Adjusting Your Bid Limits for Fewer Teams

anonymous asks:

is there a way in (Alex) Patton's software to adjust the bid prices for a 10-team league? I know he frowns upon this, but I was curious. I found the "adjust formulas based on # of teams" option, i just don't see anywhere to enter the # of teams.

In actuality, this is a two-part question.

What anonymous is referring to when he says "(Patton) frowns upon this" is an adjustment that you can make to the Patton $ Software under Options/Data to adjust the formulas based on the number of teams in your league. And, yes, there is a warning in the software that tells you that "this is not endorsed by Alex as valid." And Alex is right. If you really want to adjust your dollar values for your 10-team league, you'll have to calculate your own formulas using Alex's methodology and going from there. If you're interested in doing this, I'd be glad to explain in a separate post, but it's not going to be all that helpful for you to make this adjustment at this late date.

However, what I think you're really asking about is adjusting your bids to fit your league. And, indeed, even if you go in and adjust the dollar values in the software, this will do nothing to the bids, since these are manually entered by Alex, Mike Fenger, and Rotoman.

As painful as it is, you'll need to go into the software and do this manually. Fortunately, Alex left the bid column blank this year, so you can go in and change your bids without disrupting Alex's bids in the software.

What I've done in the past when faced with the challenge of a smaller league is going into the software and ranking the players by tiers. Start out by assuming a 12-team league (for the A.L.) or 13-team league (for the N.L.). Make sure to adjust your bids to fit your league's spending trend before you do this. Patton uses a $169/$91 split in the software, which in my opinion doesn't distribute enough money to the hitters. After you've done this, add up the amount of money for each group of 12 or 13 hitters. Do this for as many active roster spots (14 is typical) that you have in your league.

Next, figure this out for your 10-team league. Group the best 140 hitters in clumps of 10 and calculate the bids for the same 14 tiers of hitters. I did this exercise this morning for the A.L. If your numbers are the same as mine, you should fall $122 short of the $175 per team or $2,100 per league I usually budget for hitters. If you want to budget less or more based upon your league's spending trends, that's fine, but just make sure that your bids are consistent and add up to the total amount of money your league has to spend.

What you should find is that you have a lot of money to distribute to the top two tiers of hitters, and a moderate amount to Tiers 3-6. You will wind subtracting money from the hitters at the bottom.

Wait, I can hear you saying. If there's less money to spend in my league ($520 or $780, to be exact), shouldn't I be spending less across the board?

No. This is because the variability at the bottom of your player pool will be far greater. In a 12-team A.L., for example, Patton's 168th ranked hitter (sorted by bid value and then by Patton $) is Marco Scutaro, with a $1 bid limit. In a 10-team A.L., the 140th ranked hitter is Frank Catalanotto, with a $3 bid limit. The players like Catalanotto should go for $1 in your league.

And if Catalanotto goes for more than $1, that's great news for you. That means that someone higher on your list will fall to you at $1 - someone you have ranked higher who might be a $4 or $5 player in a 12-team league but might only have ranked at $2 or $3 in a 10-team league.

This means that you should bid higher on the top players in your league. Since you're going to have a relatively easier time filling in your roster with guys who play everyday, you want your best players to stand out more. Your roster is far more likely to be balanced by default. More aggressive bids on the top players is the way to go. Getting Bobby Abreu for $28 is good, but getting A-Rod a few ticks higher than his 12-team bid limit is even better. You should be able to fill in during the endgame and make up for the bid difference between A-Rod and Abreu.

This is only one way of doing this. You can manually adjust bids if that feels more comfortable. But I would still recommend tweaking the top hitters up, leaving the guys in the middle about the same, and pushing the hitters at the bottom down.