By Jim Higgins
About half the content I have created for this blog is personal stories that have happened since I joined my first keeper league prior to last season. Like many of you, my league recently began preparations for the 2010 via an auction.Previously this league distributed non-keepers via a draft but during last season we decided (some of us reluctantly) to change to an auction for 2010. While many of us were excited for the change, there was one major hurdle we had to decided upon, auction dollars. Because our league does not have contracts, there are no dollar values attached to the players you decide to keep. The only rule is that you have to keep 14 players.
After some discussion we decided each team will get $135 to fill its final 13 roster spots for the auction, hoping that number would be consistent with the standard $260 budget most leagues use. What we quickly found out was that $135 was way to high.
Since we are scattered all over the U.S., our league is using a message board to hold a slow auction. Each team began by nominating a player and could bid on any of the 12 players on the auction block. Once a player had received no bids for 12 hours, that player was awarded to the final bidder and the team that nominated the player opened the bidding on the next guy.
I am by no means an auction expert as I have only participated in a handful of auctions (not all of which are baseball) but I know that I had as much or more experience than most of the other managers in the league. And this is where I got into trouble early.
Thinking I might be able to get a player or two on the cheap early while the other owners adjusted to the system, I threw out Billy Wagner (one of my top targets in the auction) out in the first round of nominations for a moderate price, hoping his age and recent injury history would keep owners away. In less than an hour his price jumped from $7 to $32 and I knew I would have to pay way more than I ever thought if I wanted to acquire this target.
I thought I had Wagner won once I went to $33 a few minutes later and I slowly began second guessing my decision to blow so much money on such a volatile player. I really like Wagner and feel he will have a great season in Atlanta but would he come close to being worth the $33 I was going to pay for him? Not likely, even if he escapes 2010 without any trips to the DL.
Then a funny thing happened – almost six hours later a bid for $34 was posted and it was not from the manager I bid furiously with hours earlier. At that point, after I had let reason set in, I decided it would severely limit my strategy to go $35 and I let my top target go.
Hours later the same thing happened to me again, this time the target was Torii Hunter, arguably the most consistent offensive player in the draft. This time the bidding got to $36 before I stopped myself and finally realized that I had my strategy all backwards. I wasn’t supposed to get these guys early, I needed the other managers to blow through their money first, then get my targets second.
And it worked for the most part. While many of the managers bid $30+ on guys like Denard Span and Raul Ibanez, I found the pockets of value and picked up undervalued veterans like Adrian Beltre ($9) and Mark DeRosa ($4) for less than $10.
I still found myself having to outbid owners here and there for some of my targets but that never would’ve been possible if I had opened my draft by spending more than half my budget on two players. And I also know that our auction budgets need a little more tweeking if we want the values to be on the $260 scale.
So my warning to all of you out there who have yet to get to filling out your rosters this offseason is this: sit back, find the value and don’t get in bidding wars. It will be a lot easier for Mark DeRosa to provide more than $4 worth of to your squad than it will be for Billy Wagner to provide $34 worth of value.
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