Gypsy Soul wonders how you should price a player you don't like:
I know you...don't like A.J. Burnett at all. So, when you are allocating money to players to make all the numbers add up, what do you do with a guy like Burnett?...do you value him only at the amount you are willing to own him at (though it seems you don't want him at ANY price) or do you value him at what you think is the likely amount he will go for? I presume the former makes the most sense but I am not sure.
Your prices should reflect what you would be willing to pay for a player, not what the market is or isn't going to pay.
In CBS, Burnett went for $4. In LABR, he went for $8. Would you split the difference and put a $6 price tag on him? No, unless you absolutely, positively could live with owning Burnett at $6.
This is the simplest answer to Gypsy's question. If you said, "A.J. Burnett, $5," the room got silent, and the auctioneer started saying, "Going once," would you feel OK with owning Burnett at $5 or would your stomach be doing butterflies?
Valuation and player evaluation are both obviously important criteria in Rotisserie for valuing a player. At some level, though, your instincts will tell you what your price for Burnett should be. If your reaction to Burnett's price in LABR was, "Well, that seems fair" or "Man, that's a good price," then you like him more than I do and your price should be higher. If you have the opposite reaction, your price should be lower.
I don't have strong opinions about the vast majority of the 575 players I price in both leagues. In many cases I price players based on projected stats, positional scarcity or abundance, and my team's needs (either positionally or categorically). For example, I won't waste much time toying with Kevin Youkilis' price. I don't have a strong feeling about Youkilis one way or the other this year, so my gut doesn't enter into the decision process.
It is typically when I get down into the lower rungs where I start to perform gut checks on my bids. Here is where I'll start ticking players up or down based upon what I think they might do this year.
This isn't to say that I'm entirely immune to LABR or other expert opinions. Alexi Casilla's $14 price tag didn't make me push him up to $14, but it did make me add a $1 to my bid price. I still won't get him, but I want to make absolutely sure that he's at a price I'm comfortable letting him walk away at.
If you run through this exercise enough times, this process will eventually become your own. You will become comfortable assigning your own bids to players, and using bid prices like Alex Patton's, CBS's or LABR's as mere guideposts on your journey to crafting bids that make sense for you.
1 comment:
I agree that its useful to review the expert league prices as a tool to valuations in our own roto leagues. However, the utility is lost to a great degree by the fact they are not keeper leagues (which, I'd imagine, the large majority of us readers are participating in).
There may be a worthwhile post in trying to assess how to read the expert league prices in light of that fact. (i.e., no inflation and lower than expected pricing on prospects (though, most can't be nominated in keeper roto-leagues)
That being recognized - a more helpful tool, perhaps, would be to get someone to list the order in which players were nominated. This would give us the texture of the auction, help explain anomolous prices (Casilla - $14) and prepare us with a layout of what to expect at our own auctions.
Perry Van Hook all but acknowledged today that the $14 play on Casilla was heavily timing/position scarcity induced.
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