Optimizing Your Roster: How Did I Do (Part II)?

Last time out, I looked at my American League auction in my non-expert league and analyzed my performance. I was disappointed that I left $9 on the table - as I should be. But how much did I improve my team compared to the rest of the league?

Actual Auction Spending, 2010 Billy Almon Brown Graduate

Team	Salary	Value	$ to Spend	Auction Value	Total $
JSCs	$165	$263	$95	$86	$349 (+10)
Gueros	$137	$198	$123	$103	$301 (+5)
Batteries	$134	$194	$126	$97	$291 (-3)
Benedictines	$128	$179	$132	$95	$274 (-10)
Towers	$63	$113	$197	$150	$273 (+3)
Glanvillage	$147	$167	$113	$85	$252 (-5)
Quints	$53	$90	$207	$173	$263 (+9)
Copasetics	$109	$126	$151	$97	$223 (-21)
Doze Guys	$135	$126	$125	$89	$215 (-11)
Jihad	$160	$142	$100	$88	$230 (+8)
Jables	$53	$54	$207	$168	$222 (+4)
Decimators	$165	$139	$95	$75	$214 (-1)
Totals	$1,449	$1,791	$1,671	$1,448	$3,107 (-12)

I took the chart from my first post in this series and added in all of my projected non-inflation values to the final two columns to see how each team actually did. It's theoretically impossible for a league to buy less than $3,120 worth of stats in an auction; there were $13 worth of players left on the table who had non-inflation bids of $2 or more. If I want to be technically correct, I should bump up the values of the players purchased until I get to $3,120, but this is a manual exercise I don't have the patience for at the moment.

Getting back to my team, I did well. As I said in my last post, I would have done better if I had chased Torii Hunter, Bobby Abreu or Alex Rios and plopped one of them on my team instead of J.D. Drew, but I still gained $9 in value.

The problem is that the JSC's (Toz) gained $10 in value, so I actually lost a little ground in this auction. I dumped saves, but don't really have a team that was specifically built to optimize categories.

So there you have it. My team's OK - and I stayed ahead of the inflation curve - but I didn't do enough to stay ahead of that curve. I might wind up contending, but if Toz's value holds (or even mostly holds), I suspect I'm going to be playing for second place.