There’s one factor that I think can give you an incredible edge on a Yahoo auction: Knowing Yahoo’s prices. Yahoo’s prices are displayed for each player that is brought up for bidding. It acts as an incredible price control — people are unwilling to stray too far from Yahoo’s recommendation. And this is an opportunity to leverage the situation.

Here are my four rules for dominating a Yahoo auction:

1. Configure the Price Guide for Yahoo leagues. The Price Guide can build values for any league, so you need to make sure it’s customized correctly for a Yahoo auction. Yahoo’s $260 cap includes 5 bench players, so I’d drop that down in the Price Guide (which only values starters) to $250 or $255. Yahoo leagues only do 1 C, no CI or MI, and 2 Util.

On the pitching side, Yahoo starts 2 SP, 2 RP, and 4 P. I think 5 SP and 3 RP gives a pretty good approximation. I also set a custom hitter/pitcher split to tone down the values for pitchers — 60/40 seems to be pretty close. This should be pretty close to what you need.

2. Be willing to spend on top-tier talent. Yahoo’s suggested values top out at $37. The Price Guide has no problem spending $50+ on Hanley and Pujols. It is quite realistic to end up with 4-5 guys who would typically be 1st or 2nd rounders.

3. Nominate guys that Yahoo overvalues. Once you’ve spent all your money on the best talent, it’s time to sit back and wait a while. Having spent lots of your money in Step 2, it’s time to help others spend their’s.

If there’s anyone autopicking in your draft, they will usually jump up to Yahoo’s recommended bid whenever they can. If there’s anyone that Yahoo has ranked higher than you do, you can easily clear some cash from the room.

All you have to do is nominate someone that Yahoo has ranked highly that you don’t want. It won’t take long for an autopicker to jump on it. Some names that worked well for me:

Rick Porcello
Garrett Jones
Jorge Cantu
Curtis Granderson
Elvis Andrus
Mark Teahen
Neftali Feliz
Ubaldo Jimenez
Gavin Floyd
Jason Bartlett
Aaron Hill
John Danks
Orlando Cabrera
Chris Coghlan
Kendry Morales
Ichiro Suzuki
Brandon Phillips
Andrew Bailey
Nyjer Morgan
Ryan Theriot

None of those are guys that the projections here think very highly of. And even if you don’t have anyone autopicking, your league is unlikely to resist the pull of Yahoo’s rankings. It’s unlikely that you will win any of those guys with a $1 bid.

4. Look for bargains where Yahoo’s prices are too low. As mentioned before, Yahoo doesn’t have the top-tier high enough, so don’t be afraid to get several guys in the $30-40’s. Yahoo is also really down on RP: Trevor Hoffman for $3? Bobby Jenks isn’t even ranked above replacement.

As your league is filling up on the trash you’re bringing up in Step 3, keep an eye out for potential bargains that you can get with the money you have left. Following the Price Guide, these are some guys you could be targeting:

Vladimir Guerrero*
Javier Vazquez
Mike Napoli
Hiroki Kuroda
Jonathan Broxton
Billy Wagner
Ryan Ludwick
Matt Holliday
Lance Berkman
Russell Martin
Ted Lilly
Trevor Hoffman
Carlos Quentin
Heath Bell
Johan Santana
Hanley Ramirez
Jay Bruce
Jair Jurrjens
Tim Hudson
Jose Reyes
Manny Ramirez
Albert Pujols

* Vlad only qualifies at Util, but Yahoo has two Util spots this year. Guerrero under $10 looks like a great deal in this format.

Are there any other strategies you’ve found for Yahoo’s auctions?

Here are some of the things it lets you do:

Customize Player Values for Your League
In fantasy baseball today, there’s no such thing as a standard league — your specific league settings can drastically alter the fantasy values of players. So why do so many fantasy sites and magazines only give a one-size-fits-all ranking of players?

The Price Guide adjusts player values to the particulars of your league. So if you’re in an 8-team, NL-only league with standard categories or a 14-team league that adds OBP and holds, the Price Guide delivers values that are customized to those exact specifications. The Price Guide can be configured to handle literally millions of unique leagues.

Wonder how the Price Guide works? The details of its inner workings are all spelled out on the site, so there’s no proprietary secret or black-box to the methodology. There’s nothing about the Price Guide that you shouldn’t be able to recreate on your own.

Edit the Projections
While the Price Guide projections are already great, what happens if you disagree with the projected stats for a player? With the Price Guide, you can easily tweak any player’s stats and the values for all players will be automatically recalculated.

