Draft Tactics: Calling out Players You Want Early

An old Rotisserie axiom is that you should never call out players in the early stages of the auction who you actually want to buy. There are a few reasons why this is so, but the idea is that there is a lot of money floating around and you're either going to:

a) wind up chasing a player who really fits your strategy past the price point where you want to buy him, or
b) not buy a mid-tier player who you were hoping to sneak in as a relative bargain because there is a lot of money on the table and that player will also quickly go sailing past your price.

Eugene Freedman thinks that this is a silly canard:

...most teams announce players that they don't want early b/c they know that prices will be in the minus territory. But, in some Stage 3 leagues you can announce second and third tier players that you DO want, who are complimentary to your keeper roster, and add to your plus or at least break even on those guys, because nobody wants to commit to third tier players early. It can be especially useful if you don't want to get into a bidding war for the top middle infielders or catchers, but the guys in the $10 range are going to post a solid season, while at the end of the draft you will get garbage at those positions. Others waiting for the big guys just won't bid on a useful but unsexy guy early.

Instead of just looking at second and third-tier players (or trying to determine where to draw the line to figure out what a second or third-tier player is), I thought I'd simply look back at my American League auctions for the last three years to see if Eugene's theory applies to my mature A.L.-only non-expert league auctions.

All bids listed below are from Rounds 1-4 where the team that called out the player had the winning bid or the last bid on that player.

Billy Almon Brown Graduate, NOM = BUY or LB 2009, Rounds 1-4

NOM	#	Player	Cost	Proj.	+/-	BUY	LB
BEN	1:8	Jason Bay	$34	$31	-3	JAB	BEN
QUI	1:9	Carl Crawford	$43	$43	0	BEN	QUI
JAB	2:18	Carlos Guillen	$25	$20	-5	JSC	JAB
BEN	2:20	Curtis Granderson	$35	$33	-2	BEN	JIH
DOZ	3:27	Kevin Millwood	$1	$1	0	DOZ
GUE	3:28	Ichiro Suzuki	$36	$37	+1	GUE	TOW
COP	4:41	Gerald Laird	$3	$7	+4	COP
BEN	4:44	Asdrubal Cabrera	$16	$11	-5	BEN	GUE
TOW	4:47	Kenji Johjima	$9	$4	-5	DOZ	TOW
DEW	4:48	Jason Varitek	$5	$5	0	DOZ	DEW
		average (10)	$21	$19	-2

Both the expensive and the cheap plays here have mixed results.

Half of the owners who bid aggressively on the players they called out bought that player. Of those five players, Laird and Millwood are the only truly cheap buys. Millwood I didn't like at the time, while I loved the Laird play: an owner freezing the room out by calling out "Gerald Laird, $3" and having no one respond. Seeing 2008 disappointment Kenji Johjima go for $6 more than Laird six players later had to be somewhat satisfying.

Of the cheap players bought, though, Laird is the only solid play. Varitek goes for par value, and both Johjima and Cabrera go for too much. The owner who bought Cabrera told me after the auction that Asdrubal was one of his targets; given what a lot of the other MI went for later, waiting 2-3 rounds to call Asdrubal out would have been the better play.

Billy Almon Brown Graduate, NOM = BUY or LB 2008, Rounds 1-4

NOM	#	Player	Cost	Proj.	+/-	BUY	LB
DEW	1:5	Justin Morneau	$31	$31	0	TOW	DEW
GLA	1:10	Rocco Baldelli	$2	$2	0	GLA
BEN	3:32	Curtis Granderson	$31	$30	-1	BEN	JSC
DOZ	3:33	Dontrelle Willis	$5	$7	+2	DOZ	GLA
BAT	4:37	Torii Hunter	$32	$29	-3	BAT	JAB
JIH	4:38	Travis Hafner	$27	$28	+1	JIH	QUI
COP	4:42	A.J. Pierzynski	$13	$13	0	COP	JSC
BEN	4:44	Jason Kubel	$18	$8	-10	BEN	JSC
DOZ	4:45	Dan Wheeler	$8	$2	-6	BEN	DOZ
GLA	4:46	Gary Glover	$1	$1	0	GLA
JSC	4:47	Scott Baker	$8	$7	-1	JSC	TOW
QUI	4:48	Jeremy Guthrie	$3	$8	+5	COP	QUI
		average (12)	$15	$14	-1	BEN

Round 4 in the 2008 auction is a good testing ground for Eugene's theory. After three rounds where most owners weren't coming close to buying the players they called out, almost all of Round 4 was an exercise in nominating players that owners wanted to buy. It didn't really work that well. Even if BEN's price on Kubel in 2008 was more robust than mine, I hope it wasn't $18. Wheeler looked like a decent cheap flier before the auction, but spending $8 on a long shot CIW on a poor team didn't seem to make a lot of sense.

Even the Guthrie call didn't work out. QUI was planning on spending $7 on seven pitchers at the auction, and he was hoping to either sneak Guthrie at $1 or make the room pay $10-12. This ploy clearly backfired.

Billy Almon Brown Graduate, NOM = BUY or LB 2007, Rounds 1-4

NOM	#	Player	Cost	Proj.	+/-	BUY	LB
DOZ	1:6	Derek Jeter	$35	$35	0	DOZ	ALT
BEN	1:7	Paul Konerko	$32	$32	0	TOW	BEN
JIH	1:11	Bobby Abreu	$37	$38	+1	DER	JIH
QUI	2:20	Gary Sheffield	$26	$26	0	ALT	QUI
ICH	3:25	Travis Hafner	$33	$34	+1	COP	ICH
DER	3:27	Joel Pineiro	$2	$1	-1	ICH	DER
BEN	4:43	Luis Castillo	$18	$17	-1	BEN	TOW
QUI	4:44	Cliff Lee	$10	$11	+1	DER	QUI
JIH	4:47	Jeremy Sowers	$18	$12	-6	BEN	JIH
		average (9)	$23	$23	-1

With the exception of Sowers, these prices are all a ho-hum exercise in Stage Three predictability. And Sowers is the example of the kind of guy I suspect Eugene is alluding to: someone you call out early because you want him and think you'll catch the room napping.

Of course, Round 4 might not be "early" in terms of mature auction leagues with an approximate average of 10 freezes per team. The Sowers buy was a case where two teams looked at the pitching that was left and realized that the drop-off after Sowers was perilous. My memory isn't ironclad, but I think Castillo was a similar scenario: the nominating owner looked at the middle infielders, felt his stomach lurch, and called Castillo out to settle the issue one way or the other.

Getting back to Eugene's main point, I come to two quick conclusions:

1) There aren't a lot of second and third tier players coming through as bargains early.
2) However, owners aren't necessarily calling out second and third-tier players early.

The three most important numbers to look at from these three auctions are minus 30, minus 44, and minus 56.

These are the perceived losses that owners are taking in the first four rounds of my non-expert American League in the last three years. Owners are spending their money early, so a vast majority of the perceived bargains are coming later. In this culture, calling out mid-tier players that you want isn't likely to result in bargains, since the room is pushing players past par on the whole and more often than not.

This returns to the concept I discussed this off-season. Take the bargains where you can get them. Ichiro Suzuki as a $1 bargain might not sound impressive, but if you can get a $1 bargain on a $37 player, take it. It doesn't matter if you called him out or not.