There are may ways to go about building a fantasy baseball roster when you are in an auction league format. I think the majority of owners trend toward the more stars & scrubs approach because it correlates over from the draft. If you are in a 13 team NL only draft league, theoretically you should be able to buy roughly the same team in an auction format.

I ask however that you try a different approach if you have been on the stars & scrubs bandwagon in the past. Especially in an AL or NL only league where you are dealing with only half the player pool. I am all about limiting the risk to my fantasy baseball team. It is the reason I shy away from players in a draft with injury history and a high price tag and I employ the same strategy in an auction. It would have been tough to spend $35+ on David Wright last season and see him hit only 10 home runs. That is a huge loss in value, compared to a player that you bought for $15 doing that.

Buying three or four star players also leaves you with three or four holes in your offense as we saw from the 2010 NL LABR teams last week. It cracks me up to hear the comments from some of the owners after the draft and they lament the fact they have some holes to fill on their team. But didn’t they really bring it on themselves based on the way they bought players?

I took the results from the recent NL LABR (League of Alternative Baseball Reality) auction and built my own team with a limited risk approach. I constructed this team without using stats, I simply looked for players that I felt would have had value had I been at the auction table and added them to my team. After I compiled all of the players, I totaled the budget to make sure I was at $260.

At that point I added up all of the stats based on the numbers from my FBT Fantasy Baseball Draft Guide (available for just $9.99) and compared that to the targets in a 13 team NL league. I think the results might surprise you when you look at the makeup of the roster. I also hope it gives you more confidence knowing that you can build a competitive team without having multiple superstars on it.

Here are the targets for each category with my projected stat totals and score for that category. Based on a 13 team league with 10 categories, there are a maximum of 130 points to get. Usually the top teams are in the 75-80% range of the total point total so I am using 97 points as the target.

You can see from the category points I came up with 97 points, which hits the goal. Again, this was done by simply coming up with a group of players with value based on their price and then adding up the stats. If you spent more time on it then I did and looked for more value, I am sure you could come up with a higher point total.

You will see from my roster that I was able to come up with hitters that should be starters on offense at 13 of the 14 positions with the exception being Gerardo Parra, who still should see a decent amount of at bats in Arizona. By filling your team with all hitters that are going to play, it also limits your FAAB budget to just pitching, which limits your spending. Instead of having to cover three positions, hitting, starting pitching and closing, I have limited it to two by having a full team of hitters. I was also able to roster two closers so barring injury, I have limited the FAAB spending down to just starting pitching. This will make it easier to win the free agent starting pitcher you want during the season when you can target the majority of your budget at one group of players instead of at three.