are the dollar values I assign players my own, or should I use (Alex) Patton to determine that?It's entirely up to how comfortable you are with setting prices for your league. If this is your first or second year playing auction-format Roto, I'd use Patton's bids exclusively. However, if you've played for long enough, or if you find that Patton's bids are "off" and don't match the experience in your league, you should feel free to tweak.
The baseline for your bid limits should realistically reflect what you think a player will go for in your league. I wrote about this in an earlier post. In the interest of full disclosure, there was some slight disagreement about this, so I'll link to that comment, too. I stand by my basic point, though, which is that if Patton has his bid at Josh Hamilton in 4x4 at $20 but you think Hamilton is worth $30, don't put your bid at $30. Stick your bid a few ticks above $20 but decide where the stopping off point is for Hamilton. Putting a $30 bid limit on Hamilton is not only unrealistic, but will skew some of your other bids too far down as well.
I've played for long enough that I always tweak some of Patton's bids based on my experience in my league. I find that Patton's bids for catchers and middle infielders are a little light and if I adhere to them I'll wind up with two or three crummy $1 middle infielders. So I take a little money from the outfielders and move them to the catchers and middle infielders. I'm not going to overdo it, but I do want to make sure that I have a realistic price on enough middle infielders so that I'll at least have a legitimate opportunity to buy a starter at the position.
My other tweak tends to come on young players. In my opinion, the Patton bids don't address dumping, so I don't want to see Carlos Gomez go too cheaply and wind up becoming a key dump chip for one of my opponents in June or July. I have to balance that with the idea that I don't want to overpay Gomez and see him flounder and flame out by May, leaving me with no return on my investment.
I hope this answers your question. There isn't a particular science to bid limits; and a lot of it comes from knowing how your league dynamic works. And I don't want to sell Alex's excellent work in this area short. Generally speaking, his bid limits are an excellent jumping off point for most of our leagues. You are better off, though, if you adjust some of the bids for your own league (and even Alex himself used to point this out in his books). If you see a bid of his that looks heavy or light to you, your instincts are probably correct. Adjust away if you've gotten to the point where you're confident that your guess is better than his.
4 comments:
The hardest part of this process is figuring YOUR price relative to your league. In other words, I know what I think is the fair price for a player. But, I also know that that player will go for say, $5 more based on my league. How do MY prices figure in to figuring out the league?
It is easy to budget the entire league, but if you don't aggressively deal with this balance, you are left with...well...leftovers that are way under value.
I remember one year where I sat back and laughed at the overbidders, but then I was stuck with a bunch of unsexy guys with no upside. Yes, they were undervalue to a point, but they also had no capacity for significant profit. I think I finished 8th.
The bottom line is that other's overbidding or overpricing CAN be good for you, but only if you get guys that you still want and can win with.
I think you need a plan of key players to target AFTER the studs are overbid. This all comes back to how you price your players, relative to your league, as that is the only context that really matters.
Guys, badgermaniac brings up a good point:
"I think you need a plan of key players to target AFTER the studs are overbid. This all comes back to how you price your players, relative to your league, as that is the only context that really matters."
But I know from watching other auctions that it isn't always best to target players -- only how much you'd want to pay for certain types of players -- lest you overbid terribly on your targeted men.
What say you?
Just to clarify, but I don't mean "target" in the sense of picking guys out before the draft.
Rather, I mean that you need to be able to adjust on the fly in order to find value.
Josh Hamilton was a guy that fit last year for me. When the big guns were being overbid, I was able to find value with guys like Hamilton or Kelly Johnson or Russell Martin in that $10-$15 range.
I guess my bottom line point is that you have to have the structure of bid limits and so forth entering the draft, but you also have to understand how those bids fit in your league as well as the skill to manage your list at the auction. They are two mutually exclusive attributes of good fantasy owners.
The thing that I love about Patton is that you can get a fairly good reason on what a player's stats are worth. It's good going into an NL only draft to know what Orlando Hudson's stats last year were worth as compared to Pat Burrell's.
As far as bid limits, I generally do my own, with one eye the prices of an expert like Patton to make sure I don't go overboard, one way or the other.
But the thing that helps me the most is trying to put a number on a guy that makes me like him at that number. (And, of course, all the bids have to add up, as has been discussed before)
Then I try to have the largest possible pool of players at prices I'm OK with, so then I'm not limiting myself by going into a draft with only a few key guys I'm hoping to get.
So, if my bid prices add up, I can find a price with which I would take almost anyone. (Exception: Jamie Moyer)
Andy
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