by Todd Lammi

If your favorite day of the year is your fantasy baseball draft, I am about to introduce you to something that is ten times better, and that is a fantasy baseball auction. No longer do you have to worry about players sliding to you in the draft, or having the 10th pick in the first round, knowing that you have no shot at nine players in front of you, in an auction, you have much more control of what goes on around you.

While there is the extra excitement of bidding on players and trying to slip through your favorite sleeper for $2, there are also additional challenges presented in an auction that you do not face in a draft. In addition to tracking the players that have been picked, the players still left on the board and your own team and its stats, in an auction format, you also have to track dollars for your roster and the entire league.

For most players when participating in a fantasy baseball league auction for a first time, they usually run into one of two problems, either they run low on money with multiple players left to buy, or else they have already filled their roster, but have several dollars left to spend.

I am going to give you a couple of tips in order to prevent this from happening and to ensure that your first auction experience is a great one.

When you are preparing for the auction, make sure that the dollars you have assigned to each player add up to the total dollar amount that is to be spent for the league. For example, if you are playing in a 15 team league, and each team has $200 to spend, make sure that the combined salaries you have for the number of players that need to be bought equals $3,000 ($200 x 15). This way you will have closer to a true dollar amount of what a player is worth. So many of the cheat sheets or projections floating around out there provide dollar totals, but they do not add up to what a league total dollar amount is. Each league is different in roster size and team size so make sure that your dollar values are adjusted accordingly.

To make sure that you spend all of your allotted dollars and on the flip side, to make sure you do not run out of money, it is a good idea to go into the draft with dollar amounts assigned to each position on your roster. If you team budget is $200, determine what amount you want to spend for hitting and pitching. On average the split is roughly 70-30 skewed toward hitting. That means with a $200 budget you would plan on spending $60 on your pitching staff. Assuming you have a 10  man pitching staff, you dollar amounts would look something like this:

1Sp – $15

2Sp – $8

3Sp – $7

4Sp – $4

5SP – $2

6Sp – $2

1 Closer – $16

2RP – $2

3 RP – $2

4 RP – $2

You have $15 budgeted for an ace on your staff and $16 budgeted for a closer and so on down the line to fill out your rotation and bullpen. This gives you a good plan of attack to start with. If you happen to spend $17 for an ace starter, simply adjust by $2 another spot on your staff to make sure you hit the $60 mark if that was your allocation to build your staff with.

I usually try to leave $2 for each of the positions instead of $1. At the end of the draft when people are low on money, the auction at that point basically turns into a draft because each person is down to a dollar per player. By having $2 left per player, this ensures that you have a much greater chance of getting the players you want late in the draft.