The Power of The Leviathan

Last week, I thought a little about doing a post about LABR (the League of Alternative Baseball Reality) and the American and National League drafts. I didn't do this, in part because I was writing about alternate strategies, but also because I frankly didn't see the value in writing about an auction that took place in early March in late March.

However, after seeing some of the freezes that happened in my league today, I wish I had given more credence to LABR.

Sometimes you've been playing this game for so long that you think you have it all down. Worse yet, you wind up giving your fellow owners a great deal of credit as well and assuming that they know most or all of the same things that you know.

Our league had reached a point that Alex Patton calls Stage 3, in my opinion. I've mentioned the "stages" of Rotisserie Baseball - as defined by Alex - in passing, but I'll run through them again, just to make sure that everyone is on the same page as I am.

Back in Stage One, everybody...wildly overspent on the star hitters with no speed and spent way too much on pitching, especially starting pitching. they had never even heard of Baseball America. The winner was always someone who kept his money, knew the rookies and cleaned up from the middle rounds on.
In Stage Two, everybody tried to be that somebody. There was too much money at the end and Jackie Robinson wouldn't have earned what was expected of the rookies.
In Stage Three, the final stage, everybody knows everything. Skill is so rampant that it's a game of luck.

I bring this up because the freeze lists I saw today challenge the very idea of Stage Three to the core.

The last three years saw my league definitively and without a doubt entrenched in Stage Three. I could write down a price on a piece of paper for every player and almost every player, without fail, would fall one way or the other within $3 of that price. Bargain hunting or waiting for your moment in the auction was a thing of the past; the bargains came in the last few rounds, when a $4 or $5 player might sneak in at $2. As we all know, you're not going to win getting $2-3 bargains on a handful of players in the endgame.

This year was the first that John Hunt wasn't running LABR for Sports Weekly. I had always had mixed feelings about Hunt's work for Sports Weekly. He seemed to know what he was talking about, but the two pages of fantasy information he provided seemed stale and not very useful to the more avid fantasy player. With the evolution of the Internet for fantasy players, I expected Hunt and Sports Weekly to start writing more essays about the game (like I'm writing here). It never happened. The fantasy column was mired in the same format year in and year out, and I felt better getting my information from more timely sources on the Internet.

Still, the "Leviathan" (as Hunt called Sports Weekly's Fantasy Baseball insert) was a pretty good piece of information to have before your auction. Hunt predicted the values for all players, the results of LABR for both leagues were available, and I always enjoyed reading it. Better yet, Hunt got better and better at predicting player values and using the $3120 model for his values.

I always read the Leviathan but never used it for my values. However, as it got closer to my pre-season values beginning in 2004, I noticed that was when other owners were starting to bid closer to closer to me. I didn't put two and two together, figuring that other owners, like me, were getting smarter and smarter on their own. After all, I was in a stable league with very little turnover and very experienced owners. I assumed that everyone else had a learning curve, too, and was learning how to value players and not just parrot LABR.

Flash forward to 2007. John Hunt is gone and Devin Clancy has taken over. Suddenly, there's something...um...um...

Light. There's something about the Leviathan that's a little light.

Beyond the fact that Hunt's writing had a little bit of a spark to it that Clancy's lacks, some of the comments almost seem to make me believe that Clancy either doesn't know what he's talking about or is talking down to the simplest of owners. There's always a blurb next to each player's projected statistics, and the blurbs this year (never that good to begin with due to their brevity), are now completely bereft of any usefulness at all. My favorite was the blurb next to Chien-Ming Wang:

More valuable in a 4x4, which doesn't count strikeouts.

I was floored when saw this comment. Who doesn't know this??? Wouldn't anyone picking up a publication with bid prices for auction style Rotisserie Baseball know this???

So I thought to myself that Sports Weekly, which has already gone pretty far downhill, was just sliding down the final few steps into oblivion. I figured that my fellow owners would also recognize this, we'd have a good laugh about it at the auction as we chowed down on our pre-game bagels and cream cheese (bring some with scallions this year, John) and would move on.

But then I saw the freeze lists from my league, and recognized that not everyone else has recognized the paradigm shift. I also didn't realize how many of my fellow owners are still using Sports Weekly's values.

I didn't go into this polemic merely to bash Sports Weekly. Clearly, if they continue to churn out their publication they're doing something right, and if I don't buy it, Paul White isn't going to curl up into the fetal position and go into a mammoth crying jag.

