So how did I do?

When I asked the small (but growing) handful of readers of this blog what they wanted to see during the season, I found out that a lot of owners still have auctions coming up this weekend. So I thought the best thing I could do is talk about my auction this Saturday in my American League 4x4. I'm hoping Toz chimes in later with some input about his N.L. 5x5.

Some poor freezes by a few other owners left me in better shape than I thought I would be, but still projected to finish 5th overall. My freeze list heading in was:

Carlos Guillen $19
Mark Teahen $12
Gary Matthews $4
Mike Mussina $14
Jon Garland $2
Justin Speier $1
Todd Jones $12

Not a great freeze list, but there wasn't a super strong team heading into the auction.

My strategy was centered around spending up to $27 for Rich Harden and filling in the rest of my pitching staff with $1 pitchers. Then I'd spend $200 on offense (or $160 for the rest of my offense). I know Harden is risky, but I knew D-Mat would be expensive and I had to spend enough on offense to be competitive.

My expectations were that:

• pitching would go for too much money, particularly once D-Mat, Harden, Escobar and Pettitte were off the board and the league realized that the next best pitchers were guys like Boof Bonser and Kei Igawa.
• some of the top hitters might go a little cheaper, since my top 10 projected offensive players were all available.
• catchers, first basemen, and second basemen would be way too expensive, since most of them were frozen.
• there would be some huge bargains in the endgame at OF and 3B, since almost every OF/3B was available.

It turns out I was mostly wrong.

I wound up with (freezes noted with an asterisk):

C Varitek $14
C Heintz $1
1B Mientkiewicz $3
2B Roberts $29
SS Guillen $19*
3B Crede $14
CO Inge $10
MI T. Walker $3
OF Blake $10
OF Bradley $15
OF Dye $29
OF Rios $27
OF Teahen $12*
DH Matthews $4*
P Byrd $3
P Colon $6
P Garland $2*
P Harden $25
P T. Jones $12*
P Mussina $14*
P Ohka $3
P J. Shields $3
P Speier $1*

So how did I do?

Well, based on my assumptions above, I was completely off. There were a few prices for pitchers that were out of line (Meche $11, Igawa $15, Sowers $18), but the room simply refused to pay good money for medicore or bad pitching. I was merely pushing Ohka, Byrd and Shields up because I thought someone would bite, but one owner bought Silva, Kennedy, de la Rosa and Jaret Wright all at $1 rather than pay a little extra for someone medicore as opposed to poor.

Typical of a Stage 3 auction, none of the top hitters went cheaply. Crawford went for $50, Vlad $44, and A-Rod $42. Hitters in the $30s were Abreu $37, Jeter $35, Ichiro $38, Tejada $35, Manny $35, Big Papi $38, Konerko $32, M. Young $33 and Hafner $33.

I'll continue tomorrow.