Was Inflation Separate?

Yesterday, I began talking about my A.L. 4x4 auction last Saturday. I was going to talk a little bit about position scarcity today, but instead I'll address Rodger's wonderful comment on yesterday's post, which hits a significant number of points I may have forgotten otherwise:

Just over a week ago, you told us that the inflation rate for your league was 8% for hitters and 49% for pitchers.

Did it work out that way?

What was the total spent on hitting and pitching?

Rodger hits on a few interesting concepts that I've talked about previously, so it's worth addressing them again.

Based on a $175/$85 split, I put forth the notion that there would be a separate factor for hitting inflation and pitching inflation in my league. The "raw" factor - if the league spent $175/$85 per team, would be 8% for hitting and a whopping 49% for pitching. The overall factor - with hitting and pitching combined - would be 17%.

In the post linked above, I said that I wouldn't apply this 49% factor, since that would leave me with absurd bids on the top pitchers available, and I didn't want to spend $100+ on pitching because the "split" model told me to spend $49 for Nathan or $47 for Mariano.

To answer, Rodger's question, it turns out that my league didn't apply the 49% factor either. But it was close.

Team 1: $192 hitting, $68 pitching
Team 2: $184/$75
Team 3: $185/$65
Team 4: $198/$60
Team 5: $190/$70
Team 6: $173/$87
Team 7: $137/$120
Team 8: $192/$68
Team 9: $174/$85
Team 10: $190/$69
Team 11: $169/$91
Team 12: $154/$106
TOTAL = $2138 hitting, $964 pitching.

Or 69% for hitting and 31% for pitching.

Looking at it another way, the league spent $1,356 on hitters worth $1,212, or an 11.9% hitting inflation rate. The league spent $513 for $385 worth of pitchers, or a 33.2% inflation rate.

Amazingly, $56 dollars shifted away from pitching reduces the pitching inflation rate by over 15%!

Rodger goes on to hit another nail squarely on the head.

My inflation rate is similarly imbalanced, but I think my league is going to do what yours did. Star hitter prices are going to reflect an inflation rate closer to the overall average -- not the offense-alone figure.

That's correct. The star hitters I rattled off yesterday who went for $30+ all went for closer to the 17% overall inflation rate, and not to the 8% hitting inflation rate. To refresh your memory, here are the $30+ hitters from my auction. I've now added their price compared to the overall inflation rate of 17%

+2: Alex Rodriguez, Miguel Tejada, Ichiro Suzuki
+1: Bobby Abreu, Travis Hafner
Par: Derek Jeter, Paul Konerko, Vladimir Guerrero, David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez
-1: Carl Crawford
-3: Michael Young

So Rodger is correct. The room decided not to lower the prices on these guys because a plethora of hitting was available. Yes, A-Rod, Tejada and Ichiro most likely go for a few more ticks if they were the only $30+ players available. But none of these players came near the 8% hitting inflation I predicted.

So where are the savings?

Here they are, packed at the end of the auction:

+7: Mike Lowell, Shannon Stewart
+5: David Dellucci, Jose Guillen, Dan Johnson, Mark Kotsay, Trot Nixon, Juan Rivera

This is a practical application of what I talked about in my post about "plus/minus":

The one place you need to be careful with this method is if you see nothing but minuses throughout the auction and you're at -100 or so by the 8th or 9th round. My experience tells me that if you reach this point and you haven't spent at least half your money, it's too late. You're going to overpay for at least 2 players and up to 5 just to spend your cash. The room will come back to or close to zero (if you've calculated inflation correctly), but spending $3 on a $7 projected Jamie Shields isn't going to win you the league. It's also not going to empty out your $260 budget.

This was our auction last Saturday. I saw the plus/minus spiraling up and up, peaking at -104 in Round 8 with the 87th player called. 29 players before that, at #58, I bought three players in a row, buying Milton Bradley at $15 (+2), Alexis Rios at $27 (par), and Brandon Inge at $10 (+3). Put simply, I recognized the phenomenon of the spiraling plus/minus and knew I'd have to fill out my roster. I don't like paying par, but knew that the bargains coming later were on marginal players like Dellucci, Nixon and Kotsay.

I'm glad that one of my assumptions (regarding the plus/minus) actually worked for me in real life. At one point in the auction, I had $113 on the table, 13 players left to buy, and no other owner had more than $92 to spend. But instead of panicking, I knew I could buy a player or two at par (Rios and Jason Varitek earlier) and still get some bargains later. Sure enough, Bradley, Inge, Byrd, Blake and Crede all came in +2 or lower than the overall inflation rate. I didn't buy any of the players I listed above as +5 or better, but getting a $7 bargain on Mike Lowell and leaving $10 on the table made less sense to me than grabbing Joe Crede (who I had ranked higher than Lowell) and spending my money.

Tomorrow I'll look at the other side and discuss why pitching inflation didn't quite make it to 49%.