But this information does affect you if you fellow owners use Sports Weekly to manage their freeze lists and their auctions.

If you noticed a similar phenomenon this year, take notice. Review the prices in Sports Weekly and see if any of them come close to your freeze prices, especially on players you wouldn't have frozen or given contracts to in a million years. If that's the case, then you might have a paradigm shift on your hands as well. We might be moving back to Stage Two or even Stage One, though I can't tell you for sure until I see what happens at my Auction next weekend.

But it's something to watch for...

Long Term Contracts

An important element of planning your freeze list is deciding which of your players, if any, should get a long-term contract.

The downside of doling out long-term contracts is obvious. Every dollar you add to a player's salary takes away from the value you have on your freeze list. You are also increasing your risk over the life of the contract that your player will get hurt, become ineffective and/or lose his job to that young kid who's been tearing it up in Tacoma.

The upside to a contract is two-fold. The more obvious upside is that you still get to keep a player for an additional year or two years at a bargain price. Carl Crawford is available as a free agent for the first time in my league, and the owner who had him at $20 the last three years isn't complaining. For his $60 investment between 2004-2006, this owner got $123 in earnings, or $63 in profits.

The less obvious upside is that a cheap player locked into a long-term contract gives you more leverage when teams at the bottom of the standings are looking to pack it in for the year. Option-year players give you a lot of value on your roster, but you can't do anything with them but accumulate stats. Give everyone on your roster an option-year only and you'll lose out when the dump trades begin.

Deciding when to give a contract and how long to give a contract for is one of the more nuanced decisions in Rotisserie Baseball. This is yet another area where there is little to no guidance from common areas on the Internet and popular Roto publications. Since this is something that most of us (including me) have to deal with, I'm only too glad to offer my two cents.

I don't like to give a contract that's less than $5 between the player's perceived value and his projected value. If I own Curtis Granderson at $10, and I think he's going to earn $18 this year, I'm not giving him a $15 L2 (two-year deal). Even if you believe that Granderson has enough upside to be a $20+ player, you're pricing yourself out of the kind of bargain you want to be getting from one of your better freezes. You're also making it harder to dump that player mid-year. Why should I trade for a player who's only $3 undervalued? I can't build my team around a guy like that.

My next suggestion is don't give a hitter more than a $25 salary with a contract or a pitcher more than $20. Granted, a $25 contract for a hitter or $20 for a pitcher is going to be the exception anyway. But try to avoid the temptation of giving Grady Sizemore a $28 L3 (three-year deal) because you think he's going to be a $35 player for years to come. Yes, he might be. But $35 is an extremely high bar that not many players reach. Twenty American League hitters earned $28 or more last year. The odds of Grady even matching those earnings every year over the life of that contract aren't spectacular.

Pitching is even more of a crapshoot. It's tempting to give a cheap reliever a four-year long term deal if you have him for $1 or $2. Don't. As we all know, a lot can happen in four years, and closers are the most fungible players in the game.

Third, try to avoid giving contracts to players past their prime. If you drafted someone cheap who re-emerged, it's great to have the bargain. But don't get excited and assume that he's going to keep putting up great earnings for you over the life of the deal. He might, but I've found that players who are getting snatched up cheap in their early 30s and have a breakout year are equally likely to fade out early. Major league teams also have a way of pushing these guys back into role positions pretty fast.

I mentioned dumping earlier in this post. Keeping dumping in mind is a great reality check when you're giving out contracts. If you gave out an $8 L2 to Craig Monroe last year only to find out no one wanted him in a dump deal, chances are that you should have simply optioned him out. Monroe might turn a solid profit at $8, but he turns even more of a profit at $3, and that extra $5 you could have spend in the auction might have meant the difference between Jim Thome and Jason Giambi in your auction.

When I'm on the fence about giving out a two-year deal, one thing that sometimes pushes me toward a three-year contract is the idea that I can sell the player not only as someone cheap for my trading partner next year, but also as someone he can trade in next year's dump deal when he's in contention. Getting a cheap L2 in a dump trade is nice, but you can't move him again...all you're acquiring is his value. Getting an L3 gives you a cheap player for your auction next year, but also gives you someone you can turn around and deal when you're in the running in 2008. And that's quite a perk.

