Winning Draft and Auction Fantasy Leagues
by David Luciani
Published March 16, 2001

Too many fantasy leaguers finish in the middle of the pack because they don't set their sights correctly during their draft or auction. It's such a fundamental aspect of success that how you bid and draft will essentially determine how your season is destined to go.  Some elements of what I will publish here have no doubt appeared on our site before and I continue to make it an annual tradition to expand further on advice from previous years with the hope that some new reader out there will end up winning their league because of what they read here.

There are really three types of leagues, a straight draft league, an auction league and what I will loosely call an "online league" in that these leagues usually let you assemble a roster within the constraints of a designated salary cap and pre-determined salaries for each individual player. We're going to deal with the first two types of leagues here and then move onto online leagues in the next couple of weeks.

The Straight Draft

The straight draft league is actually a bit easier to win if you know what you're doing, especially if you're using our interactive ranking forms. Basically, you just want to select the best available player left but with some exceptions. For example, Tom Gordon will be high ranked on most league lists but we strongly recommend waiting to draft him until late in the draft. It is important for the drafting owner to recognize that perceived value is an important reality that allows you to save lower draft picks to take potentially higher-valued players. Gordon is an excellent example of a pitcher not likely to go too early in drafts but that would be a good pick to round out the end of a roster.

In cases such as Gordon, I recommend that the drafting team adopt one of two strategies: Leave one pitching spot open to take him last or bypass Gordon on your list altogether. It's worth noting that perception is often quite accurate and if your league really isn't interested in a player, it could be because they rightfully recognize that he is a big risk, despite his upside.

Because pitching often ends up too low or too high on draft lists, I strongly recommend that a drafting team try to maintain a 2-1 ratio of hitters to pitchers drafted, throughout the draft. If you want Pedro Martinez and have a first pick, then by all means take him first but I have found that the greatest success in draft leagues tends to come by constantly preserving a 2-1 ratio of hitters to pitchers as the draft succeeds. So if you take Pedro first, then draft two hitters next.

I have also argued elsewhere in these pages that position scarcity is overblown and that you should take the best available player. That argument still stands. The field may be thin at second base after you get past a few key players but you really don't do yourself a favor by taking a relatively good player at one position just because the rest of the choices that qualify there are weak. Just take the best available hitter or pitcher respectively and move on to the next pick.  Eventually, you'll get your second baseman.

In terms of maintaining balance, especially if you have eight or ten categories to fill, let me emphasize that most teams drafting aren't that good at maintaining balance and you will find at the end of the draft that if you took the best available player, you will be in an excellent position to trade for your weakness within the first month of the season. A few weeks after the first standings are published, it will be painfully clear if you've missed drafting strength in a category. Experience tells us that if we draft the best available player, you'll end up with two or three closers, a great starting pitcher, one speedster and a few power hitters and the rest will fall into place and you'll be in a good trade position. If you have too much power, there will be someone out there who would love to give you Roger Cedeno for Carlos Delgado.  You probably won't make the deal but drafting the best players will give you options. It may sound strange but don't try to think too much during the draft!

The Auction League

Winning an auction league is a bit more complicated. I would say that a good majority of players who lose in auction leagues lose because they bid published value for a player. In other words, you read in your favorite magazine that Alex Rodriguez will be a $40 player this year and you bid that. That's a great way to lose. Even if you're a member using our interactive ranking forms, the values listed are expected actual value and are not the amount you should bid, if you're interested in winning your league that is.  If your goal is simply to assemble a roster with a few of your favorite hometown players, by all means bid away.  You'll finish sixth but you'll probably enjoy your team's "real life" games more because of it.

I wrote an article on fantasy auction bidding back in February of 1994 and it's incredible how little has changed since then and how many Rotisserie players continue to make the same mistake year after year. This essay, unlike some of the others we post on the site, contains some math so if you skipped first grade algebra, you may need to review. The calculations are important, as you will see.

Of all the fantasy leagues I have played in over the years, so many that I have lost count, my favorite existed from 1987-1994. We used to draft in person rather than on the phone, by mail or over a computer screen and ceased to exist after the 1994 baseball strike. Not to boast (believe me, you will know when I am boasting) but my team won every year but once in the league's history. The funny thing about it is that I was only using formulas to do bidding and rarely, if ever, used the things I knew about baseball. The guys in my league talked about how afraid I was to bid over $30 for a player. We used $260 in chips during the draft and believe me, I made a forty chip bid only once in the history of the league. Had the league continued to exist, I wonder if the owners would have ever figured out the secret because the success of the team had nothing to do with me. I should have written a "thank you" letter to my old college math professor. Maybe I'd go back even further and send it to my teacher from the first grade.

