Detailed FAAB Review - Roger Clemens

I thought I'd review the complete mechanics of the Roger Clemens bidding in my league earlier today. I can't read anyone's mind, but it's always fun to try and figure out the thought process of every owner, in addition to trying to impart more general lessons across all leagues.

I'll review every team's action in order of most remaining FAAB to least.

4th place team (57 points) - $98. No bid.
It's true this team needs hitting more than pitching. But it's not like it has 40 or more pitching points. Clemens would have been a fine replacement for either the faded Jorge de la Rosa or Carlos Silva. More importantly, I think you have to at least put a bid in, even if only to push the other owners. Salary cap wasn't an issue here.

9th place team (42.5 points) - $95. $80 bid WINNING BID
This was the first team to give up on 2007, but grabbing Clemens gives him some options. He can package players like Lyle Overbay and Akinori Iwamura with Clemens to get a bigger chip for next year, or he can decide to keep Overbay and Iwamura and hope that Clemens by himself is worth something big at the deadline. It's true that three contenders are very close to their salary cap, but I say not to worry about that; teams will creatively shuffle things around to fit in a guy like Clemens.

2nd place team (77.5 points) - $91. No bid.
This team is $6 away from our league's $375 salary cap. They also have Dan Haren, John Lackey, and C.C. Sabathia, along with 45.5 out of a possible 48 pitching points. Shuffling the deck to buy Clemens just wouldn't have made any sense.

1st place team (79 points) - $88. $49 bid. 4th best bid.
This is me. As mentioned in my last post, I lost Milton Bradley, Joe Crede and Mark Teixeira to the DL this week. My mind wasn't on Clemens at the moment, though I could use him to bolster my slumping pitching. However, if I had simply reserved Bradley, Crede and Teixeira and filled in with $1 FAAB pick-ups, I still would have only been able to bid $70, which would have left me $10 short and, more importantly, $28 away from the theoretical high bid.

Last place team (29 points) - $87. $51 bid. 3rd best bid.
You will start to see a recurring theme in this post, and that is the theme of buying Clemens to trade him versus buying him to keep him. The team in the basement has announced its intentions to dump but has yet to do so. Meanwhile, three teams ahead of him already have packed it in, leaving the pickings for freezes very slim. Part of the problem is that this team has next to nothing to offer. Its big ticket items are Joe Nathan ($45) and Curt Schilling ($25). Scott Podsednik ($30) has limited value right now and Jonny Gomes ($10 option) is hurt. That's more or less it. Adding Clemens at more than $70 would have created the problem of trying to move him in a league where one team is $6 away from the cap and two other teams are within $25 of the cap. This team already will have the challenge of moving Schilling and Nathan and getting something good back in return with three contenders all but out of the market for these players. Adding Clemens would have simply created another headache.

OK, that's one view. Personally, I would have bid at least $80 in this team's position to get Clemens. Like I said earlier, I believe you bid for the player and worry about the trading limitations later. A creative owner will figure out how to make these types of trades work.

5th place team (56.5 points) - $80. No bid.
Due to cap issues, this team's max bid would have been $76 without some creativity. But no bid? I suspect that this owner looked at all the teams ahead of him in FAAB $, figured he wouldn't get Clemens, and gave up. Another belief I have about FAAB is bid what you think the player is worth and worry about how you'll make him fit later.

3rd place team (64.5 points) - $77. No bid.
Like the 2nd place team, this owner was within $24 of the cap, so he wasn't going to get Clemens.

7th place team (48 points) - $76. $64 bid, 2nd highest bid.
The 2nd highest bid came from another team that had packed it in. I like this bid. The owner knew he probably wouldn't get Clemens but didn't want to do nothing in case Clemens snuck through. As it turned out, this was the second highest bid. You never know.

8th place team (47.5 points) - $72. $40 bid, 5th highest bid.
A soft bid. I speak frequently with this owner, and he told me that he wanted Clemens at a price where he could trade him and not have to worry about the salary cap. You'll be sick of reading this by the end of this post, but I think you bid what you feel Clemens is worth and worry about trade possibilities down the road.

11th place team (32 points) - $62. $20 bid. 7th highest bid.
This is one of those "why bother" bids. Sure, $62 won't get him, but $20 sure won't either, not unless the league went to a game, didn't tell you, and the bus they chartered crashed, flipped over and caught fire on I-95. This team is still playing for this year, in theory, but I can't see how they're going to make up a 47.5 point deficit.

6th place team (48.5 points) - $62. $15 bid. 8th highest bid
10th place team (42 points) - $45. $25 bid. 6th highest bid
I grouped these two teams together because both of them bid heavily on Joey Gathright (see my previous post) and one bid as much on Gathright as he did on Clemens while the other owner bid more on Gathright. In both cases, I would have put the max bid in on Clemens and then bid whatever I was going to bid on Gathright anyway. You're not going to get Clemens, so your bid on Gathright will still apply. Additionally, the league will know that you're not "soft" on players like this, so you'll get people to pump up their future bids accordingly.

In the case of the 6th place team, it's possible that he's given up on seriously contending in pitching, as he has 7 1/2 points in pitching and is buried in last in ERA/WHIP. The 10th place team bid a combined $30 on Joakim Soria ($20) and Cha Seung Baek ($10) early in the year, and must have been looking at those bids a little sadly when it was announced that Clemens was going to be pitching in the A.L. this year.