Minor League Players

It's two days before my freeze date, and there's a lot of talk about trading picks.

If you're in a league that doesn't carry over from year to year or if you don't have a farm system, you'll never get to know the pleasure and rewards of "scouting" a player, following his progress through the minors, and then watching as he puts up great stats for you at a bargain price.

If you are new to a league (or new to leagues with "farm systems"), it's easy to underestimate or overestimate the impact minor leaguers can have. Early on in Roto, I was in a number of leagues where I could grab two great minor league players. As with everything else, the proliferation of information has made it next to impossible to steal Andrew McCutchen from under everyone else's nose and stash him on your farm system until he made The Show.

Since there are already a number of great resources out there about minor league players and how to scout them, I'm not going to parrot that information. If you're not already aware of him, John Sickels is a great resource for minor league information. His book is admittedly a little arcane for the casual fan, and you'll wind up seeing profiles of hundreds of players who will never see the major leagues unless they buy a ticket or rent an airplane and a parachute.

What I'm interested in is talking about how to use those picks and how to value them when your fellow owners start asking about them in trades.

A lot of this discussion depends on how your rules are structured. My non-expert league allows us to keep up to four minor leaguers at the conclusion of the auction. I can keep a minor leaguer as long as I like. So if I decide to draft Hank Conger this year, I can hang onto him until 2011, when he'll surely be the Angels' starting catcher. I probably won't do that, since a lot can happen in four years and Conger might never make it for all I know.

We used to be able to keep an unlimited number of minor leaguers, but one owner wound up with something crazy like eight minor leaguers in his system because he'd draft guys like B.J. Upton and just hold on to them forever. We wanted to find a balance between allowing an owner to draft a few young kids and hold on to them and allowing all owners in the league the opportunity to draft some good players in the farm draft.

So the idea of whether or not you should draft a player in AA or AAA versus the kid who played in the Pioneer League last year does hinge on your league's rules. Some leagues only allow you to keep a minor leaguer for up to two or three years. Don't waste your time in leagues like this with a high school kid. In leagues with no time limit, I still recommend being judicious with these types of picks. Justin Upton is still worth a high pick, but you don't want a farm system filled with Justin Uptons. Anyone who drafted Ian Stewart when he was the hottest thing going can tell you that these young players are more likely to disappoint than a player who has made it to Double-A and continued to thrive.

A common mistake I see owners make is drafting minor league veterans who aren't prospects. I'm not talking about guys like B.J. Upton who bounce up and down. I'm talking about 27-year olds with great stats who clearly will never make it for one reason or another. A few years ago, Mat Olkin of USA Today as well as Baseball Prospectus were talking up Graham Koonce as a player who would be better than a lot of 1B/DH/PH in the majors. I saw Koonce play on my trip to Arizona in 2003 and I saw immediately why he'd never play in the majors, not even for the Moneyball A's. Lumbering and slow around the bag, Koonce was a guy whose size doomed him to the minors unless he developed Paul Konerko-like power. Koonce was more of a 20-25 HR guy with low batting averages and decent on-base percentages.

Don't get sucked into guys like this. Baseball Prospectus spends a lot of time talking about why guys like this belong in the majors. I agree with them. But that doesn't change the reality of the game, and you're buying a lottery ticket that's not going to pay off.

Another rule of thumb I have is that I tend to rank hitters over pitchers, most other things being equal. The pendulum in leagues tends to swing toward pitching whenever a rookie pitcher is lights out. I'm willing to bet that my league sees a significant number of farm picks used on pitchers because Jered Weaver and Francisco Liriano were lights out last year. I used to avoid rookie pitchers entirely, but I do agree that there's too much value to be had to ignore rookie pitching. However, I would rather have a hitter in most cases. Baseball America, for example, rates Philip Hughes ahead of Brandon Wood in their rankings. I love Hughes, but if I had a choice between both players, I'd take Wood. Rookie pitchers are less likely to turn into Jered Weaver right out of the gate. Matt Garza, one of the most highly regarded young pitchers in baseball, struggled last year and might struggle again this year. Wood might also struggle, but he won't torpedo two categories in the process.

Establishing trade value for your picks is, without a doubt, subjective. It is common sense that you don't want to trade a top pick for a marginal freeze. More commonly, I'm confronted with the challenge of an offer of a borderline or slightly advantageous freeze for a low pick.