So let’s say you come across a prospect who is initially slated for 10 HR and 10 SB, but you think he can get 20 of each. Enter new values on the Price Guide, and you’ll not only see his value jump, but you will also see a slight revaluation of everyone else as the number of available HR and SB increases.

Enter Keepers
If your league let’s you keep players, you know that they can have a dramatic effect on draft-day prices. With the Price Guide, as you enter keeper prices, you can watch the inflation rate raise the values of the remaining players.

Upload Your Own Projections
If you ever encounter a situation where you want to change a large number of players’ values, the Price Guide also lets you upload your own projections into the system. All you have to do is put the stats in a simple Excel format and upload them to the site. You can upload as many sets as your want, so you are free to continually adjust your projections throughout the spring.

Add Values to Your League Website
Using a Firefox add-on called Greasemonkey, you can even add Price Guide dollar values to your league website. Get a leg-up on the competition with this handy tool to help you evaluate free agent pickups and trade opportunities.

The dollar values work with Yahoo, ESPN, CBS, and Allstar Stats leagues. As on the Price Guide site, the values are customized for your exact league settings, and the year-to-date values update daily throughout the season.

Interested yet? Everything is completely free, so why don’t you try it out?

Mass answers the question I’ve always been wondering: “What happens if you rank fantasy hitters using bizarre, illogical criteria?” His top 10 fantasy hitters:

1 Jacoby Ellsbury
2 Carl Crawford
3 Michael Bourn
4 Albert Pujols
5 Matt Kemp
6 Mark Reynolds
7 Ryan Braun
8 Ian Kinsler
9 Hanley Ramirez
10 Chone Figgins

Now there’s something unusual about that list, but I can’t quite put my finger on it… Mass has already expressed his love for Ellsbury, so I guess it’s not too surprising that he puts Carl Crawford #2 and Michael Bourn #3.

How did this happen? The secret is in the faulty starting assumption:

What we’ve done is very simple. We’ve taken the league-wide totals from last season to create a statistical universe for our players to inhabit. We determined the expected statistical output of the average player, assuming even distribution among the lineup spots. From this, we were able to extrapolate the relative value of each hit, each run scored and so on. In other words, since there were more home runs than stolen bases in 2009, by a ratio in the neighborhood of 7-to-4, the value of each stolen base was about seven-fourths that of a home run, matching the relative frequency of the event.

I’m pretty sure you want to use the totals from a typical fantasy league, not all of MLB. Using the pool of fantasy starters will either get you to SGP or standard scores, either of which should yield a pretty realistic result.

Using the pool of all MLB hitters is just going to give you a mess.

What can cause prices to change during an auction? I see a few possibilities:

A player below replacement level is drafted.
All it takes is someone bringing up Francisco Liriano or Daisuke Matsuzaka, not realizing that these are pitchers who are not expected to match their performances from a few years back. They are valued at a negative amount — below the replacement level for starting pitchers.

Every time this happens, the replacement level at that position moves up one player, and players at that position lose value. Basically, the supply of above-replacement pitchers has stayed the same, but the demand has dropped (as one less team needs to fill a spot).

A team overpays for a player.
The same dynamic deflation happens whenever someone overpays. Now there is less money than expected available, and prices for all players go down slightly.

A team underpays for a player.
The reverse of this has the opposite effect. If a team gets a bargain on a player, they now have extra money that must be spent on remaining players. Extra money drives prices up.

A team fills their roster with money left over.
Typically, any money that isn’t spent at an auction goes to waste. When a team finishes their roster, not only do you have one less bidder in the auction, but their remaining money disappears as well. Both of these factors will deflate prices for the remainder of the draft.

Are there any other factors that cause prices to go up or down during an auction?

Regarding those who might prefer Prince Fielder or Ryan Howard in the late first round, AJ says:

They might have mainstream public opinion on their side, but you would have mathematics. Allow me to explain why you just can’t let him get past you with, say, the seventh, eighth or ninth pick in the first round and leave open the possibility that he might not make it back to you. You need to take him with that first-round pick.

Well, who am I to argue with mathematics?

AJ’s idea is what he calls “Mass Effect,” a valuation system that makes Ellsbury the #1 overall player in fantasy last year. That’s right: Jacoby Ellsbury, Fantasy MVP.

Did I mention that it ranks Carl Crawford #2, Derek Jeter #5, and Ichiro Suzuki #7? Something doesn’t seem right here…

Well, AJ acknowledges that Mass Effect has “one flaw.” He explains how stolen bases become less valuable throughout the season due to diminishing returns. So to adjust for the changing value of stolen bases, he decides to knock off 50% of the value of each stolen base.

