Last Player Picked

The Price Guide only accounts for draft inflation and deflation from one source: keepers. With keepers, it’s assumed that the players being kept will be paid prices below what they are worth (deflation). With owners having extra money, the prices of the remaining players at the draft go up (inflation).

While that may be the most obvious example of inflation at a fantasy auction (and the easiest to quantify), I think there are other real factors that will cause prices to vary from what the Price Guide projects.

I can come up with at least these reasons:

Varying Projections
Each owner comes to the draft with their own set of dollar values in mind. The values for the top tier should be pretty consistent from owner to owner. Everyone should have Hanley Ramirez valued near the same spot. There won’t be much difference of opinion about what to pay for Grady Sizemore.

But what about Victor Martinez? Some owners will be scared by the lack of power last year. Others will disregard 2008 as a season lost to injury, and bid based on his performance in 2007 and before. There could easily be a wide range of opinions that vary by $10-20 in value.

Since people are less likely to agree on which players should make up the lower tiers, the bidding will typically stop below the projected values. A player you have valued at $10 might not be valued higher than $5 by anyone else, which means you should win his services at $6 with a $4 “savings.”

Keep repeating that scenario of saving a few bucks on every player in the latter part of a draft and you will see that there’s systemic deflation on these players.

The Sleeper Mentality
Everyone loves sleepers. For some reason, there are certain players who captivate the attention of fantasy owners each year.

The result of this infatuation is that we become so absorbed with these players that we will pass up higher valued players in favor of our favorite sleeper picks. “Why should I pay $10 for that guy when I can pay $1 for my sleeper — and potentially be rewarded with a $25 player?”

Now, the $25 outcome might not be the most likely, but the high-upside sleeper is still more appealing to us than a safe $10 player. And, in the end, the $10 player will probably go for less than $10, as people are banking on grabbing a breakout player later.

So there are a couple of major factors that play a role in deflating the value of players, especially lower-tier players. Just like with keepers, though, this deflation must be balanced by an equal amount of inflation elsewhere. A fantasy auction is a closed system with a set amount of money and a set amount of goods (i.e. baseball players). If less money is spent in one area, it must be spent somewhere else.

Ron Shandler suggests bringing two sets of dollar values to your fantasy draft — projected values (what you think players are worth) and market values (what your league thinks they are worth):

The variance between projected value and market value is where you will find the greatest strategic advantage. If a player’s market value is far greater than projected, you can immediately cross the player off your target list and employ tactics to inflate his purchase price. If projected is greater than market, these are opportunities for you to try to build some profit into your roster.

Sounds like good advice to me. However, market value can be a hard thing to predict. Average Draft Position is a good place to start, and from there you can throw in a little bias for the hometown team. Maybe you tack on a little bit for guys who are dominating spring training.

But by and large you can still expect to be wrong on a lot of market values. There are always players drafted at prices that catch me completely by surprise. I find owners running up the price on a sleeper that I thought would go for single digits. I throw out a name that I think people are going to jump on and get nothing but crickets.

So don’t expect the market values to be something you can strictly depend on while drafting. But, with a little common sense and a bit of flexibility, having two sets of prices can still prove helpful.

Yesterday, I talked about how splitting players up into tiers before a fantasy draft can be a useful exercise. Today we’ll look at some of the problems that tiers can create.

Consider the 3B values the CHONE projections give for a standard fantasy league:

We’ve decided that there’s clearly a top tier of A-Rod and Wright — no one else is valued at even half of their prices. The second tier is also easily demarcated by a $7 drop after the next two players, Ramirez and Atkins.

But do you see any tiers after Atkins? I’m seeing a pretty steady decline from $12 to $1.

Let’s say we decide to split the remaining players into roughly equal-sized groups, drawing the line between Troy Glaus and Ian Stewart. That gives nine players from $7-12 and eight from $1-6.

But does it make sense to say that a $6 player is closer to a $1 player than he is to a $7 player? That would be prefering a $5 difference to a $1 gap, which doesn’t seem logical to me.