In theory, I should take the freeze if it helps with my team's value heading into the auction. In practice, I don't always do this because I feel I can still find value in the minor league draft.

One of the most important things about minor leaguers in my league is that they're often included in dump deals. I've seen strong enough minor league players get dumped straight up for pretty good players. Even if you can't pull that off, having a minor leaguer or two in hand to sweeten a deal is a good thing, since you're not trading any current stats.

Bidding for this year AND next year

A while back, Mike Fenger addressed the idea of adjusting your bid prices for next year:

I do find more frequent examples of guys I have at $5 going for a dollar (or not getting bought), just because I do tend to have a list of pitchers that I'm willing to bid up in the endgame, and lots of times those pitchers are selected for their futures, more than their potential value this year.

Which of course, is another issue I hope we can address. On Alex's site, I mentioned that some of my bids are geared towards both this year and next year. I'm very interested to hear your thoughts on this point . . .

To the best of my knowledge, this is an area that is never addressed by any Roto publications or expert web sites. This is a significant disservice to fantasy players everywhere. We all know that Francisco Liriano isn't going to be available in the reserve round of our auctions. So how much should we pay for Mr. Liriano?

First, though, I'm going to back up and discuss the types of players whose bids might need to be adjusted based on next year considerations:

• Disabled players. I'm not talking about guys who will be out for a week or two at the beginning of the season. I'm talking about players like Liriano, who will be out for the year but will clearly be undervalued if purchased and players like Juan Rivera, who will miss about half the season but will be at full value in 2008, assuming health.
• Young players. This is a selective and subjective category. You're not going to want to bid up every rookie; in fact, you want to be careful not to have a team full of rookies and second year players with a lot of risk (unless you're playing for next year). But you are going to want to make sure that your rivals don't grab onto some great rookie for too low a price. You might think that Alex Gordon is only going to earn $11 this year. But you don't want to see him earn $16 this year and, worse, $23 next year for your opponent.

The most significant conundrum is that there's no great rule of thumb here to determine how much you should budget for these types of players. Toz and I were having a conversation about Francisco Liriano and how much we think he'll go for. Our guess was between $8-10. I e-mailed Mike Fenger this morning, and he guessed about the same amount for Liriano.

But why? Why not less? Why not more?

Establishing bids on young players is a little easier. We're trying to establish a low bid where if we get the rookie we'll feel comfortable taking a small loss. We're also trying to prevent another owner from profiting in a dump deal. I'd rather push Howie Kendrick to $18 (the LABR and Sports Weekly bids are too high, btw) than let someone else get him, but I can't go too far past that. I'll suck too much value out of my team.

The same applies for injured players. Guys like Kris Benson and Matt Clement are pretty easy. The nature of their injuries makes me think I won't say more than $1. In fact, Benson and Clement have more value as placeholders on my roster on Opening Day than they do next year; I can wait a week or two and see if there was an undrafted starter I like.

Liriano, Rivera and Bartolo Colon are tougher cases. I don't want to see Juan Rivera go for $4-6, but I don't want to pay $15 because that makes him a bargain next year. I'd rather go to $10 and take my chances at $10 that I take a small loss.

A final consideration in setting these prices is value on your roster and how many players you have to dump. Toz, for example, has Grady Sizemore, Huston Street and Jon Papelbon on the cheap. He might bid up Rivera, but he won't go crazy for him because he already has plenty to swap in this year/next year deals. I, on the other hand, have only Mark Teahen cheap. Drafting Rivera or Liriano might be a good play for me.

Reader e-mail bag

I always love answering reader questions...

Timothy responded to Sunday's post:

My fifteen-year-old league collapsed under a wave of recrimination, lies, etc. Seven of us are starting a new NL-only, 4x4, $260 league, with three new owners. Of the seven originals, 4-5 are pretty good owners, 2-3 are raw, and the three new guys are likely to be fish. We couldn't find twelve owners, so I know the guys who would have gone for $3-$7 will now go for $1. I don't think the Pujols/Reyes/Wright/Carpenter studs will deflate much, if at all. What other effects might we see?

Back in 1987, when I first started playing Roto, I was in a similar league with a small number of owners. I was only in that league for four years, and my memory is hazy on what happened 17+ years ago (except for the fact that I won twice and finished second once).

