A Question of Value

Between updating the Patton $ projections and preparing for Tout Wars and the XFL 17 round reserve draft, and just a little bit of civilian life, time is speeding past. I wanted to talk briefly here about the idea of value.

In Tout Wars I bought a team that is way heavier on OBP than the other teams. I did this partly because I bought the OBP king, Joey Votto, for the first buy in the auction. I saw him as a bargain, a good value, at $38. How did Tout NL owners value OBP?

Some players gained a bit, some lost a bit, but many didn’t change at all.

Screenshot 2014-03-27 11.30.15

These are my Top 12 NL players for 5×5 BA, ranked (by ML rank) by OBP-BA (based on the Fantasy Pros composite projections), a measure of their on base skills. As you can see, the Top Players did take an OBP adjustment (it appears, since this small sample is suggestive, it proves nothing). The higher ranked players saw their prices go up, the lower priced players down.

The question is whether those of us who bought OBP (in the AL Mike Podhorzer seemed to value it more than others, while in the Mixed Draft Ray Murphy did. Derek Van Riper bought Miguel Cabrera and Mike Trout and Jose Bautista in Mixed Auction for what its worth) actually got a bargain or we overpaid for something that others don’t value.

In a league without trading the answer would be obvious. We overpaid. But in these Tout Wars leagues there is a decent amount of dealing, in part because the results are out there from week to week and the results are publicized. You can’t slack without looking at least a little bad. Plus, everyone in the auction leagues gets together and hang out for a few days, so there are relationships, both friendly and competitive.

If I’d known how the rest of the auction was going to go I might not have paid up for Votto, there were other places to find value in OBP, but his price was more than 10 percent below what I thought would be a par bid for him in an OBP league. That’s value.

By that measure, I bought a lot of it, and so the question for my season is whether it can be swapped for equal value.

 

 

 

 

 

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