This is the problem with tiers: They work fine for about the upper 20-25% of players, where you can find clear separations between groups of players. But for most of the draft, there just aren’t big gaps in value between players. In these situations, I’d argue that attempting to separate players based on arbitrary dollar value cutoffs does more harm than good.

Tiers of Common Traits
So what can we do for players in the mid-to-late rounds of a draft? One idea is to group players by similar traits instead of strictly relying on dollar values. For example, with the 3B above, we might form a fantasy tier of Solid Yet Possibly Declining Veterans with Chipper, Beltre, Glaus, Guillen, Mora, and Lowell. We might form a Young, High Risk/Reward Tier with Davis, Stewart, and Longoria.

With tiers formed by common characteristics, you can get some insight that you don’t get with value tiers. If your early picks at other positions were geared towards players with lots of upside (and downside), maybe you should draft the best available 3B in the Veteran Tier. A consistent performer like Beltre can bring some balance and stability to your team.

If you have played it safe in the early rounds, maybe now is the time to take some risks. I highly doubt Longoria will still available, but Ian Stewart is an intriguing player if he gets some playing time. Why not roll the dice and and see if you can grab a bargain?

Stat Category Tiers
Maybe we go a slightly different route and form tiers based on common statistical contributions, while relaxing the positional requirements. We make a tier called Late Speed Options that has Figgins, Pierre, and Taveras. There’s a Good Batting Average Tier with Polanco, Loney, Kendrick, and Helton.

Suppose you get near the end of the draft and your team is looking light on AVG. You have an OF spot open and a MI spot available, so you can look in the Good Batting Average Tier for the best player left that you can put in one of those two spots. That player might not be the highest player on your overall draft board, but he could still be the best choice for your team.

Do you see any other ways to divide up players into meaningful tiers?

I imagine that most people are already aware of the concept of tiers — the idea of placing players into groups with similarly valued players.

Today, I’m going to look at what I consider to be the benefits of using tiers for your draft preparation. I’ll address some of the problems with tiering tomorrow.

So what’s to like about tiers? Well…

Tiers recognize that projections are far from exact.
In fantasy, it doesn’t really matter much if your projections have Alex Rodriguez valued at $43.48 and David Wright at $42.21. At the end of the year, either one has essentially the same probability of outearning the other.

Ron Shandler has noted that even the best projections will only fall within +/- $2 of what a player earns about 46% of the time for batters and 37% of the time for pitchers. With that margin of error, it’s not a big deal to go to $45 on David Wright. It’s not the end of the world if you stop at $40 for A-Rod.

With tiers, we don’t make a big deal about that $1 difference in their projections. We put A-Rod and Wright in the same tier. We know there are pros and cons with either one, but we also recognize that they are very similar in value.

Tiering recognizes that the important thing is realizing that both players should be valued somewhere around $40+.

Tiers show where there are gaps in value.
So we have put A-Rod and Wright in the $40+ Tier. What is the next tier of 3B? According to CHONE, it’s Aramis Ramirez and Garrett Atkins, both at $19. (See note on Longoria below.)

That’s less than half of the value of our top tier players! In draft terms, we’re dropping from early first round players to somewhere in the fourth round. Below these two $19 players is another $7 drop down to Chipper Jones at $12.

Mind the gap!

These gaps between tiers is especially important information in a draft: Let’s suppose it’s your pick, and you are choosing between Atkins and Brian Roberts. You have Roberts ranked marginally higher than Atkins. Your 2B rankings have Brandon Phillips, Dan Uggla, and Robinson Cano ranked just below Roberts — all in the same tier. Atkins is the only remaining player in his tier at 3B.

Although Roberts is projected to be worth more, in this situation, you might consider taking Atkins over him. The values are close, and there are other 2B options in the same tier as Roberts.

All else being equal, you should prefer to pick a player at the bottom of one tier over a player at the top of another.

The main things to take away from tiers are that they can help you to mentally group similar players, and they can show you where gaps lie between players at each position.

But are there situations where tiers don’t work? That will be our topic tomorrow.

Now, I’m not saying that I agree or disagree with that projection, but it does give me pause… There could be some very disappointed Longoria fans this year.