What I do remember is that Timothy's assumption is correct about the stars. If anything, they might go for even more money. To review, here are the number of slots that need to be filled in Timothy's league and the number of everyday players in the National League:

Catcher - 16 N.L. starters, 14 C slots.
Corner Infield - 32 N.L. starters, 21 CO slots.
Middle Infield - 32 N.L. starters, 21 MI slots.
Outfield - 48 N.L. starters, 35 OF slots.

Even with seven utility slots to fill, this means that there will be 30 everyday players just sitting out in the free agent pool at the beginning of the season. So I would say that spending a few more bucks on Albert Pujols or Jose Reyes isn't a bad idea. A stars and scrubs team, where your worst corner infielder is someone like Nomar Garciaparra or Conor Jackson, can be quite effective in a league like this. Timothy's assumption that players at $3-7 in a full league will go for $1 is even more radical. Guys valued at $10-15 could very well be sitting in the end game at $1.

I would argue that position scarcity matters much more as well. Paying extra for Brian McCann or Chase Utley gives you an advantage that no one else will have at a position.

Downgrade closers. Everyone will get at least two, and at least two owners will get three. The downside of this is it's a much harder category to dump, the upside is that you're bound to get at least one cheap closer.

To answer the second part of Timothy's question, the other effects will be seen during the season. The free agent pool will always be robust and filled with players who get 500 AB. Active roster management will lead to more stat accumulation and a stronger team.

In theory, dump trades will be harder, since more and more players will be, in theory, undervalued. You've got a $3 Nomar? Well big deal...I have a $4 Ken Griffey Jr. However, some teams will try to play for next year and might very well be able to build a powerhouse if they do it right and if your freeze list rules are liberal. This leads right to the second part of Timothy's comment:

Also, what should we do after the season if we go to twelve teams? There's going to be a raft of bottom-feeding bargains. I suggested that EVERY player get $10 added to his salary after the season, to bring the bottom up without shooting the stud through the ceiling.

I'd recommend starting over, but I know this doesn't appeal to most owners with great freezes. However, the biggest drawback to expansion is the plethora of great freezes. Many owners who would have joined my six-team league didn't because they didn't want to compete against a team with 14 or 15 kick ass freezes at rock bottom prices.

Barring a do-over, I would recommend a) reducing the number of freezes dramatically and b) having an expansion draft for the new teams. Knock the freezes down to 8 freezes if your league adds one team, and drop the number of freezes down one for each team added. A 12-team league would then have only four freezes. This might sound radical, but these will be four awesome freezes.

Let the new teams pick anyone they want who isn't protected for the expansion draft. Limit the number of protected players to the number of freezes you'll be using.

Another idea, if this doesn't appeal to you, is pushing all of the contracts forward by a year and forcing teams to either option out their players or give them contracts. It's not perfect, but it will at least make the league competitive again in 2009.

Whatever you do, I wish you good luck. Depending on the temperment of your league, it might be very difficult to convince owners to sacrifice freezes in the name of your league's survival. But then it might also be hard to convince owners to join the league if the deck is so obviously stacked against them.

Less Than One Week

With less than one week until Opening Day, I'm going to shift gears. The last post concludes my series on the little edges you can use to try and win your league with a weaker freeze list. Certainly, this isn't my last word on this subject, but I'd like to talk about more timely topics as we begin to narrow down our rosters and get ready for our auctions.

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.

A Question About Dumping Categories

Earlier today, Rodger replied to yesterday's post about the dump wins/dump saves strategy.

Generally, my keepers are not very good and my pitchers are especially bad. Does that seem the perfect circumstance to try to minimize pitching costs?

I feel sort of stuck because I don't know what players Rodger has and what prices he can keep them at. My general advice would be to try something different than a straight, eight-category strategy.

As far as minimizing pitching costs, I would agree that this is one possible idea. Judging by Rodger's comment, though, I wouldn't go down the path Rodger describes next:

Keep this in mind: in my league, the largest source of draft inflation is the number of cheap closers: Dotel $5, Putz $6, Jenks $8, Papelbon $9, Ray $10, and Street $11. Total: $49.At LABR, those guys went for $106 -- when the Sox said Papelbon would be a starter. Incidentally, those 6 retained closers were acquired as relatively cheap middle relievers, so that's another potential perk of this strategy.

