Monday Morning Quarterback

Shoulda, coulda, woulda....

Let's begin with the following preamble: I've been playing fantasy sports for 24 years, football since 1981 and baseball since 1986. There is one constant relating to fantasy drafts and that is: your team always looks better to you the day after the draft than you expected. There is a reason for this. Not everyone agrees with you on value and potential performance, so by definition you will get more players that you like than you expect because others do not like them as much.

It doesn't make them wrong, and it doesn't make you wrong. Wrong will be determined in September. As will right. As will luck. And skill. Right now, though, when you look at your own team, and look at the other teams, you have to remember than in judging draft/auction success, you have prejudices about players that make your team look better than it is and other teams look worse.

That said, I'm going to make some reflections on values and profits post-auction. I understand that my values (actually, our values, which we call PECK value) are subjective and not always the same as others. My head just exploded when the bidding for Taveras peaked at $19, after spirited bidding by virtually every team in the room save the Pecklers. We had him down at PECK value $5, INF value (bidding value taking into account inflation) $8. OK, maybe we were a little low, but it's clear we do not agree on that guy. And we may be wrong - there, I said it.

So please do not be insulted by any of this. But I want to try to analyze the draft. If my numbers suck, so be it, it will be my problem. But I would be interested in feedback on my observations.

We created 2 values for every player in the league, PECK and INF. PECK values for the players kept had $458 in profits in them on $1294 spent. (I have not adjusted this for the Pounders throwing back Burke and activating Floyd, but this doesn't matter too much. INF values reallocates the $458 to all of the other players remaining to be purchased. No one is worth less than $1. I know there are analyses that show players worth minus something, but my mind can't completely absorb that, much like I have a sense of Einstein's theory of relativity, but please don't ask me to explain it.

The projected keeper profits were as follows:

Busch - 92
Hobo - 60
Cappers - 58
Cartel - 45
Pecklers and Pounders - 44
Bums - 37
Any 9 - 32
Bats - 26
Old Rips - 13
Alltease - 8
Lickers - (1) Sorry, Lou

Jeff had $56 profits tied up in his pitching, principally in Gagne, Lidge and Oliver Perez.

After the draft, total profits were minus 1 (not sure how that worked, but let's just somehow call it rounding, even though I did not use any fractions). The allocation was:

Busch - 56 (5 Hitting/51 Pitching)
Hobo - 20 (15/5)
Cappers - 21 (11/10)
Cartel - (3) (8/minus 11)
Pecklers - 24 (23/1)
Pounders - 0 (minus 19/19)
Bums - (9) (minus 4/minus 5)
Any 9 - 7 (7/0)
Bats - (23) (1/minus 24)
Old Rips - (20) (minus 1/minus 19)
Alltease - (22) (1/minus 23)
Lickers - (52) (minus 30/minus 22)

There have to be minus numbers here, because it all comes to a sum total of 12 teams times $280 spent (actually $9 was wasted). Profits must be offset, in the end by losses because this is a zero sum game. In general the teams with the strongest keeper lists ended up better off than the teams without them, but EVERY TEAM LOST PROFITS IN THE DRAFT. They had to: we were required to overspend by $458 on the remaining players.

There was no way to spend your remaining money in a manner that you would get fair value for the players you bought except in a few rare instances. We had planned to stop at 4 starting pitchers, but Webb at $14 was right at our PECK value, so we bid it. We were shocked that no one said $15. It caused us to change our strategy a little. When we said $3 on Hampton, we had his PECK value at $6. I think that was one that others in the room were surprised about. But there weren't many of those players taken -- it's a mathematical impossibility.

Where I'm headed is to see the change from keeper profits to ending profits. This is an indication of how teams did in the auction itself. All of the numbers below are minus numbers, so a low number is a good thing, like in golf.

Pecklers - 20
Any 9 - 25
Alltease - 30
Old Rips - 33
Busch - 36
Cappers - 37
Hobo - 40
Pounders - 44
Bums - 46
Cartel - 48
Bats - 49
Lickers - 51

Our top score is probably more reflective of our using our own values here. This reminds me of a couple of years ago in our football league when Fast Eddie did a post draft analysis which showed how his team was much better than everyone else's based on HIS valuation system. We laughed at him, hard. Ask Boof Brittain. However, he ended up in the championship game that year.

In our defense I have two points to make. First, we had to spend $208, which with so much inflation is very difficult. Second, I believe we were quite disciplined about not overspending on the inflation figure. We only overpaid on INF value for Lawton ($2) and Hammond ($2). Lawton was the last of the really valuable players and if we didn't buy him we would have had a hard time spending the rest of our money. Furthermore, Jeff bid $27, and there was just no way we were going to let him of all teams have a potential 4 category young guy. As for Hammond, we had $6 for 2 pitchers, so at that point money didn't matter.

Kudos to Any 9 who I sensed throughout were being pretty careful about their values. And in the Lickers' defense, they had to spend $250. They actually did a pretty good job if you look at that figure as a percentage of how much they had to spend.

I'll do some individual team analysis after tax season, but these are my initial impressions of a heavy inflation auction. You never see this kind of commentary anywhere. Just like everything on this and every other site out there, take it for what it's worth. You get what you pay for.