SubscribeAs the fantasy draft season heats up, a common question I get is how to deal with bench spots when building dollar values in the Price Guide. My common answer to that query is, “I don’t know.”
By definition, a bench player is not contributing any stats to your team. That means, in theory at least, that a bench player is worth nothing.
In real life (real fantasy life, I guess) that isn’t the case. Players that you draft as starters will get hurt. Others will underperform. It is very likely that some of the guys that you draft for your bench will see a significant amount of time in your lineup, contributing stats toward your totals. Some bench players will have a non-zero dollar value, which is why owners will pay more than the minimum for them at the draft.
So how do we quantify the value of bench players? Here are a couple of tips for dealing with the issue:
Reserve some money
When you enter your league’s salary cap in the Price Guide, you might try lowering the amount to compensate for what owners spend on their bench. Suppose your league has a $260 cap that is also spent filling five bench spots. Maybe you only enter $250 into the Price Guide — allocating $2 per bench spot.
The average amount that teams spend on their bench players will vary depending on the league’s rules, so there’s no magic amount to allocate. Past drafts should give you a rough idea of how much you need to hold back, though.
Enter more starters
For a league with daily lineup changes, it’s common to keep a couple of extra SP on your bench, which you rotate in on days they are pitching.
If this is a widespread strategy in your league, then these players are essentially starters, and you can consider them as starters in the Price Guide. For a league that starts 4 SP with teams average 2 SP on their bench, you might just enter 6 SP into the Price Guide.
This also works for hitters, but teams aren’t able to rotate bench players in as consistently as they can for pitchers. If an average team in your league has three hitters on their bench, you might add one extra Utility starter to compensate for the combined contributions of those three bench players.
Inflate starter values
For leagues with large benches, you might notice that the deep draft pool makes teams spend a little more on starters. If this is the case for you, you might inflate the values of starters by a certain amount, say 10%. Just copy and paste the Price Guide results into a spreadsheet, and you should be able to tweak the prices until they make sense.
I really don’t like to advocate playing with the dollar values until they look the way you want them. When there are discrepancies between the projected values and what happens at auction, my preferred solution would be to identify the factors that cause the differences, so that the values are computed as accurately as possible. But the effect of bench players seems like a really difficult thing to quantify.
Does anyone else have any solutions for how to handle bench players?