If you have the final totals from your league, go get them right now. Stop reading and get those because you need to see this in action Let us review the objective of the standard rules of fantasy baseball. Each team has a certain salary limit, which we'll say for example is $260 dollars (or chips or matches or baseballs or whatever your league claims to play for) and the goal is to build the best team possible with that $260. No matter what anyone bids, the total eventual value of the positive value players in the league will equal $260 multiplied by the number of teams. There are no exceptions. If you have the worst ten bidders the planet has ever seen, the sum of the bought players is still worth $2600. There may be free agents left over who could change that later but when the auction is complete, the average team has $260 in value for $260 in chips bid.

The biggest mistake most beginners make is to go into the draft/auction feeling like they have to get $260 in value for their bids. Wrong! This is why you rarely see a beginner win at this game and why some smart and knowledgeable fantasy baseball players can't figure out why they finish fifth or sixth every year. The average team will get $260 in value and if a beginner follows a strategy of bidding fair value, and if their prices are sound and their predictions relatively accurate, they'll finish in the middle of the pack. Why? Because they only got fair value and not winning value.

The reason I asked you to get the final standings from your league was because I wanted you to pick a category and grab a calculator. Let's say to look at home runs. Pick a different one if you don't like home runs but for our purposes right now, it can't be a calculated category like batting average, ERA or ratio. I want a category you can key in easily. If you are in a twelve-team league, find out the number of home runs or wins or steals that the average team accumulated. That is, add up all the home runs and divide by the number of teams. Now, take the team that won your league (NOT the team that had the most home runs) and find out how many home runs they had. Divide the average number of home runs by the winning team's number of home runs and I can tell you that the number will usually be higher than 78%. In some categories where unnecessary domination took place, you might take it below 78% but usually this number will be in the mid-eighties or even the low-nineties. One stats company provided me with data on seventy standard Rotisserie leagues and when we analyzed it, the most lopsided league averaged only 78% in each category of the league winner's totals. I like that number because unless you set a new record for unevenly distributed value in a league, 78% is a first place team in ANY league.

So what good is that? Well, it means that the winning team has to collect $333 worth of value ($260 / .78) for their original $260. So, the best bids will be those that are only 78% of the expected value. In other words, if you were the most brilliant prognosticator the Earth has known and had projected an unknown rookie to have a $40 season, but you had bid $40 for him, you did yourself no good. You need to get $40 in value by bidding $31 (or 78% of $40).

People ask me why I don't look at the league leader in the category and look at the league winner instead. Well, the guy who finishes first in a category almost always has collected meaningless numbers. If the second place team hit 180 home runs and the first place team hit 250 home runs, there are sixty-nine wasted home runs that we better not be valuing - it would have taken only 181 home runs to win the league category, not 250. Above all, our objective is not to finish first in specific categories but to win the league outright!  In almost every league, finishing second in all eight columns would get you the most points. Besides that, you don't even have to work anything out. I've done it for you and I can say that you should start with 78% as your base. If your league is even closer in talent or if you have more teams, the number goes up into the eighties.

Be warned! One mistake you must not make is allowing all the players to disappear. You must be conscious of the phenomenon of draft inflation (fantasy writer John Benson has written volumes of info on this crucial principle that you must be aware of). One owner wrote me a few years ago to say that my principle caused him to be left with $50 at the end of the draft, something you should never have happen.

I can guarantee you that during the first two rounds of the draft, using a 78% bidding method is going to get you zero players. However, in perpetual leagues that allow retention of players, you can overcome this. Here's how (this is the math part I warned you about):

Your goal is to come up with $333 in value with $260 in spending. Fortunately, because you will always have keepers that are undervalued at their salary, you are already en route to saving money. Here's the calculation that tells you exactly what percentage you need to bid in the draft: First, calculate how much value a winning team needs to win. Simply take your team salary cap and divide it by 0.78. So, in a $260 league, you want $333 of value ( 260 / .78 = 333). Take the 333 and subtract the total value you think you've retained with your keeper list. Let's say you've protected seven players that you think will be worth about $150 in value so you still need to come up with $183 in value in the upcoming draft. Take $260 and subtract the total value you know you've spent on these players. Let's say you spent $90 on the players so that means you have $170 to spend. If you do the math, you have $170 to spend on acquiring $183 in value which means that you can actually afford to bid 170 / 183 = 93% of expected value in the upcoming draft.

This requires great discipline because you'll usually miss out on some of the big names that sell in the early part of the draft. You're not going to get Alex Rodriguez or Pedro Martinez. You'll definitely end up with some good players and provided you don't wait too long to start adjusting for draft inflation, you'll come away with a $333 team for $260. That will explain why you finish first and the guy who was able to get a $43 Pedro for just $42 finished in fifth place.

