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On Wednesday night, FP911 held the inaugural Blogger's League draft. The format is a 5x5 12-team NL-Only league with standard rules and rosters and we drafted via online auction. Though we are using ESPN to play out the season, apparently the IT team there has never participated in an auction before. Their software has absolutely no customization options, which forced us to draft through CBS Sports using my home league site. Besides me, the participants are as follows: Rob Reed- Playertrack.com Brad Stewart- MLBFrontOffice.com Corey Humes- MVN.com Zach "Finkle and" Steinhorn- MLB.com Mike Kuchera- TheFantasyMan.com Marc Edelman- SportsJudge.com Rudy Gamble- Razzball.com Scott Swanay- FantasyBaseballSherpa.com Dick Santino- DickSantino.com Jason Sarney- FantasyPhenoms.com Nick Minnix- KFFL.com Though the CBS auction software worked smoothly for me for the most part, several others continually had problems. Unfortunately, by the time the reserve draft rolled around, the software basically froze after we each made our fifth reserve pick. I therefore present my roster with just five out of seven reserve players drafted. Commentary will follow.
The auction began with a bang. Money was flying all over the place, as if my competition was taking a stand against the recession our country currently is suffering through. Some of the crazy prices the NL stars went for are as follows: Hanley Ramirez $54 Jimmy Rollins $43 Ryan Braun $41 Jose Reyes $45 Albert Pujols $49 David Wright $48 That's six players who went for at least $40 and one above $50! I have never, ever seen this before in an auction I have participated in. Early on, Mike Kuchera's team landed the aforementioned Reyes and Pujols, along with a $37 Chase Utley, plus spent another $94 on five pitchers. He was down to dollar days in seemingly 10 minutes. In fact, his roster contains an amazing 13 $1 players! To be fair to The Fantasy Man, he actually had a "friend" draft for him for probably 75% of the auction, so we can't fault him for the results, just for his choice of pinch-drafter! When Mike finally made it into the draft room, he aptly called his situation a "$hit storm", a description I whole-heartedly agree with. Needless to say, with all this ridiculous early spending, 95% of players went for well above my dollar value. I sat in my chair patiently waiting for my chance to add my first player to my roster. It finally came in the surprising form of Brad Lidge. I never draft top-tier closers, but in an Only league, that strategy changes. Many middle relievers are drafted and pretty much all the guys who would be next in line for saves, so it's much more difficult to find saves on free agency during the season. For $19, Lidge was a bargain compared to my $26 value, so I was price enforcing and no one outbid me. I continued to wait for prices to become more reasonable as I maintained a $241 budget and watched as everyone else went wild to leave themselves with $100-$150 early on. Only Nick Minnix was close to my budget level as he sat with $220 for a while. With all the early overspending, I knew there would be bargains galore; it was just a question of when. When it was still rather early, I decided to throw out a few players I expected to get for cheap, thinking that by doing so, I would know how much savings I would benefit from to spend on some more expensive players later. I was wrong. Money flowed freely to my nominations and the bargains I thought I would end up with never materialized. I waited and waited, watching as all the top players filled other team's rosters at inflated prices, and began to get nervous that I would leave $30 on the table. Eventually, my patience paid off as the bargains started to show up in droves. Even more exciting for me, I spent my entire budget for the first time in my auction-drafting career. Aside from catcher, every single one of my hitters is a full-time player. This is usually one of the goals of an Only fantasy owner, but it is very difficult to pull off. I was able to accomplish this due to the early overspending on the top-tier and top-middle tier players. My entire roster is filled with mid-level players, with no one above $25. Though my hitters aren't a flashy group and they lack a superstar, they are a nice mixture of young, high-upside guys like Lastings Milledge and Justin Upton and solid, but unspectacular veterans that are perennially undervalued like Orlando Hudson and Randy Winn. My power is light and I project for a middle of the pack finish in home runs, but the mere fact that I project myself to accumulate the second highest at-bat total means that I should finish fairly well in Runs and RBIs. I don't have any huge steals sources, but a bunch of guys in the 10-25 range that should put me in the top third in the category. Last, my batting average should be solid with no real detriments other than Bill Hall and probably Upton offset by a whole bunch of players projected to hit in the .280 range. I have to comment on the Ryan Zimmerman $25 purchase. This was a perfect illustration of the "last good player left at a position" situation in which every owner who has yet to fill that slot has been sitting on the player hoping not to get stuck with a bottom-tier guy. I kept hoping that the bidding on one of the other third basemen would stop below my value, but this never happened until eventually Zimmerman was the last man standing. Naturally, a bidding war ensued, but with more than enough money remaining in my budget, I knew