teachings in Winning Fantasy Baseball. But, I do take various shortcuts in my auction prep, and I also modify a few of Schechter’s strategies (I think a little more flexibility is needed when you’re dealing with leagues with your buddies instead of LABR or Tout Wars).

I’m not tooting my own horn here, I promise you. I fully admit to being one of the world’s worst fantasy baseball auction players four seasons ago. But this strategy WILL work if you do it correctly, and I have taught it to a few of my leaguemates and their auctions instantly improved.

So, are you ready? Let’s dive in. To put your auction goal into one sentence, it is this: Leave your auction with more value than anyone else.

Now, there’s more to it than that, but that’s pretty much what you’re shooting for. Basically, there are three components to achieving this goal:

1. Create reliable auction values
2. Build a spending plan and identify targets
3. Buy a balanced team while getting the most value for your dollar

Let’s take them one at a time:

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Create reliable auction values

What does leaving your auction with more value than anyone else mean? Well, everyone starts with $260 in auction dollars and, if everyone does it right, they will all spend their full $260. Your goal is to spend your $260, but walk away with significantly more in value. $300. $320. $360. Whatever it is, your goal is to get a ton more than $260 and, if possible, more value than anyone else.

Ok, that all sounds good, but how do you measure that value? And that’s where the first step comes in – creating reliable auction values. This is the key, guys. You need to have values you can trust, otherwise, even executing the rest of your auction perfectly won’t mean much.

Now, if/when you read Schechter’s book, you’re going to read that in order to formulate your values, meaning you should a) create your own player projections, b) calculate your league’s standard gain points (SGPs) (that means how much a single run, homer, steal, RBI, or point in batting average is worth in the standings in your league based on the league’s history), c) manually run a replacement value for each position, and d) pass out from exhaustion.

I made “d” up, but you see what I’m getting at, right? I have done all that before, and it’s an incredibly rewarding process that will age you seven years and have your spouse threatening to divorce you. But, if you have the time for it, go forth young squire!

If you’re like me, however, you need to pull a shortcut and that starts with an auction calculator, which you can input your budget, how many teams are in your league, the type of league, etc., and it will spit out auction values tailored to your league’s parameters. So, for the most part, it does a lot of your work for you.

I use the FantasyPros auction calculator and here’s why. The player stat projections are the LIFEBLOOD of your values. Differences of a few home runs or steals in projections can greatly impact values. Projections are what it’s all about, and that is why Schechter advises you to create your own – so that you know that you’re comfortable with them.

The reason I rely on the FantasyPros auction calculator is because it is based on aggregated projections from several major sites and projection systems. As with the expert consensus rankings, why would you rely on just one expert opinion when you can rely on the average of several reputable sources?

So, personally, as my free time to do offseason fantasy baseball preparation has been replaced with time pretending to be one of the villains from Kung Fu Panda and having fake tea parties, I’ve quit doing it all myself and now rely on FantasyPros (don’t worry, there’s still plenty you’ll be doing yourself). There’s a free version, which will give you most of what you need, but because I’m anal and my league settings and roster positions are a little funky, I use the premium version, which allows you to customize your values up the wazoo.

Whether you do it yourself (cray cray), or use the FantasyPros auction calculator (the best option, in my humble opinion), the most important thing is to create auction values you feel comfortable with. Because if your goal is to walk away from the auction with way more than $260 in value, you need to feel comfortable with how you’re measuring that value.

One final point on values: Whether you use the auction calculator or do it all yourself, you’re going to need to come up with a “split” of your budget – the percentage allocated toward hitters vs. pitchers. The general standard is anywhere between 65%/35% and 70%/30% for a hitting/pitching breakdown. Play around with the split, see which values strike you as right. Personally, I tend to go with a 68%/32% split, which seems to be how my leagues play out. And just an FYI, the auction calculator here has this option!

Build a spending plan and identify targets

Ok, we’ve got some awesome auction values! Now what? Well, now we need to craft a rough plan as to how we are going to be able to buy way more value than the money we spend. And that leads us to step two; build a spending plan and identify targets. They go hand-in-hand a bit, but I’ll separate them out to make it easier to understand.

Building a spending plan

Above all else, do not go into an auction saying “I’m walking out of here with x player” or “I’m spending $35 on x position.” That might work in a fantasy football auction, but you can’t limit yourself like that in baseball. A fantasy baseball auction is like jazz, baby. There’s a lot of improvising.

What you DO want, however, is to have a general sense of how much money you are going to be spending on your various purchases. So, for example, in one of my leagues, we play with 13 hitters and nine pitchers (pretty standard). In preparing for my auction last year, I used my usual 68%/32% split, meaning I was planning to spend $177 on hitters and $83 on pitchers. Here is what my hitting plan looked like:

 
I had a similar breakdown for pitching, but with nine slots totaling $83. But this is it – my spending plan for the auction. As I purchased a player for the money allocated (or closest to that slot), I wrote his name in the “player purchased” column. To the extent he was higher or lower than the money allocated in that row, I would make the change, and then make sure I changed another row in the opposite amount so that my total always stayed at 177. That allows you to adjust your budget on the fly.

