Keeper Question - 6x6

anonymous continues to push my knowledge to its breaking point with his profound questions about 6x6:

Reading this, tell me if I'm looking at my team incorrectly [12-team, NL-only, 6X6 (holds, doubles-triples) with 27- to 30-man rosters and a $271 auction budget that expands to $300 during the season]: I have Eric Byrnes ($17), Adrian Gonzalez ($10), Kelly Johnson ($15) and Hanley Ramirez ($17). I was thinking that I'd pick up two over-priced stars (say Howard at $45 and Utley at $45). I say this only because (according to my math -- and a review of past years of my league) I figure I'll only need to average 16 HR, 55 R, 55 RBI and 6 SB for the remaining seven starters. Is this stupid?

One of the dilemmas I have right off the bat with a question like this is that there are a lot of what Donald Rumsfeld calls "known unknowns" sitting out there. Depending on quite a few variables, most notably inflation, the strategy above could be a terrific strategy or a terrible one.

Let's start with the easy part, though. Byrnes, Gonzalez, Johnson and Ramirez represent four freezes at $59. Buying Howard and Utley at a combined $90 would mean that anonymous spent $149 on his first six hitters.

Now anonymous needs to buy seven more hitters.

First, how much money should anonymous spend on these six hitters? The theoretical answer is $23, though the fact that anonymous only carries 13 active hitters means that this actually isn't the answer; the $ split between hitters and pitchers is dependent not only on which categories are used but also on how many hitters and how many pitchers each league carries.

But let's assume, for the sake of simplicity, that anonymous has an $88 pitching staff and needs to average "16 HR, 55 R, 55 RBI and 6 SB" for his final six hitters. This translates to 96 HR, 330 runs, 330 RBI, and 36 SB cumulatively. Is this feasible?

From a valuation standpoint, the answer is an emphatic no. In 5x5, those statistics in 2007 were worth $56. anonymous would need to turn a $33 profit on his $23 investment to hit those marks, and this doesn't even take inflation into account. The 6x6 format might mean that anonymous needs to turn a smaller profit, but the difference isn't significant enough to be a game-changer.

So anonymous is going to fall short of his offensive goals. But by how much? Falling $33 short of his goals might mean falling anywhere from 5-20 points short of his overall points goal. If those average stats listed above are intended to push anonymous to the maximum of 72 offensive points, then I'd say he should set his sights lower and try to shoot for a team that isn't winning every offensive category but for a team that might finish second, third or even fourth in a some of the categories but can still win the league. However, if falling $33 short means finishing in the middle of the pack, I'd recommend some kind of category optimization in order to win.