this was the rare time I should go above my value to lock up a good hitter and make sure I leave nothing on the table. My pitching staff is where my strength lies. I usually hate to spend a lot on pitching, and was not real happy that I ended up using up about 37% of my budget here, but that is where the value ended up being, so I adjusted. As I suspected, Rob Reed took full advantage of my daily Chad Qualls touting as he bid me up to $15 for his services and followed that up with a classic line in the chat room, "Good boy". I felt like I was played, but still thought I got potentially excellent value as I had Qualls worth $23. Jason Motte could turn out to be a bargain at $11 if his dominance late last year with the Cardinals and again during this spring can convince Tony LaRussa to hand him the closer role to open the season. Even if he finishes with just 5-10 saves, he will earn that value assuming his reliance on his fastball doesn't hurt him (and it has not to this point). My favorite purchase was Kong-Chi Kuo for $3. I think I even did a fist pump when the count down hit zero. I had Kuo valued at $13, as he is a dominant reliever and I read somewhere, though cannot for the life of me find the site, that Joe Torre would give him some save opportunities this season. The reserve draft started out extremely frustratingly. I had a few guys queued up and every single one of them was taken before my pick. Seth Smith sat atop my values as the best player still available as he was inexplicably not drafted, despite some teams opting to draft minor leaguers for their starting roster. Rudy Gamble was smart to snap him up with the first pick of the snake draft. As you could imagine, pickings were slim at this point, so I decided to go with a young pitcher with a pretty solid skill set that was victimized by bad luck last year, Ross Ohlendorf. Next up was another guy who has a fairly decent skill set, but gets to call PETCO Park home. Unfortunately, Wade LeBlanc has since been demoted and will not have a spot in the rotation as I had hoped. I love the Aaron Heilman selection as I expect a rebound and think there is a strong chance he finds himself in the rotation at some point during the season. Ramon Troncoso is an extreme ground ball pitcher with his other minor league skills pretty much all over the place. He has an outside shot at joining the rotation at some point given the weak candidates currently vying for the fifth slot for the Dodgers. Last up was Matt Diaz who is expected to form the right side of a platoon with Garrett Anderson, but could receive additional playing time if Anderson is not ready for opening day after suffering from a strained right calf. Overall, I am happy with how the draft played out. Though the way the auction went was certainly a surprise, I am pleased with the results and look forward to rooting for at least three Braves. Our league uses a FAAB (Free Agent Acquisition Budget) to award free agents, which is something I have never used before but am exciting to. No longer do I have to refresh Rotoworld every five minutes to make sure I don't miss the latest breaking news! There will be regular updates on the league here so put on your manliest cheerleading uniforms and root on the FP911 team. Since I am a complete nerd, I use my projections to project the standings in every league I am in. Keep in mind that many players that were drafted as starters are projected to receive little playing time, so in those cases, I subjectively chose a more valuable reserve player for my calculations. Also, since I drafted using my own projections, I almost always project myself to finish first. I would be curious to see what the standings looked like using other projection sets if anyone had the time and desire to do them. Without further ado, your projected standings for the 2009 FP911 Blogger's League:
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Comments (8)
  written by MikePodhorzer, March 27, 2009
Hahaha, Rob, I'm disappointed that it took you an entire 2 days to comment on this! Look on the bright side, despite projecting you tied for last, you're only 21 points behind 2nd! Some good luck here, nice pickups there, and suddenly you'll be right there battling to move into the Majors next year!
written by RobReed, March 27, 2009
For the record, I am shocked - *SHOCKED* - that your team is projected in first place by a landslide.
Well, my projections have me with 98 points, and, unfortunately, you're sitting in last place at 34.
written by JT, March 24, 2009
Oh, and are you going to update the roster for the Expert League? I noticed a few guys from within the same company swapped out.
I'm looking forward to seeing those results too and how they differ. Are they going to do short recaps of their teams? Thanks, Mike.
written by JT, March 24, 2009
Yup. Definitely. I love Kuo at $3. You really got some steals, I'll tell ya. Upton and Theriot at $10, Hall at $3, Lidge at $19 - great value there.
Good luck man.
written by MikePodhorzer, March 24, 2009
There it is! I did a google search and couldn't find it but knew I read it somewhere. Even if he gets 0 saves, which is unlikely, he should still easily earn well above $3 assuming he remains healthy all year.
written by JT, March 24, 2009
As far as Torre saying Kuo will get saves, I read that too.
I think it was thefantasyadvice.com. I read it there, scroll down a bit on the home page. Unless it was somewhere else? But that's the only place I've seen it.
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Ouch!!!!!!