$2 Profit Per Player

Everyone, including mulkowsky, is obsessed with my throwaway comment about turning a $2 profit per player.

Two related questions sparked by recent posts. First, you've noted that while the greatest "profit" is usually on lower price players, you can't spend all $260 just on low priced guys. Have you ever gone back and modeled two strategies as to their profit potential: a) Try to get players for $2 under inflation par, regardless of their price, b) Spend up to inflation par for the most expensive players, then buy more very low price players who have higher profit (aka, scrubs and studs).

I don't actually try and turn a $2 profit per player. The price enforcing in my non-expert American League has become far too tight for this strategy to work.

Assuming I would have been able to win all of the players in my league by a bid that was $1 higher than the winning bid, I would have only been able to put together a $96 team of 11 players in 2007: four corner infielders, five outfielders, and two starting pitchers.

In 2008, I would have done a better job filling out my team and spent a little more money, but I still would have fallen short. $142 would have bought me 21 players, leaving me a catcher and an outfielder short of filling out my team.

In both years, if you had some money wrapped up in your freeze lists, you would obviously have increased your odds of buying an all-undervalued team. The more salary you had frozen, the greater your odds would have been of buying all of your players at $2 under par. But it still would have been a very difficult task.

Bargains are great, but you need to spend your money. And if you do nothing but troll for bargains all day, there's a good chance you won't spend your money.

So what if you wait for stars to reach par prices and then go after the scrubs?

Using 2008, you could actually have spent $260 and put together a team whose inflation par price was $306. That sounds great...until you realize that the actual value of these players (without inflation) was projected out to $252.

If you did this, you were meeting my goal of turning a $2 profit per player in theory. In practice, there are a few problems with this idea:

• All of these bids assume that my bid was +1 over the "real" winning bidder. Maybe my bid would have won the player at inflation par but, then again, maybe it wouldn't have.
• Your bargains on the hitting side are particularly limited. Five $1 hitters were projected to earn $10 total on this hypothetical team. Your catcher and second baseman would have each had a $1 projection.
  
• The profits on the pitching side would have been better, but buying seven $1 pitchers is an extremely risky proposition. The seven $1 pitchers who I got in this exercise (Eddie Guardado, Jesse Litsch, Dana Eveland, Jose Contreras, Leo Nunez, Miguel Batista, and Manny Delcarmen) were pretty successful with the notable exception of Batista. But the problem is that it only takes one Batista to destroy a staff like this. And, once again, there's no guarantee that I would have been able to buy any of these pitchers for $1 if someone else said $2.

I prefer the hybrid approach of taking the bargains when they come in the auction, even if those bargains are a mere $1 below the player's inflation par price. These types of bargains will come at all points of the auction, and you still should be able to plumb the depths of the endgame for $1 players who you have projected at $2-3 on your sheet. On the pitching side, you'll probably do even better than $1-2 bargains if your league is anything like mine.