I’m sure he went through some of his extensive mathematics to come up with that 50% figure, since it drops Ellsbury from #1 overall to a much more realistic #10 overall.

Just to recap:

1. Come up with a player valuation system that doesn’t make sense.
2. Instead of recognizing that the system doesn’t make sense, fudge the numbers some so that they look better and yet still fail to reflect reality.
3. Call it “mathematics.”

I love it.

Sure, checkers has its own unique strategies, but those strategies are restricted by the limited moves you can make. With chess, you have lots of different moves at your disposal and lots of strategic options. Freedom makes a much deeper and involved game. While auctions give you lots of choices, with a draft you’re just deciding which piece to move forward one square.

So it’s always been amusing to me that fantasy baseball started out with auctions but has since become dominated by serpentine drafts. It’s like chess players converting en masse to checkers or Garry Kasparov dropping out of tournament play to take up draughts.

Ironically, I’d guess that it’s technology that is responsible for — from the point of view of someone who favors auctions — a dramatic step backwards in the fantasy gaming experience. Internet-based fantasy baseball seems like the biggest factor in the rise of serpentine drafts. (I think that could work as an action movie — “The Rise of the Serpents.”) Technology couldn’t handle an online auction but could deal with a straight pick ‘em, and so the quality of the game regresses.

The Internet causing something to take a step backwards is not unparalleled, I guess. Think about Internet communication — an instant message is in many ways a step backwards from talking face-to-face. You have the advantage of communicating at a distance, but you miss out on tone and expression and body language. It took years for the technology to catch up with the old-fashioned experience — with faster connections speeds and the popularity of video chat. (And, honestly, even video chat has yet to replicate a face-to-face conversation.) But technology can take a while before it compares with a live experience.

Finally, though, it looks like the fantasy baseball technology is starting to catch up. After years of making people rely on straight drafts, Yahoo’s 2010 game is offering online auction drafts.

The question: Can auctions make a comeback? Will people who have spent the last decade doing serpentine drafts make the switch now that online auction technology is available?

I’m clearly biased towards auctions, but I’d like to think that when people try out auctions, they’ll be won over by the superior method. Once people are no longer forced to play checkers, they’ll start to see why so many people like chess.

While I don’t have a precise formula for putting a dollar amount on extra eligibility, I think there are several important factors:

Some extra positions are more valuable than others.
Victor Martinez may qualify at both C and 1B, but his value at C is so much greater that it isn’t that useful to be able to put him at 1B.

As far as specific positions, I’d guess that the most valuable are players who qualify at both SS and 2B, like Asdrubal Cabrera. The next most valuable are middle infielders that also qualify at 3B, like Ian Stewart or Jhonny Peralta.

Less valuable are the players who just add 1B eligibility. Not only are there plenty of regular 1B available, but 1B is also the most common extra position in fantasy.

Multiple eligibility is less valuable in leagues with CI/MI positions.
Traditional fantasy leagues start both a “corner infielder” (either 1B or 3B) and a “middle infielder” (either 2B or SS) in addition to the actual baseball positions. These “flex” positions give you some natural wiggle-room: If your 1B gets hurt, you can maybe slide your CI to 1B, and replace your CI with either a 1B or a 3B.

Since you can use either a 1B or a 3B, in this situation a 1B/3B player is less important. But this makes a huge difference in a standard Yahoo or ESPN league that only starts one infielder at each position.

A multi-positional player is more important in a league that starts fewer players and less important in a traditional league with CI and MI.

Multiple eligibility is less valuable in leagues with transaction limits.
If your fantasy league lets you make daily roster changes and doesn’t cap games played, a multi-positional player is great. The simple ability to fit players in the lineup more often means you have an advantage in counting stat categories like HR, SB, R, and RBI.

However, if your league only allows weekly transactions, this strategy doesn’t work as well. Really, a multi-positional player just gives you a little extra coverage when you have a player go down with injuries.

All told, I’d probably be willing to spend an extra $3-4 for a multi-position player, or maybe draft them a round early. But that evaluation is very dependent on the context.

For example, many leagues have tried adding extra categories — holds, errors, etc. — in an attempt to create a more realistic game. I’d argue that part of what makes fantasy fun is its simplicity, and going to 6×6 or 7×7 creates a more complicated game. Plus, going beyond 4×4 or 5×5 has a chance to completely alter the game’s balance.

I have one easy proposal for fantasy leagues, one simple change that makes the game more realistic, but does not change the balance of the categories or the ease of gameplay: Replace AVG with OBP.

