Missing Peavy

Rodger wonders why my "regular" A.L. didn't bid on Jake Peavy.

In our league, an owner spent his entire free agent budget on Peavy ($100). Did your league ignore him because of the DL?

In my regular A.L., we can't use our FAAB to speculate on players in the minor leagues or on the disabled list. It's against the rules. One owner did bid $24, despite instructions from the commissioner reminding everyone that Peavy wasn't available (when I asked the commissioner about this, he told me that this owner must "have his own inner commissioner.").

Peavy was available in the expert league I'm in and went for the full $100 as well.

There was more money floating around in the expert league than in my regular league. Part of this has do to with the seven-man reserve list they use (compared to the farm-system only style my regular A.L. uses), part of it has to do with the $0 bids that are allowed, but I do believe that there was a lack of foresight on the part of the experts.

The down-to-the-wire bids in the expert-A.L.:

Jake Peavy $100
Edwin Encarnacion $100
Jerry Hairston Jr. $40
Casey Kotchman $5

Scott White of Sportsline admitted that he was waiting for a big fish to land in the A.L.:

I anticipated a big trade deadline. That's why I saved all of my FAAB dollars.

Actually, I anticipated a big name moving from the NL to the AL at some point during the season, even if not on July 31. It usually happens -- it did for Mark Teixeira and Jason Bay last year -- but for whatever reason, all the big names floated to the NL this year. About the only exciting player who swam against the current was Jake Peavy, who hasn't pitched since June 8.

Thanks for the help, guys.

And I couldn't even win Peavy. Someone else saved enough money to snatch him away from me. I had to settle for Edwin Encarnacion, using every last one of my dollars to get him.

You certainly can't count on a big name landing in your one-league Roto league, but you should definitely be able to make an educated guess as to who might be coming in to your pool. In this day and age of non-stop information, there's no excuse not to at least know who this coming winter's free agents will be.

I had bid $71 on Scott Hairston when he came over because I didn't see that big N.L. name coming over to the American League. Peavy surprised me, but I'm happy I'll have three months of Hairston versus one month of Peavy.