SubscribeOne of fantasy baseball’s basic rules of thumb is the idea that you should spend about 70% of your auction dollars on hitters and the remaining 30% on building a pitching staff.
This is a useful guideline, but, of course, any rule will have exceptions. For leagues that start more pitchers (or fewer hitters), your budget will probably be slanted closer to 65/35 or even 60/40. Since the split is league dependent, the Price Guide does not presuppose any split but allocates dollars without regard to hitters and pitchers. (Typically, it will end up close to 70/30 anyway.)
I noticed last year, however, that the Price Guide tends to put a higher value on top-tier SP than typical auctions and drafts. Whereas a typical draft puts the first pitcher off the board late in Round 1 or early in Round 2, the Price Guide was suggesting pitchers from the start. That trend is continuing this year: Roy Halladay will probably be valued by the Price Guide as the #1 or #2 overall player in most leagues.
I’ve wrestled quite a bit with whether the Price Guide or the conventional wisdom is correct, and I’m still not completely sure of the answer. Regardless, I’ve decided there’s a good bit of value in at least allowing the Price Guide to create values that mimic real life.
So you will notice a new feature this year to enter your own hitter/pitcher split:
This allows you to force the Price Guide to use a split that is realistic for the way your league really drafts. If your leaguemates will spend 72% of their money on hitters, you can enter a 72/28 split to get a better idea of how they will bid. If you’re in a draft, you may just need to gradually nudge the split in one direction until it matches what you expect to see.
Part II of this series will experiment with this feature for a real-world league, the experts’ Tout Wars Mixed League. In Part III, we’ll look at what the implications might be from letting your league dictate the values.
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