Early Injuries (Or Joe Mauer Revisited)

Joe Mauer returned to action on Friday night. Given the length of the wait - and how dire the predictions were about his health as recently as March - Mauer owners would have been happy with an 0-fer if Mauer had simply stayed on the field for nine innings.

By that yardstick, Mauer exceeded expectations, going 2-for-3 with a solo HR and three runs scored. I didn't see that game or last night's game, but all accounts are that Mauer looked good and was showing no ill-effects from his injury.

In retrospect, Mauer definitely represented a buying opportunity in auctions last month, particularly in keeper leagues. His price dropped from $24 in the CBS Sportsline auction on February 11 to $21 in the LABR auction on the weekend of March 7-8, to a mere $14 on March 28 in the Tout Wars auction.

Mauer earned $22 in 2008 over the course of 146 games. So my guess is that the bids in Sportsline and LABR assumed full health and it wasn't until Tout Wars convened three weekends later that the dire health reports knocked Mauer's price down quite a bit.

The 33 percent markdown on Mauer from LABR to Tout Wars is probably what a lot of owners did with a complete question mark in late March: assumed Mauer would play about two-thirds of the season and bid for about two-thirds of his value. Anyone who bought him at that price reaped the rewards. It turns out Mauer only missed 22 Twins games, or 13.6% of his team's games. This markdown would have made him an $18 play (compared to LABR), not $21.

My rationale on March 17 was that I'd downgrade Mauer to $19 or $20. At the time, it sounded like rest and medications, not surgery, were going to help him come back sooner rather than later.

Those reports turned out to be correct. It was around this time that the fantasy news web sites - at least those that aren't behind a pay wall - started freaking out somewhat about Mauer. Prognosticators hate uncertainty; hearing a player will be out for the entire year is preferrable than hearing "we don't know."

The most useful advice I gave on Mauer was one that you didn't see anywhere in the mainstream fantasy community, and looks particularly smart today:

If your freeze list is weak, gambling on Mauer might be the right move anyway. If you have a strong freeze list, you might be better off throwing Mauer back, spending $8-10 on a "safer" catcher, and spending your additional $16-18 on another player elsewhere.

This is the bottom line. The best case scenario for Mauer was a quick recovery and a return on Opening Day, while a worst case was a season ending injury. Split the diference and you had an $11-12 bid limit. Where you wanted to go from there should have had more to do with your team than with Mauer himself.

But it is interesting how hysteria - not good information - polluted Mauer's market. Given the reward - particularly in keeper leagues - that $11-12 base bid limit should have been adjusted upward. Kudos to you if you did just that.