Today's Fantasy Rx

We've never participated in a draft anything like FBRC. Our only head-to-head experience was one year of picking up a couple of ESPN's "dead teams" and running them for two months. We've also never played a points' league with an auction, and we only had eight owners. Finally, we drafted by phone for the first time, and it was a "round the table" draft where you either increase your bid or you're out of the bidding on a particular player, instead of a standard "open bid" auction, where anyone can bid at any time.

The points' breakdown for the league is as follows. For batters, .32 for every Total Base, .5 for SB, .25 for every Run Produced (RBI+R-HR), .15 for each walk, -.1 for every Strikeout, and -.12 for every at-bat. For pitchers, 1 point for every save, .63 for every IP, .5 for every Win and Shutout, .32 for every Hold, .1 for each K, -.24 for each baserunner, and -.32 for every Earned Run. We did not incorporate projected shutouts or holds as we did not project those statistics. For each of the first 19 weeks, whichever team has more points in each head-to-head contest "wins" the week.

Our valuation process was rather simple. We subtracted the difference between the last (112th) hitter and (72nd) pitcher to be drafted and 1 to obtain each player's Marginal Points. The first wound up to be about 27 points and the latter at 37 points. Then we took each player's Point Share (Player's Points-(27(or 37 for pitchers))) / (Sum of the 112(or 72 for pitchers) Total Marginal Points, multiplied by the available money for offense($1352) or pitching($728) at a 65/35 split.

To give you an idea of the range of points, Randy is worth about 110, Schilling about 90, Maddux about 80, and the following pitchers are all in the 70-75 range: Lieber, Oswalt, Nen, Hoffman, Benitez. Another 15 pitchers should earn 60-69, another 15 in the 50-59, 23 in the 40's, and over 30 players in the 30-39 range, only about five of which are even worth a dollar.

For hitters, Bonds, Helton, and Sosa all break 100. About a dozen players are worth in the 90s, a half dozen in the 80s and 70s each, and then the numbers go back to over a dozen players each in the 60s and 50s before tripling for the 40s and 30s. Replacement level begins around 30 points on offense.

As the head-to-head nature of the game can only be anticipated by maximizing match-ups, we still needed to draft based on total annual value. A few quirks became immediately apparent when conducting our pre-draft analysis of player values.

The top 5 players, Randy, Bonds, Helton, Sosa, and Schilling, ranged from $44 down to $34 and were each certainly worth their salary due to the points' scarcity at each position. We determined that we should go to wall on Randy and then try to fill in our team.

Well, Randy was tossed out first, the bidding went right to $44, and we chickened out instead of bidding $45. As we wound up with $10 left over, this was a horrible decision on our part and might cost us the league. However, we were able to spread our money over a bunch of players, and we were able to control much of the last half of the draft because of our excess funds.

Our other early strategy, as we had the second nomination, was to try to sneak in Paul LoDuca early. Only three catchers were worth over $10, a disparity far exceeding any other position. LoDuca and Piazza were just short of $20, and Kendall just over $10. We knew without any doubt that the latter two would exceed their salaries, so we opened LoDuca at $19, and we eventually bought him for only $23. Piazza went for $38 as the fourth nomination, and Kendall went for $16 as the 11th nomination.

We decided to go ahead and try to grab one top starter, and when the bidding on Kevin Brown stalled in the low 20s, we managed to pick him up at $28, a slightly high price considering his probable value and injury risk, but an absolute steal if he stays healthy.

While we bid on many of the successive players, we sat back as many players went for far more than our projected prices. Helton hit $55, Sosa went to $51, and even Vlad made it to $50. Maddux went for $41 and Schilling reached $39. Even the top relievers went at elevated prices as Nen and Hoffman were sold at $30 while Billy Wagner went at $26.

After only purchasing two guys in the first 40 players, we picked up Cliff Floyd at $25 when we had him originally valued at $30. We then filled out our corner slots with Richie Sexson($15 paid for $15 Draft Value), Scott Rolen($20 for $22), and Sean Casey($15 on $16). Draft inflation was running high on offense at the time, so we were able to purchase these players because of our excess of funds.

