Matt Finkelstein and I recently participated in a somewhat unique auction. Here is the team we have so far.

Matt and I are joining a new high stakes league that is starting from scratch. The initial auction would take far too long to do in one day, so the commissioner decreed that we would start with the first 200 players from the ADP list and would auction them on Fantasy Auctioneer, doing as many as we could in a set amount of time. At a later date we will complete the auction.

Strategically this presented a somewhat nightmarish scenario from a planning perspective. There are many unknowns in this scenario: we didn’t know how the other players would react, or their experience level, or how many players would be auctioned. The only legitimate strategy here was to have no pre-conceived plan but merely to target players we like at reasonable prices and to remain supremely flexible and fluid.

One prime example was how closers were dealt with. Normally my tactic here is to slum for closers, and this was our intention. However even price enforcing bids were enough to snag the closers!

The league parameters are that each owner has two teams, one AL-only team and one NL-only team. Each league is treated separately for scoring purposes (traditional roto style) and then your overall result is summed. So, you might have 100 points in the AL and 120 in the NL and your overall total will be 220. It is that overall total that determines the champion.

Where normally we would have zero after the first 100 players were auctioned, we ended up with:

Joe Nathan $23
Mariano Rivera $21
Jose Valverde $20

I can preach about the lack of value as a parameter for the top of the pyramid, but that is only true when prices are not ridiculously low! My theory is that one should not quibble with one or two dollars when going for players at the top of the pyramid. In that vein we snagged David Wright at $36 and Miguel Cabrera at $38. Whether they will have “value” is irrelevant in my opinion.

Not so with the closers however. Saves are a double point category and the fact that all closers auctioned went for under $25 was a boon to the owners that got them. The closer slumming tactic is a strong one where there are many closer kept or where the non-risky closer go for their typical price.

Here it was clear that everyone else was planning to slum as well, no doubt reading of this old advice in lots of places. As we continuously assert here on this site, such thinking is only good if you are the only one pursuing it. When others pursue the same strategy you must adjust, and the failure to do so is an error no two ways about it.

So, instead of having no closers we shifted our strategy mid-auction to shoot for getting any closers that went cheap. In short order we had all three. Given the turnover in closers from year to year, to get three reliable closers of their ilk is a tremendous asset.

Other picks did not go so well. Due to a communication error we ended up with a $27 Corey Hart. Matt was running the computer and I was on the phone. One gaping flaw in the Fantasy Auctioneer site is that you cannot log on from two computers for the same team. As a result when discussing Hart’s bidding, I told Matt “don’t do it,” and he heard “do it!” Oops.

Even here it is not a disaster. We reviewed, as always, both Baseball Prospectus’ values and Baseball HQ values. BP had Hart at $30 and HQ had him at $23, so we essentially split the difference. This is yet another data point in my theory that “value” is not an objective concept; we got a player at a price where on two reliable projection methods he is a value on one but not the other. I hope we can see that the concept of “value” when dealing with these players is wholly subjective, no matter how many times or how often you hear otherwise. Maybe I am Don Quixote in this regard!

Some more critical picks: Howie Kendrick at $19. This was purely an error in reading my opponent. During the bidding I strongly felt that the other bidder would go to $20 and was wrong. Oh well, not every decision works out. The other bidder was an expert in my opinion and perhaps he snookered me; one will never know. Against weaker competition there would be no issue here but since he was an expert it is very possible he was trying to drive us to the high bid while we were doing the same to him. I will have to be more careful with him next time….

Another: Juan Pierre $10. Frankly I thought this was a no-lose price. Even if he doesn’t play everyday, if he gets 350 AB he will get $10 worth of steals. Given his contract and given Torre’s preference for veterans and the fact that Ethier was lucky last year and is a marginal starter anyway, Pierre has a good chance of getting the job anyway.

Carlos Pena $24. Others may disagree but I think this is a bargain. Last year was definitively not a fluke, and though he may not hit 40 HR I think 30 is very close to a sure thing assuming good health. The BA will drop a bit but he will still be worth the price.

Brandon Webb $29. I could kill Matt for this one. He has a man-crush on Webb, and is writing an article on him that will go up soon. I didn’t want to go this high but Matt controlled the computer and our destiny. If only he would have been so bold when Rowand was snuck through for $6 (yes that is true).

Overall the auction was not a great success or a great failure. I would love to have back the money we spent on Kendrick, Webb and Hart though. Even two of the three would be fine with me. The other players we nabbed were:

Vernon Wells $20
Scott Kazmir $23 (probably a steal if he is healthy-he WILL finish in the top three for the Cy Young in 2008-you heard it here first).
Edgar Renteria $16–another price enforcing bid that ended up with us getting him.
A.J. Burnett $16
Johnny Damon $13
Rafael Furcal $19

Feel free to comment!