Larger Rosters, Same Auction Dollars

anonymous has a wrinkle in his league that poses a rare valuation challenge:

My league just bumped up minimum rosters from 27 to 30. We still have our $271 budget

...with the rosters even bigger, does this mean I should spend some cash on my bench; or should I go with a bunch of endgame $1 players while everyone else spends up their benches? I worry that this will leave me with few prospective fill-ins in case a starter goes down, but it would give me more money to spend on impact players during the auction.

...If you are fortunate enough not to be bitten by the injury bug too badly, how much impact does a bench player have on a team with daily lineups? Am I looking at getting 15 percent of the overall production; 5 percent? And how does that translate to counting stats (HR, R, RBI, SB)? I'd hate to go the $1-per-bench-spot route and find out I could lose my league by not having some solid guys to dump in my lineup on a Monday or a Thursday.

This is a two-part question with a significant number of variables. I'll start with the second question first.

Valuation Fluctuation:
Billy Almon Brown Graduate, 2007

	Auction Total	Auction $	League Total	League $	A.L. Total	A.L. $
HR	1,925	$732	2,099	$798	2,252	$856
RBI	9,010	$930	9,853	$1,017	10,593	$1,093
SB	1,148	$478	1,265	$527	1,354	$564
Total $		$2,140		$2,342		$2,514

This chart is for my 4x4 A.L.-only league, but it gives you an idea of the extra hitting stats (counting only) that are lying around after we all take our first 168 cracks at buying or freezing the best hitters we can. From a percentage standpoint, we add approximately 9.4% to our HR and RBI totals and 10.2% to our SB totals.

However, that doesn't mean that you should budget between 9-10% of your hitting budget for your reserve list. Intuitively, I'd place $1 bids on almost anyone who would be on my reserve list, with the possible exception of a hot-shot minor leaguer like Jay Bruce or Colby Rasmus, who might be up this year and produce in a big way.

I chronicled the variability of reserve list picks this winter, reviewing the 72 reserve picks that the Tout Wars expert league made last year. There were some hitters who worked out very well (Josh Fields, Matt Stairs, Marlon Byrd, Ross Gload), but most of them didn't. When you reach the end of your auction and are picking players on reserve, you are drafting players who are so lowly regarded that 276 players before them were purchased first. A handful of these reserve picks will work out. Most won't.

In your league, though, you are going to have to redistribute your money. Your $271 budget gives your league an extra $132 to spend, but bidding on 30 players per team gives you "only" $48 extra to spend if you assign the minimum bid to your reserve players.

My advice would be to add this extra money to the players in the middle, not the bottom. Buying Jose Reyes and Ryan Howard would be good, but if you spend $80-90 on those two combined, you're going to wind up with fewer everyday players in your line-up, and your stats on Monday/Thursday are going to be weaker. In a league like yours, the best way to field a line-up with as many regulars as possible is to attempt to buy 13 everyday players. Don't worry about injuries; you can't control this element of the game, and spending extra money on the bottom-of-the-barrel types is a waste.