In my 5x5 A.L. keeper league last year many of the best pitchers available went for considerably more than I valued them. Only two went around par. Papelbon was the only top-tier closer available and surprisingly he went for par also. What options are available in this type of situation?Most Rotisserie leagues tend to spend anywhere from 65-70% of their budgets on hitting and 30-35% of their budgets on pitching. This tends to also be true in leagues with keepers. Because pitching is generally more unpredictable than hitting, auctions tend to produce many more undervalued pitching keeps than hitting keeps. If keeper leagues insist on spending 30-35% of their money on pitching - regardless of the quality of arms in the auction - separate inflation can occur. More on this phenomenon can be found in this article.
If you calculate inflation across the board, you might wind up with lower prices on pitchers than the market is willing to pay. In my American League last year, for example, overall inflation was 27%. However, hitting inflation was 23% while pitching inflation was 40%. If you calculated inflation using overall inflation, a $30 pitcher at inflation par would be worth $38. With separate pitching/hitting inflation, inflation par on that same $30 pitcher would be $42.
Some readers have disputed the notion of separate inflation, and those readers are correct to point out the most obvious flaw in the concept. If your league applies inflation across the board, then separate inflation won't exist. That $30 pitcher will now sit at $38 inflation par.
Separate inflation or no, what tends to happen in keeper leagues is that more than a few pitchers get frozen and owners wind up paying for scarcity, particularly at the top of the food chain. There used be a time when owners would chase the second-tier pitchers as hard as they would the first-tier guys, but it seems that this time has passed.
Whether or not Gypsy wants to pay or should pay higher prices for the top pitchers depends a great deal on the composition of his freeze list. Just because the best pitchers are generally more reliable doesn't mean that some of them won't disappoint. All it takes is one. If James Shields was your ace last year, you overpaid by $5 in 5x5 leagues with no inflation. If you paid 40% over his market price, your $5 loss became a $14 loss. There is still risk in the mid-tier and lower level pitchers, but since there is lower inflation on those pitchers, there is less risk built in in leagues with higher inflation.
The other possibility that I haven't explored is that there wasn't higher pitching inflation in Gypsy's league and people were simply overpaying for the top arms. If this was the case, my advice would be to play the pricing game and wait for the second and third-tier pitchers. You should get inflation bargains and - if the prices on the top guys were high enough - you might even find yourself some non-inflation bargains.
2 comments:
I think this overpaying phenomenon for SP goes back to our earlier discussion about the value of middle relievers (MR). Using standard valuation procedures, MRs with better than average WHIPS (<1.25) and ERAs (<3.50)and reasonable strikeout rates (>6 per 9IP) "should" be going for $4 to $5. But what happens if bidders are just not prepared to pay these kinds of prices ? If these MRs actually go for $2 on average, and assuming 15 such MRs, that leaves $35-$40 in unallocated auction dollars. My guess is these orphaned dollars end up drifting back into the SP bidding. If it's a keeper league, those are more than enough dollars to drive up the price of tier one SPs, especially if we are talking about 12 team AL or NL only leagues.
Bird, I think there is something to that, but there is another phenomenon at work as well. People see every year the $1 pitchers who earn good profits (they ignore the ones that don't of course lol). So, people like to take the shot in the barrel and hope he/she gets that pitcher. Add unallocated MR dollars to the mix, and, lo and behold, there is a lot of extra money floating around to pay the aces.
I'll keep an eye on this as the CBS AL auction goes forward. While it is not a keeper league, we can still look to see what pattern develops, particularly since I have a pitching strategy in mind.
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