I'm assuming that Dotel went for $5, Putz for $6, and Papelbon for $9 last year. Jenks went for $8 and Street for $11 in a previous season, Ray was picked up as a free agent and his salary converted to $10 at some point.

If those assumptions are correct, I still believe that this is a lot to pay for a chance at saves.

I've always been against paying too much for a closer-in-waiting (CIW). I believe that CIWs are a pretty random crapshoot. Whatever you pay for a CIW, you want to hope that you at least get it back in value in ERA/WHIP.

More importantly, if you pay $5 a pop for potential closers, you might as well draft a top closer for $30 and spend $1 on your other relievers. The relievers listed above are certainly success stories, but Dan Miceli went for $13 in my league last year and Fernando Rodney went for $11. Miceli's owner probably wanted to jump off a bridge by May. Rodney's owner got good stats, but didn't get saves, and you can get good stats from middle relievers just floating around the free agent pool. You shouldn't pay $11 for those stats.

And this is my philosophy when you're playing for eight categories. When you are playing for six categories, every dollar must be optimized. If you're going to dump wins and saves, spend $1 for all six of your relievers. If you get a closer, great, but you can't count on getting one. And since you planned to finish last in saves, it won't matter too much if that's what winds up happening.

One last thanks: Given the poor state of my keepers, and your February 22 post on freeze lists, I'm now likely to keep Hafner at $31, Jeter at $33 and/or Rios at $24.

I don't know what Rodger's inflation rate is, but I would agree that all three of these players are freezes with inflation. The downside is that Rodger is still in the position of having a team that will wind up under the $260 medicore bar even with those freezes.

A dump wins/saves tandem strategy might work here. A lot depends on if Rodger has any pitching freezes, if Santana is available, and what price Rodger guesses he might go for. If Rodger can't get Santana, he'd have to decide if Halladay or D-Mat could make this strategy work as well as the ace pitcher.

Two Category Dumps - Tandem Strategies Part III

The final two category dump I'd like to talk about is the one I've personally had the most success with. It involves dumping wins and saves.

In a league with no IP requirement, this would be as easy as drafting nine injured pitchers and simply making sure you had an ERA and WHIP of 0.00. But this is a strategy that can work quite well with an IP requirement of 900-1,000. Anything higher would make this a difficult road to travel.

Alternatively, this has been called the Maddux strategy or the Pedro strategy. Greg Maddux dominated the National League pitching universe from 1992-1998, and Pedro dominated the American League pitching universe from 1998-2003.

The idea is to spend whatever it takes to get your ace, fill in with two other starters, and then pick up a host of middle relievers. The goal is to spend $60 on your pitching staff, tops. The additional $25 spent on offense (compared to the $175 average per team) should put you at or near the top of all the offensive categories.

The additional benefit is that you probably won't finish last in wins and, if one of your cheap middle relievers gets some saves, you might get some garbage points there as well. Since your ace alone will win 20+ (you hope), you might finish with a handful of points in wins.

In freeze leagues, a decent undervalued starter certainly will help your cause. Last year, I tried a modified version of this in my American League and would have been screwed if I hadn't lucked into a $14 Mike Mussina. Another year I did this, I had a $10 Brad Radke frozen. That sure helped.

But even if you don't have the pitching freezes, you can still try this. The biggest problem with trying it today is that I don't see a Maddux or Pedro out there.

Johan Santana is currently the closest thing to one of those pitchers. But even he "only" earned $46 last year.

In his best season, Maddux earned $72. Pedro earned $78. Those types of earnings make you almost bulletproof and, if you draft only two other starters, you only need $0 earnings from those guys to a) make innings and b) still win ERA/WHIP in a walk. Pedro was so dominant in 2000 that I owned him for only half of the season and still made this strategy work.

A $46 season is nice, but your wiggle room suddenly disappears. I owned Santana last year at $47 and he couldn't quite put me over the top in ERA/WHIP. My draft roster garnered me 21 points in those two categories. Excellent...but not what I was looking for in a year where I had no margin for error.

So you can try the strategy with Santana. It just might not work. One bomb of a starter can sabotage your whole effort much more easily.

The other caveat is obviously injury. If your strategy is relying mostly on one player and that player goes down, you're finished. Furthermore, if you're running a three SP strategy and one of your starters gets hurt, you will have a problem making innings.

Tomorrow, I'll talk a little about allocating auction dollars in a category dump, and what you shouldn't do.