RotoJunkie - A Long Strike - Wrestling With The Touts (powered by evoArticles):
"In this same 12-team mixed redraft 5x5 league, Melvin Mora was on the block at about 8:15 pm Friday night. I said, '$14' figuring the bidding would go much higher. With no corner infield slot and a $41 A-Rod already in my stable, I had no intention of buying Mora. My (lack of) preference for the father of sixtuplets is well-documented in the Pen.
And then, silence.
'Going once, going twice, sold.'
(insert appropriate facial confusion here)
I was furious. Complain as much as I wanted, I was stuck with him. (Imagine my fury when Hank Blalock went for almost double half a round later.) Which led me to a realization: many owners are starting to wait for the end of the begnning of the auction to acquire players, so that while there are still some bargains in the middle, there are true bargains coming out in the beginning. As people focus on acquiring the one or two key studs that they want early on, they tend to let the ones they don't want fall undervalue. This will probably continue to happen as more and more owners turn to the stars and scrubs strategy."
The Tout Wars auctions are coming up next weekend, and John Hoyos has weighed in with an interesting piece about last year's NL auction. He did better than I, so I'm not dissing his analysis, but the point of John's I quote above is crucial, I think, if you're playing in a serious league.
Everybody knows what everybody is more or less worth. And so we now tend to sit waiting for the guys we believe in. But that allows the guys we don't believe in to go very cheaply. Sometimes.
When the assumption is that everybody knows everything it isn't a bad idea to sit out the early rounds and then pounce on the mistakes, but as John rightly points out, sometimes those mistakes happen early. There are better and better reasons to mix up the draft order, whenever you can, if you know the real (projected) value of the players.