In real baseball, walks are valuable. It doesn’t matter how a player gets on base, whether he gets a or a walk or is hit by pitch or reaches on an error. A walk is essentially worth the same as a single, but fantasy in its current forms completely misses the value of walks.

Since on-base percentage is functionally equivalent to batting average, I think the best thing to do is to replace BA with OBP. That lets the league keep the same balance of categories. But now your categories are just a little bit more better at matching values in real life.

Right now, I play in some some traditional leagues, but I also play in leagues that have made the switch to OBP. I can definitely say it’s the best change we have made. It’s small enough not to completely distort the game everyone is used to, but it also brings the fantasy game one step closer to the real thing.

Think about sports video games: Most games have two settings — the actual game and an “arcade” style game. The arcade game is much simpler — the plays are standardized, the buttons are limited. If you’ve never played the game before, you are much more likely to have fun with the arcade style, just because it is more straightforward. The trade-off, of course, is that you sacrifice some realism from the main game to make it easier to play.

With fantasy sports, I think in general there is a tendency to want to make things more realistic. Leagues are always wanting to add more categories because there is some element of real baseball that is not being perfectly modeled by the fantasy game. We know that real teams roster middle-relievers and not just closers, so we add holds. We know we are leaving out defense…maybe adding errors will help?

Or maybe we just need one stat category: How about just using WAR for both hitters and pitchers? Using that one stat is probably a more realistic reflection of value than any combination of others.

The downside of those more realistic 9×9 and 10×10 leagues is that you lose the simplicity. And the downside of the uber-stat like WAR is that you lose the fun. Fantasy is about balancing realism and fun.

Fantasy baseball in its most common forms (4×4 and 5×5) is a pretty fun game. It also does a decent job of reflecting reality: Albert Pujols and Joe Mauer are valuable both in real life and in fantasy. Carlos Silva is worthless in both.

But I’m curious: Are there any rule changes that can improve realism without detracting from the simplicity of the current game? Are there any changes that would make fantasy baseball more fun without compromising its realism?

Auctions

Auctions are the original method for picking fantasy teams. The idea is simple: Each owner is given a certain amount of imaginary money. Since the money isn’t real, the amount could be $5000 or $5 million, but typically it’s around $260 per team. Owners then bid on players in $1 increments, with player values usually ranging from about $50 to $1.

Team Construction
The main concern at an auction is how to construct a team. Do you spend all of your money on three or four top players, and then fill in with $1 sleeper picks? Do you take a more balanced approach, refusing to spend more than $25-30 on any one player? Or do you just take whatever players you feel are being undervalued by the other teams?

All of these strategies can work, and there could be owners at your auction employing all of them.

Nominations
With an auction, teams take turn nominating players for bidding. Often, teams will choose to nominate a player they don’t really want, hoping that other teams will be willing to spend money and a roster spot on that player. Sometimes you want to nominate a player that you do want early, just to make sure that you have the money to spend on them.

Running Up the Bid
In an auction, it’s to your advantage for other teams to overplay for players. While sometimes this will happen naturally, there are times where you might want to get involved yourself. If you suspect that an owner who currently has the high bid on a player would be willing to go higher, maybe you choose to raise the bid.

Obviously, there’s risk involved, since you could win a player that you didn’t really want. But there’s also some reward if you can empty out an opponent’s bank account and fill a spot on his team.

Drafts

The draft is a bit simpler than the auction, which might be the reason for its rising popularity. With a draft, teams take turns picking players. The order that teams choose reverses each round, so that whichever team picks last in the first round then picks first in the next.

Timing
The main strategy that I see when drafting is trying to time when to pick someone. “If I don’t take that player now, will he still be available in the next round?” This can be an especially hard decision for teams that pick first (and last) in a round, because they will have to wait for 22 picks before they get another selection.

Teams might be waiting to draft a player because they think no one else will take him at that point in the draft. Even if you think that player is the best pick, you can maximize your value by taking someone else now (provided you still get the first player later).

Team Balance
We noted that the auction format gives you the flexibility to take whichever players you want, provided you are willing to pay for them. Given the option some teams will spend most of their money on a few top players and then grab the leftovers at the end of the process.

However, the draft requires that every team takes a balanced approach. Everyone gets one first round player, one second round player, etc. While this is a restriction that eliminates some of the strategies you have in an auction, it also requires some additional thinking.

Conclusion
Given the choice, I will always pick an auction over a draft. I realize it’s a little easier and faster to do drafts (especially online), but I still don’t think they can match an auction’s flexibility.