At this point, we only had six slots filled with $134 remaining for the other 17 slots, an existing budget that gave us a nice advantage over half the other teams, all of whom were under $100.

We drafted Luis Castillo($12 for $16), and then as J.D. Drew was easily the top player left on the board, we were willing to pay almost any price for his $26 of value; thankfully, we were able to acquire him at $23.

Our only two aquisitions in the next 20 picks or so were Edgar Renteria($9 for $11) and Russ Ortiz($9 for $18). Due to position restrictions, we now had $82 for 3OF, 2UT, 1MIF, 3SP, 2RP, and 2P. While we were starting to become a little concerned about our resources, we were still far ahead of most teams and could afford to selectively purchase players.

We grabbed Mike Lowell($7 for $12 for UT) and Daryle Ward($6 for $6), the latter because he was one of the few remaining decent outfielders. With four remaining offensive slots and a willingness to go very cheap on pitching, we identified specific players to fill our MIF(Jose Uribe) and OF(Jeromy Burnitz and Brian Jordan); we were hoping to pick up a starter of any kind for our second UT slot and didn't want to limit ourselves with specific players.

After spending $11 for a $12 Jeromy Burnitz, we started picking up several pitchers in a row at relatively nice prices. I'll save that discussion for tomorrow's article as I want to take a look at our points' situation today.

With three offensive and seven pitching slots open, we'd spent $202.

According to our projections, the top 112 offensive players should earn a combined 6125 points, making 765 points as the average that we want our team to exceed. With three spots left, we were currently at about 725, and with Uribe and Brian Jordan both over 50 points each, we were comfortable with our offense at this point.

On the pitching side, the top 72 pitchers should earn about 3925 points, leaving each team with a goal of about 491. With Brown and Ortiz, we were less than a third of the way to that goal at about 150. However, with rotating pitchers and attempting to maximize 2 start weeks, we were confident that we could nicely fill out the rest of our pitching. We'll begin tomorrow's article with purchasing three starters in a row.

I'm going to finish this draft tomorrow, review the Bullpen/Lineup situation on Friday, and then spend this weekend reviewing the NL LABR draft. I also hope to finally get to the Baseballmanager.com review on Monday, and then we should be able to start discussing our projections.

Today's Fantasy Rx: When conducting a draft either by e-mail or over the net, keep track of your team BA during the draft and adjust your values accordingly.

For example, in FSICNL on Saturday, we drafted Chipper, Shawn Green, Pierre, Kendall, and Casey in the first three rounds. Even a conservative projection for these batters would leave our team with a .310 BA (775H/2500AB). We'd planned to draft about 6500AB, and we believe a .280 team BA should leave us first in the league.

.280 = (775 + x) / (2500 + 4000)

.280 * 6500 - 775 = x = 1045; 1045/4000 = .26125

As of this point in the draft, any BA above .26125 was wasted BA points and therefore had no value to us. We used a .2572 cutoff for scoring BA points, so player between .2572 and .26125 still scored a couple of BA$, while players below the latter number still lose CD. The net result is to adjust players so that we maximize our offensive production in the other categories while maintaining the probability of leading the league in BA.

When we added Edgar Renteria in Round 6, we incorporated his .278 BA (160/575) to our calculations in the following manner:

.280 = (775 + 160 + x) / (2500 + 575+ (4000-575))

.280 = (935 + x) / (3075 + 3425)

.280 * 6500 - 965 = x = 855; 855/3425 = .2496

Thanks to Renteria's relatively decent BA, our BA threshold now drops to below .250, so we'll no longer add positive BA$ to Total Category Dollars. The marginal value of a "good" BA for us is zero, and even the top normally negative BAs wouldn't hurt our team. We recommend occasionally looking at this, especially during an extended e-mail draft, as a way to make sure you properly value the quantitative "counting" categories during the draft, instead of over-buying BA and running short on HR, RBI, SB, or Runs.