What is also worth noting is that during the auction, as you get players even cheaper than your maximum bid, the percentage of value that you can bid goes up. Let's say that go into the auction with $170 to spend on acquiring $183 in value, which means you will bid 93% of expected value. In the first round, you want to get Shannon Stewart of Toronto and let's say that you think Stewart will really be a $30 player. You end up spending only $17 to get him, a bargain! Now, you only need a remaining ($183 - $30) $153 worth of value but you still have ($170 - $17 ) $153 left, so you can now afford to bid exactly 100% of value! In fact, later in the draft, it's entirely possible that the tables will turn so much that you'll be able to overspend on a player and still have your sights properly set on winning.

So, here's how you prepare for the auction: Print your expected value lists in advance and have them neatly organized so you can find any player. Several good fantasy players I know make a separate cross-reference list in alphabetical order with the value of the player so they can find taken players to remove. Record what the expected value of any players that you have frozen are and calculate how much value you have yet to obtain in the auction and how much money you have to do it with.

Throughout the draft, keep a separate running total for these two critical numbers. In other words, if you underspend or overspend to acquire a player, you remove the total value you need and the total money left and recalculate what your proper bidding level should be. Things happen faster than you might think in an auction and unless you're well-prepared, you're going to find yourself over your head unless you have a perfect grasp on what you're after. As I recommended for draft leagues earlier in this essay, try to maintain a 2-1 ratio of hitters to pitchers where possible. It may slow down your auction but always increase your bids in the minimum bid increment.  In an auction league, the only time you need to think about a 2-1 ratio is when it's your turn to throw out a name.  In other words, if you have one pitcher and no hitters, throw out the name of the best remaining hitter.  Otherwise, just bid properly relative to the value of the player and don't fall for a cheap player early in the draft.  If someone says Craig Grebeck $1 and you think he'll be worth $3, let Grebeck go.  Late in the draft, there will be time for you to draft the Craig Grebecks of the world but not early.

One good technique for not getting shut out of all the good players is to go ahead and bid higher than your proper ratio early to pick up a couple of key superstars. You'll have to make adjustments on your ratios but it's a good way of being sure that you don't end up with unspent money, the nightmare of any auction in which you want to contend this year. The great thing about this sort of tracking is that if your keeper list is good, you not only get good players fairly early but because you can afford to bid outlandish amounts as the auction goes on, you start picking up players that no one else can afford.

WHAT IF I HAVE A TERRIBLE OR ORDINARY KEEPER LIST?

Unfortunately, if you protected players at value rather than below value or worse, you're not likely to pick up many players early in the auction. Obviously, if you can only bid 70% of a player's worth, you're never going to get Randy Johnson or Derek Jeter so it means you're going to spend the first two hours of the draft either watching players get drafted or you're going to go on a spending spree and have to fill the last third of your roster with $1 players.

People don't like when we give the advice that you should build for next year if your freeze list is terrible so we'll avoid saying that here, even though it's probably true. If your freeze list is terrible, prepare to be disciplined and wait for bargains in the mid to end game. You will not win by going crazy with what little money you have left.

SHOULD I REALLY SIT BACK AND WAIT?

There is a phenomenon known as "draft inflation" which fantasy baseball columnist John Benson is the leading expert on. The idea is that as the draft proceeds, because of so many good keeper lists, the talent available is actually less than the money fantasy GMs have left to spend. That increases the value of players who would not normally be valuable. You must be aware of this because as the draft hits the middle mark, this phenomenon kicks in and everyone has too much money with no one to spend it on.

Even if you're not using popular draft software for your computer, for example, you should really recognize when there isn't anyone worth drafting left because then the scramble must begin and you must really get someone before you're left sitting with money. You should never finish a draft with any money left!

One strategy to overcome this is to make one ludicrous bid on one superstar early and then make an adjustment to your desired remaining "real value" and the money you have to spend. I have assembled winning rosters that won by a solid margin with all $8 pitcher types and $9 batters and one superstar whom I paid too much for.

Don't let the draft pass you by. A winning fantasy GM must be able to recognize when it is time to go outside of the boundaries and get some high-value players, even if it means knowing that you're breaking your own rules. One reader last year told me that they bid exactly 78% of our values to the letter and didn't acquire a player in the first three hours of the draft. That's someone who isn't watching the pace of the draft.

Stay focused and organized and you'll come away with the ingredients to win. Don't let the draft cause you madness and always think about your target value. The ability to stay calm and focused is often the difference between winning and losing in an auction league. Go in with a plan and practice in advance and you'll be well-equipped to stun the other fantasy GMs in your league.