Part 1: Deciding Your Keepers

Auction Post-Mortem: How my plan played out

This is probably going to be a pretty big post which will have to go up in segments. I am hosting a design meeting later today that I have to prepare for and won’t have time to finish this properly. As you may have noticed by now I don’t really edit anything so let’s see how this goes.

Part 1: Deciding Your Keepers

We have to submit our keepers normally on March 1^st with our auction anywhere around the 15-20^th of March. This year we had some members away on vacation so we had to have our auction on March 1^st which meant our keeper list went in on Feb 17^th – or about 2 games into Spring Training. This presented some new wrinkles that we hadn’t dealt with before.

The general rule of thumb for your keepers is that if you can get them cheaper at the auction than what you’re keeping them for you let them go. You may also have players that you could not get cheaper at the auction but you are uncertain about how they’ll do in the upcoming season and therefore don’t really want to keep them. Falling into this category for me this year was Jim Johnson ($23) and Joe Mauer ($22). Then there are the guys that are way overpriced but come at scarce positions and someone is likely to want them given inflationary factors. For me this was Cano ($46).

For guys that you will be keeping their value is directly related to how much of a bargain they are. Say for example, I had Cespedes for $12 going into this year and he’s likely a $26 player then that’s a steal. I can use that $14 I ‘save’ on Cespedes to overspend on another position or two. That makes him extremely valuable. If someone offered their $31 Bautista to me for my Cespedes I’d tell them where to go and how to get there. Of course if they were both the same price I’d likely take Bautista every time (personal preference). This can turn average players into valuable commodities and excellent players into waiver fodder. A $7 Jake Peavy is way more valuable than a $20 Chris Sale even though you’d take Sale over Peavy any day of the week.

My roster going into this year before cuts was:

Billy Butler	1B	31
Chril Tillman	P	8
Coco Crisp	OF	20
Curtis Granderson	OF	39
Edwin Encarnacion	1B/3B	23
Stephen Drew	SS	6
Elvis Andrus	SS	34
Eric Thames	OF	6
Hiroki Kuroda	P	20
Jim Johnson	P	23
Jake Peavy	P	7
Joaquin Benoit	P	7
Joe Mauer	C	22
Joel Peralta	P	6
Kendrys Morales	1B/OF	19
Matt Harrison	P	9
David Robertson	P	6
Michael Saunders	OF	9
Robinson Cano	2B	46
Max Scherzer	P	30
Vinnie Pestano	P	12
Zack Greinke	P	39

At this point I generally use a stop light on each guy. Basically green = keep, yellow = maybe and red = cut. Greinke was out as he went to the NL.

Reds were: Pestano, Cano, Peralta, Kuroda, Thames, Andrus, and Granderson.

Yellows were: Scherzer, Saunders, Robertson, Harrison, Morales, Mauer, Benoit, Johnson, Butler, Coco and Tillman.

Greens were: Peavy, Encarnacion and Drew.

When I decide on keepers I value stability highly. I am more than willing to spend money on a $31 Billy Butler who may not produce at the $31 level but will hit .290, 20, 90 almost guaranteed with the potential for more rather than a $35 Josh Hamilton who could be amazing or mediocre. At auction I’ll take more chances but with keepers I want to know what I’m paying for. Now you might notice that none of Peavy, Drew or Encarnacion are sure-things which is true but for their prices its well worth the investment.

Now my eye turns to trades I can make. To do this I look at all of the other rosters and try to identify players that I will value more than my competitors at their prices. At the same time I’m also projecting keepers on other teams to determine which positions will be shallower than others. Almost automatically I noticed that catching was quite deep this year for us. We take 10 catchers of the 15 with starting jobs and there were up to 12 catchers that given their price I could stomach playing for my team. This made Mauer and his $22 price tag expendable. For outfield I came to the opposite conclusion. Based on some of the projected keepers I made it looked like there would be very few ‘sure-things’ available and that apart from the elite (Trout, Bautista, Cespedes, Jones, Gordon, etc)  who were all kept there wasn’t much. Guys like Ellsbury, Melky, Suzuki, Granderson and Cruz were all available but all are highly volatile. Granderson of course broke his forearm right before our auction so he was off the table. I decided that at the very least I wanted one outfielder that I had a reasonable level of confidence in and was well rounded. To achieve this I dealt Cano ($46) and Mauer ($22) for Alex Rios ($18). Cano is obviously elite and 2B looked to be a wasteland but I just won’t pay more than $40 for anyone as a keeper unless your name is Miguel Cabrera. The way the Yankees look this year I just can’t see him producing the same numbers as last year. Rios should be a 20/20 outfielder and for $18 I was sold. That’s not exactly a steal but at least it gave me one OF that I could be certain of.

Gotta do work now. ‘Til tomorrow....