Auction Blues: The Law of Diminishing Returns

Yesterday, I compared Alex, LABR and Tout Wars' prices for the top predicted 2007 N.L. hitters and determined that, in a three-way bidding war, Alex tied or outbid the two expert leagues on the following players:

Outfield: Austin Kearns.
Third Base: Ryan Zimmerman, Chipper Jones, Scott Rolen, Morgan Ensberg, Freddy Sanchez.
Shortstop: Jose Reyes, Bill Hall, Rich Aurilia.
Second Base:Dan Uggla, Jeff Kent, Chris Burke, Ray Durham.
First Base: Todd Helton, Nomar Garciaparra.
Catcher: Brian McCann, Johnny Estrada, Paul LoDuca, Ben Molina, Miguel Olivo.

Out of 60 players (10 for each position), Alex ties or surpasses LABR and Tout Wars actual bid limits for 20 of those players, or an even 1/3. That makes sense. You might not agree with Alex's individual bids but in a three-way bidding war, you would expect him to buy one player out of every three.

Let's look again at the list above and say that you're bidding against an owner who simply brought the LABR auction prices to use and another owner using the Tout Wars prices. That means that you will, indeed, be shut out on 40 out of the top 60 players on your list.

Now add 10 other owners with 10 other lists to the mix. As we've seen while running through each positional summary, expert bid limits and expert auctions still have extremely narrow price points. However, even with the slimmest variance, the list of players who you would still have the highest number on your sheet for would continue to shrink, since you're now competing against 12 other owners. In theory, for the Top 60 hitters, you would be able to buy either four or five (60/13 = 4.62) of those top hitters.

Not only would you be buying four or five of these hitters, though, but you're also going to be spending a good chunk of your money on these four or five hitters. Even if you took a more conservative approach and refused to spend over $30 on any hitter, you're probably going to spend somewhere between $85-100 on your top five hitters. If you follow Patton's recommendation of spending $175 on your offense, you will come very close to spending, at a minimum, 50% of your offensive Auction Day dollars on five players.

It's worth looking one more time at the list of players Alex thinks more highly of than the LABR or Tout Wars crowds:

Outfield: Austin Kearns.
Third Base: Ryan Zimmerman, Chipper Jones, Scott Rolen, Morgan Ensberg, Freddy Sanchez.
Shortstop: Jose Reyes, Bill Hall, Rich Aurilia.
Second Base:Dan Uggla, Jeff Kent, Chris Burke, Ray Durham.
First Base: Todd Helton, Nomar Garciaparra.
Catcher: Brian McCann, Johnny Estrada, Paul LoDuca, Ben Molina, Miguel Olivo.

Assuming, once again, that two other owners use the LABR and Tout Wars lists, this pool of players is likely where you would have spent most of your money last year, once you started battling the other 10 owners in the room and their respective lists.

I hate to backtrack, but perhaps looking at these lists by position is wrong, since we don't buy our teams solely based on position. Meaning this: if we spend $40 for an OF and $3 for our entire middle infield or $40 for a MI and $3 for three of our outfielders it doesn't matter. What matters is that we get the most bang for our $43 across four slots.

Does this list of players above do that? To find out, I'm going to re-juggle the deck in my next post.