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Last week I had the honor to draft in the 2010 “Battle of the fantasy gods” league.  Last season I drafted and managed my team to a 2^nd place finish.  What was different this season was the draft was an auction draft instead of a snake draft.  I am a diehard snake draft person, but knew that to be taken seriously in this business, you have to master all types of drafts and league format, so I was up for the challenge.  This was my first serious auction draft and my strategy was simple, but I needed confirmation from Lenny “Obi-Wan Kenobi” Melnick.  I called Lenny and he was gracious enough to spend over an hour on the phone with me, discussing his “controlling the auction draft” methodologies.  The Cliff Notes version is that there are 12 teams in a draft and each team has $260 as a salary cap, so the total amount of money available to spend in the draft is 12 x $260 = $3,120.  If you look at most magazines, they have the auction value totals based more in the neighborhood of $8,000 than $3,120, and the early drafting reflected this.  Simple math tells you that if you have to draft 23 players and you have $260 to accomplish this, the average amount per player equals $11.30.  In a brief survey of the mixed league dollar value for Albert Pujols, here is recap:

Yahoo Sports / RotoWire - $45

Lenny Melnick - $42

CBS Sports - $40

Baseball HQ - $37

ESPN - $35

So which bid is the correct one?  The answer is all or none of the above.  Before you can even put a dollar value to Pujols, you must build your team to have at least 300 home runs and 175 stolen bases.  You can to come up with the combinations and positional scarcity to accomplish this task.  In the 2010 battle of the fantasy gods auction draft, Albert Pujols went to Ryan Hallam of Fighting Chance Fantasy for………$54!  Ryan was also able to land potential first round snake players such as Chase Utley for $40 and Evan Longoria for $37.  When you take the “stars and scrubs” approach, as long as you can make your projections work to 300 HRs and 175 SBs, then you use whatever approach you feel can get you to these projected statistics. 

My approach was to only jump in if the bidding was up to or at my projected auction values for any given player.  When Pujols went for $54 and $43, I knew that there would be opportunities later in the draft as managers can’t continue to overpay for players.  The most that I paid for a player in the entire draft was $29 for Ryan Zimmerman as 3^rd base was getting scare at the most scare position this season.  I spent a total of $168 on hitting, $84 on pitching, and ate $8 at the end of the draft.  I spent $28 on closers which is a big mistake in the book according to Lenny Melnick.  Lenny’s philosophy is that you should never pay for saves as it is a single category and that money should be used on either hitting or starting pitching.  In hindsight, I wish I had gone another dollar here and there on players.  I walked away each time, thinking that I would have the most money at the end of the draft and have the ability to purchase players at an incredible value.  The one obstacle in my way was Tim McLeod.  Tim also had a lot of money towards the end of the draft and I felt that I would be outbid on most of the players that I still wanted to acquire.  So I went ahead and burned through my money to ensure that I at least purchased the players that I wanted.  For the most part, I ended up with most of the players that I was targeting.  On paper, I have a team that should finish pretty good, but not in contention.  I have some high-risk, high-reward starting pitchers that if everything goes right, I have a chance.  This worked for me last season with Zack Greinke and Justin Verlander in this league.  But that was a snake draft and this was an auction draft.  The draft was fun, but exhausting.  I felt like I had just got done taking an SAT or ACT entrance exam, but did not really know how I did.  The next night, I decided to take CBS Sports’ projections for each team to see how I would stack up on paper.  The results are at the end of this article.  I have played in a FOX Sports Radio league and this will be the 4^th season in this league.  I have convinced the other league managers that we should give an auction draft a try this season, so I will attempt to execute on what I have learned from our auction draft in my next auction draft in the near future.

I would like to thank once again Mike “The Fantasy Man” Kuchera who has always been there for me when I was first starting out and turned my hobby into a passion.  I would also like to thank Lenny Melnick for taking time out of his schedule to not only host the live draft on blog talk radio, but to also take time out of his schedule to share with me his valuable experience and philosophy on auction drafting.  I wish that I was able to record the conversation, but I took good notes Lenny!  Last but not least, it is an honor to play against all of the talented league managers in this league.  We all share in the same passion and I have a respect for all of your talents. 

Jeff Boggis

“The Sultan of Stats”

Fantasy Sports Empires

http://fantasysportsempires.com/

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