8 Tips for a Successful Fantasy Baseball Auction

Auctions are my favorite way to draft in fantasy baseball. You’re not locked into the whims of a draft position, and they let you build any shape team you want. The downside is that they take twice as long and require constant attention. You don’t get to make two picks at the turn and then casually browse the player pool and add to your queue until you’re up again. These are my top eight tips that I’ve learned over the years (and especially from reading and listening to Mike Gianella).

8 Tips to Nail Your Fantasy Baseball Auction

1. Schedule Breaks

Now this isn’t a hot strategy take, but for everyone’s sake, it’s good to schedule a 5-minute break every hour, or at least around the halfway mark. If your draft doesn’t, make sure folks are okay pausing as needed.

2. Make Your Own Values

Preparation is critical to a successful auction, and that starts with your values. To start, pick the projections you like. Generate values for every player either yourself using a spreadsheet or using an Auction Calculator. If you’re playing a standard format like NFBC, there may be average auction value (AAV) data available to compare against real results. Just be careful because auction dynamics can lead to some strange numbers.

Once you have a set of numbers to start with, go through them and adjust players up/down to your preference. These should be your maximum bids – the most you want to pay, barring some bizarre turn of events. Just make sure that the total values for the number of players you’re drafting don’t exceed the total auction budget of the league. Overcooking your values is the best way to stumble into a stars & scrubs build.

The trickiest bit is getting the Pitcher-Hitter split right. This is where AAVs or past auctions are most useful. If you get this wrong, your values will all favor one or the other, leading to a lopsided team if you don’t catch it in the room. The default is 70/30 in favor of hitters, and that’s a good starting point.

I’ll cover when to stray from your values, but you need them as a foundation and should stick to them unless you have a good reason not to.

3. Know Your Values

You won’t have time to check your number on every guy. You might have a few moments to review them when you’re out on a guy, or if every nomination starts at $1 and slowly bids up, but any name could be called at any time for any starting price, and you need to know quickly if you’re bidding or not. If you’re using multiple projections to build your values, it can help to know where different systems disagree the most. Besides potential savings, you might be able to get a read on which projections owners are using.

4. Have a Plan… and Backup Plans

Once you have some values, mess around with potential rosters. Look at the price tiers at each position and make some general decisions about where you want to spend your money. How many $1 guys are you okay with? What do you need to spend to get a top-5 second baseman? Is there a clump of $12-15 outfielders you like that you like as much as the $18-20 guys? Do you need two catchers, and how much are you willing to pay for them? For starting pitching, it’s good to bucket similarly priced guys and plan how many you want from each bucket. Do you want two Aces? Do you want to skip them and buy five $15-20 guys?

This is also when you should look at extreme builds. Stars & Scrubs is where you spend almost all your money early, skip the mid-game, and finish your roster with $1 players. This is easier to pull off in 12-team leagues where talent is abundant on the wire. Deep league teams sink or swim on playing time as much as talent, which makes this harder. Punting categories is also easier in an auction, and deep leagues have less expectation of being competitive in every category. If your format particularly favors or devalues pitching, all $1 starters or a 50/50 split might be a viable strategy.

You don’t want to lock in on specific players; winning an auction is about being nimble and adapting to the room. This is just identifying where you can get production at different prices and positions, so you can do that. There are build-defining players, typically speed guys, but if you plan on having one of them, make sure you know who the 2nd or 3rd best versions are.

5. Read The Room

This is where the rubber meets the road. Your draft will create pitfalls and opportunities unique to your room. Picking up on those trends will let you capitalize on them. The first thing you’ll see is how aggressive or disciplined owners are bidding early. Inexperienced owners tend to spend more freely, but unless you’ve been thrown into the deep end with a bunch of veteran sharks, most drafts run a little on the aggressive side. There’s some dependability to perennial all-stars and flexibility to having true five-category players that will demand a premium beyond projected value.

In an aggressive room, if you stick to your values, you won’t get any elite talent. You might want to pick one you believe in to push your price on, or just be patient and jump on the first guy who stalls out at your price. The side effect of an aggressive room is that the money has to come from somewhere, and that’s going to be sub-$10 players, so know that you’ll get some bargains later.

If the first dozen or so players go pretty close to your numbers, you’re in a more conservative room and shouldn’t expect to get many discounts. In these rooms, the players who will get pushed up tend to be the last players in a tier. If you’ve got five second basemen valued between $13 and $20, the last one nominated might go for $17 as owners don’t want to miss out.

Pay special attention to what people are paying for pitching. I mentioned it already, but this is where your draft can most easily get derailed. Your values might just be higher or lower than everyone else’s. Even one or two more extreme builds can really skew the market. Be prepared to mentally add a couple of bucks to all your starters, or take a break if you spend your pitching budget faster than planned.

Beware the turn. In all but the most patient rooms, there’s a moment where the dynamic flips from slight overpays to bargains, usually somewhere in the teens, price-wise. Almost every auction I’ve ever done, there’s been one $17 player that I got for $15-16 that I later regretted when similar players went for $11 later. These are usually boring, oatmeal outfielders that come up, and you’re just used to clicking bid on anyone under your price up to this point in the draft.

If you’re doing an in-person auction, you’ll want to have a physical printout of your auction values. Writing actual selling prices down there can help you see how things are going. I don’t recommend attempting that in an online auction, as the clock is less forgiving and recording prices can distract more than it helps.

6. Don’t Leave Money on the Table

While there is an advantage to holding the hammer – having the most money left to spend, thus being able to outbid anyone late – the biggest mistake you can make is not spending all your money. Unless you’re in a league that has an in-season salary cap, you can’t spend those dollars later. Patience is a virtue, and it’s good to have a few bucks to go to $3 on your dollar guys, but if you hold too long, you can run out of players to spend on. All your deals are pointless if you don’t use those savings elsewhere.

This is why you’ll see some weird prices in real auction results; it happens when a manager realizes they’ve been too patient and has to spend their money somewhere.

7. Nominate What You Don’t Need

By default, players get nominated roughly in price order. Most teams want to know where they’re spending big to shape the rest of their build. You might occasionally get a deal on a sleeper by throwing out a name people aren’t prepared for and just let pass, but more often you’re better off waiting. Outside of wanting to know if you’re going to build around a specific player, your best bet is to nominate guys you don’t like. The more money you can get off the table, the less competition you’ll have for the guys you like. If you buy the top catcher, nominate the next five. If you’re punting saves, nominate closers. If you’ve got a “Do not draft” list, throw all those players out there.

8. Draft Guys You Like

This might be controversial, but to me, the whole point of doing an auction is to get players you want, not to take begrudging bargains. It’s more fun when your $1 sleeper hits, and it doesn’t help when a pitcher you never trusted goes under the knife. I’m not sure if this helps you win, but it does help keep you engaged and managing your team throughout the season. It’s trusting your process and betting on yourself.

Finally: Have Fun

Auctions can be stressful, but also the most rewarding drafts to do. Remember that projections aren’t that precise, and a couple of dollars here and there will come out in the wash, so don’t stress the numbers too much. If you screw up somewhere, you can usually fix it in-season via trades or the waiver wire, but you just might create more work for yourself. Just keep your head and don’t panic, and you’ll get through.

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