Category optimization = Allocating your dollars

Once you've taken the plunge and decided to throw away a category or two, you then need to decide how to split your auction dollars.

This is easier said than done. I've seen some very smart owners put a lot of thought into tossing a category, or engaging in a two-category dump, only to see their plans fail when they don't allocate their money correctly.

Since not everyone reading the blog has been on board since the beginning, I'll refer you back to the rationale behind the $175/$85 split in Roto. It's important to know if your baseline for determining prices is going to be $175/$85, or if it will be marginally different, based on your league. For the purposes of this post, I'm going to use $175/$85 as a baseline.

Now comes the more difficult part. How do you re-shuffle dollars when tossing a category?

If you're only tossing one category, it's easy, but you have to do two things:

1. Move the auction dollars away from the category you're dumping.
2. Reassign the dollars based on your team and your league.

If you are dumping a category like saves, then moving dollars away from the closers in your league is easy. Just dial the closers remaining in your auction down to $0 and move that money to other players in your auction. How do you do this? Well, that depends on your roster.

This is where splitting your freezes into hitters vs. pitchers is extremely useful. Let's say you have $98 worth of hitters at $51 of salary but only $22 worth of pitching at a $17 salary. If you're dumping saves, you'll probably still want to keep your team split at $175/$85 and just move the dollars you would have spent on closers to starting pitchers and, to a lesser degree, middle relievers. On the other hand, if you have $75 worth of hitters for $60 and $60 worth of pitchers for $30, you'll want to consider spending more than $175 on your hitting and less than $85 on your pitching staff.

Is there a sweet spot for how much value you want on the pitching side and how much you want on the hitting side? The answer to that depends on how much value the best team in your league can be expected to have after the auction. See this post for an example of how to calculate this factor. However, when you're dumping a category or categories, the equation changes. You don't need the most value across all eight categories, so it is possible you'll draft a $275 team or a $280 team and still wind up with the best team.

In other words, you're not obsessing as much over value as you would be in an eight-category universe. But you do need to pay it a little mind. The general rule of thumb is that the more value you have on offense, the less you can spend on offense. The more value you have on pitching, the less you can spend on pitching. It's going to depend more on how you see your league.

This is the right way to do this. The first mistake category dumpers make is assuming that they should subtract $21 from pitching ($85 divided by 4 categories) or $44 from hitting ($175 divided by 4 categories) just because they are dumping a category. That's a huge mistake.

In principle, this idea is correct. In practice, every other team in the league will spend $175 for hitters and $85 for pitchers. Even if one team goes $220/$40 and another team goes $140/$120, the league as a whole will spend $175/$85 per team on hitting vs. pitching. So your bids don't need to be all that radical to successfully implement your strategy. In fact, they shouldn't be.

Remember, if your bid on a player is $1 more than any other owner's, you will own that player. So you don't need to adjust your bids across the board based on your strategy. If you are executing a Sweeney Plan and decide to spend $140 on pitching, the last thing you want to do is take your pitching values and multiply them by 1.65 ($140/$85). You'll spend too much money on the first couple of pitchers out of the gate and you'll wind up playing dollar derby right away. I've seen teams make this mistake. Yes, Joe Nathan is a great closer to have in a Sweeney Plan. Paying $58 for him if you have him at a $35 price is folly. No, you won't actually wind up paying $58. But you'll wind up in trouble if someone calls out a mid-level pitcher early. Cliff Lee at $16 probably isn't a good idea...try paring the bid limit down to $11 or $12. Better yet, use your bids to target specific players. Raise the bar to a price where you feel you'll get someone. If you don't, have a backup plan.

The most important thing to remember with a category optimization is to be flexible with your spending. One year I was doing a dump wins/saves plan and a closer fell into my lap at $12. Rather than stubbornly say I couldn't buy closers, I knew I could afford one because my top starter went for less money than I had expected. I then competed in saves because I picked up a guy who became a closer off of the scrap heap. Remember that dumping categories is a plan from the beginning of the season. You don't have to be married to dumping that category all year long if an opening presents itself. In fact, taking advantage of that opening is the surest way to masterfully execute a category optimization plan.