As we’ll talk about in a second, by the time you get to the auction room, you should have a general sense of the group of players who are likely to be populating your chart. But you should not, under any circumstances, be limiting yourself or have anything set in stone. The spending plan is there to make you feel comfortable, so that when you spend $38 on someone, you can easily adjust and feel confident that you know around how much you’ll be spending on your other players.

One final point on your spending plan: That chart above was just a plan that fits my league, because there are a ton of players that go for super cheap at the end of the auction. Your plan can be whatever you want it to be. You do you, friends.

Identifying targets

So, why do you have a general sense of the players most likely to fill in your chart when you get to the auction room? Because you’ve spent some time during your preparation looking at your values and determining who you think you value more than your leaguemates will. In other words, you’ve identified your targets.

Last year, I had Mark Trumbo as being worth $14 in my auction values in one of my leagues. There’s no way I expected his huge season, but his projections and my league format certainly suggested he’d be a solid outfielder. When I saw his value, I knew right away he would be one of my targets, because there was no way anyone in my league was going to pay anywhere close to that for him. So I included him on my list of targets and, sure enough, got him for $6 late in the auction.

In essence, that is your goal. To purchase players for much less than their value. Your target list is there to have a general sense of who is most likely to be able to meet that criterion.

A lot of times, your targets are going to be obvious to you after looking at your values. For example, when a player has a value much higher than you would have thought he would have, he’ll probably be a target. But, you should also check values from other websites and publications, because people in your league are probably getting their values from those same sources. If a few magazines are saying a player is worth $7, but you have him valued at $18, he will probably be one of your targets.

So, of course, creating reliable values is the biggest key, but identifying targets in advance is critical. Having a list of players who you are confident can be purchased at a discount is really what allows you to walk out of the auction room with far more value on your team than anyone else.

Three final points about identifying targets:

1. Elite players – say the guys that go in the first round and maybe the second – are not going to come at huge discounts. That’s ok. You can’t just forgo those guys, so be prepared to pay full price if necessary.
2. Schechter is the most disciplined guy in the world, and goes over his values only in the most extreme case, such as the very end of the auction when he has more money to burn and is desperate. Especially in mixed leagues, I think you need to be more flexible. I’ve shot past my values at various points when I felt it’s been necessary in light of the available players. It happens. You’ll get plenty of discounts if you’re generally disciplined.
3. Finally, you may wind up with a bunch of guys who are not on your target list. Discounts come at random times and with random players, so don’t be locked into the guys you’ve identified pre-auction. Be ready to pounce at a moment’s notice.

Buy a balanced and discounted team

At this point, all that’s left is your auction. You’ve got your values and you’ve got your targets. So now, let’s nail the auction.

We know we’re looking for discounts, of course, but even the most discounted team won’t do us much good if we’re projected to have 485 steals but just 25 home runs, or 300 saves with 20 wins. We need to make sure we’re building a competitive team, too.

So, in advance of your auction, I’d advise taking a look at your league history, or at least the standings from the previous year, and noting what it took to get a 12 (or a 10 if you’re in a 10-teamer) in each category. Your goal should be to, at the end of the auction, have a team that is projected to be close to (or surpass) those numbers in every category.

As with the spending plan, I advise you to make a chart in advance. Here’s my sample for hitters:

 
As you purchase a player, input his name and his projected stats into the appropriate category. This will allow you to see, as the auction progresses, how your team is looking and what stats you might need to be focusing on going forward (i.e., if you’re looking great in steals but horrible in home runs, maybe pass on that Billy Hamilton buy even if it’s a bargain).

Chances are, you aren’t going to hit all your targeted stats, but rare is the league where anyone actually sweeps all the categories. This is much more about giving you a goal and allowing you to have a good sense of where your weaknesses are as the auction is going on.

Two final points about building a balanced and discounted team:

1. There are times when you want to nominate players you aren’t interested in, just to get some money off the table. But, more often than not, I nominate players that I do want, ESPECIALLY early. If you think Bryce Harper is a guy you are going to be able to get at cost or even for a slight discount, you’re going to need to know whether you can or can’t fairly early. Because you don’t want to let a bunch of elite players go for fair prices thinking you’ll get Harper, only to find out that it won’t happen. You’ve got plenty of targets and can easily improvise if thing don’t go as planned early. But you’ll need to actually know if things aren’t going as planned!
2. The most difficult part about building your team will be knowing when to let a discounted buy pass and when to pounce, because there are going to be a lot of discounts available. So, you know, sometimes you think Mike Moustakas is such a huge bargain that you can’t pass him up even though you don’t really want him, and then later you realize that better third baseman will go for even less (I never said I was flawless, ok?). You don’t need to jump on every bargain. Feel your way through it.

Phew, we’ve done it. If you’ve made it through this whole article in one sitting, then you’ve definitely got the patience and dedication necessary to nail your auction. And sure, you’ll still have plenty of instances where you feel great about leaving your auction with your discounted Leonys Martin only to cut him a few weeks later. But, if you follow the steps in this article, I can almost guarantee you that you’ll leave your auction feeling good and having given yourself a chance to win your league.

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Dan Harris is a correspondent with FantasyPros. For more from Dan, check out his archive or follow him on Twitter at @danharris80.