One of the challenges in playing fantasy baseball is handling the waiver wire and the process becomes even more complex if you play in a league that uses dollar amounts instead of some order of the standings or another method. With that in mind, I wanted to take a look at some of the numbers from my main event NFBC team through this past weekend and see if there is some conclusions that can be drawn.
The league is a 15 team mixed league format with a $1,000 FAAB budget per team. Minor league players cannot be bid on until they are called up unless they had been drafted and were later dropped during the season.
So far there have been a total of 362 free agent pick ups for a total spent of $11,276. Of those pickups, only 181 had another owner bidding on the player or exactly 50%. If we look at only the 181 players that had multiple bids, the highest bid totaled $9,533 while the second highest bid was $5,236.
It is no surprise that the highest bid players have been rookies coming up to the major leagues in the form of Mike Stanton, Starlin Castro, Dexter Fowler, Jose Tabata and Jhoulys Chacin. Searching for saves also takes a big hunk out of a teams budget as Alfredo Simon ($204), Manuel Corpas ($179), Jim Johnson ($103), Evan Meek ($99) and Tyler Clippard ($85) led the way in relief pitcher spending.
It is interesting to note that of the 362 players that have been picked up, 83 of them were picked up multiples times, or 23% of the moves have been recycled players. Usually you would attribute that to fringe pitchers being added and dropped to maximize two starts but there have been quite a few hitters that have fallen into the category as well. Leading the way has been Jamie Moyer who has been added five different times already this season. Also high on the claim list has been Daniel Bard (4), Jason Motte (4), Michael Saunders (3), Livan Hernandez (3), Tom Gorzelanny (3) and Yuniesky Betancourt (3).
If your league uses a nine man pitching staff in a mixed league format, the tendency has been to go with either two or three closers. I think with the number of closers that lose their job each year due to performance or injury, plus the amount of your free agent budget it costs trying to find a new one, the ideal option is to grab three instead of two at the draft or auction. This way even if one loses their job, you still have two to fall back on.
The statistics above obviously show there is a lot of room for improvement considering only 50% of the players had another owner bidding on them. Technically all of the players purchased could have been bought for $1 instead of what they went for. The more you are able to close that gap in understanding the other owners in the in the league in terms of roster needs, spending patterns and money available, the more money you will free up to purchase extra players because of a tighter bidding pattern.
It you look at the other teams in the league and review their bidding history, most often you will notice a pattern when they bid on certain types of players or positions. This will help you when it comes time to placing the bid of not going too much over what the second place bidder does. Some teams will never go over $50 on a bid, other teams will bid $1 for the majority of the players and take whatever they can get while saving up money to make a splash later in the season. Either way, there is data there to help you improve your free agent bidding if you take the time to examine it.
When it comes to losing lower dollar amount bids, most often it is because the owner bid $1 and the winning bid was either $3 or $5. Out of the 142 winning single digit bids, in none of the cases was the second highest bid either 6,7, or 8. It looks like owners have $5 as the threshold for lower level bids in the majority of cases, otherwise they are bumping the bid to double figures.
Looking at all the double digit winning bids, what is the last digit that owners prefer to use? Out of 220 double digit bids, numbers ending in nine (18%) were most popular, followed by the number five (16%) and the number one (14%).
