Wednesday night's Ugueth League auction draft was, quite simply, bonkers. With 20 teams, price inflation is an expected part of the game. There's only so much elite talent to go around and if you want the edge, you've got to pay for it. In last year's draft, 4 players commanded salaries of $52 or more: Albert Pujols ($57), Hanley Ramirez ($55) Ryan Braun ($52) and Ryan Howard ($52). Each team gets $260 to spend, so dropping 20% or more of your budget on one player is a generally risky move. Improbably, in the 2010 draft, Pujols and HanRam were both drafted by the same team; they finished 7th.
In the 2011 draft, 10 players earned a $52 dollar price tag or higher, and two of those eclipsed the $60 barrier:
Troy Tulowitzki - $61
Carlos Gonzalez - $60
Albert Pujols - $58
Robinson Cano - $56
Carl Crawford - $56
Alex Rodriguez - $54
Adrian Gonzalez - $54
Hanley Ramirez - $54
Josh Hamilton - $52
Evan Longoria - $52
I expected Tulo and HanRam to command a lot of bucks considering the thin talent pool at shortstop, but I never would have guessed that anyone would have dropped $61. I went into this draft with the intention of not spending more than $40 on any one player, but the price tags on these top-tier players made it difficult for me to stick to my guns.
Part of the inflation probably had to do with the league's new rules on transactions. We've capped pickups at 4 per week in order to keep people from streaming pitchers. It's already hard to work that strategy in a 20 team league, but it definitely favored people with consistent internet access. And no kids. And no real life. Naturally, I was against the rule change. As another deterrent, rosters were expanded from 23 to 25 players, which means the available talent pool got a little shallower. Teams now need to draft what they need instead of relying on free agents and waiver wire.
My underlying goal was to model my behavior on last year's champ, and I think I did a pretty good job. I think we had similar strategies (don't overspend, focus on infielders, relatively low pitching budget) though he's always been a collector of closers and I abhor spending money for saves. We ended up with similar looking teams and throughout the draft we were within $10-15 of each other. He spent $64 on pitching, I spent $69. His highest paid player is Ryan Howard at $42, mine is Adam Dunn at $43. Both infields are solid, though he's got a hole at third base (Placido Polanco) and I've got a hole at short (Jhonny Peralta/J.J. Hardy). We also both took shots on injured pitchers (Brandon Webb for me, Johan Santana for him). It'll be really funny when we both finish in the middle of the pack.
One of the team owners didn't even bother to show up, so Yahoo was auto-bidding on his behalf. Since the Yahoo draft values didn't take into account the inflation of our 20-team league, he ended up with an injured Chase Utley for $18 (possibly a steal, if he gets on the field sometime in the next two months), a questionable Carlos Beltran for $6 and a bunch of $1 and $2 guys to fill out the roster. Yahoo only spent $78 of his $260 budget. The new roster size and transaction limit rules are going to make it really hard for him to build a competitive squad. The lesson: DON'T MISS YOUR DRAFT!
I made a couple of tactical errors over the course of the draft. After I grabbed Shin-Soo Choo for $38 and Dunn, I got Andre Ethier at $29. I fully intended to not spend more than $15 on my second outfielder, but I got caught up in an early bidding war. I would've rather spent that money on Buster Posey (who went for $32), Victor Martinez ($28) or even a second tier catcher like Carlos Santana ($19), Geovany Soto ($12) or Jorge Posada ($12).
I also overspent on a couple of low-dollar guys. I got into another bidding war over Kila Ka'aihue, who got nominated early (50th overall) and I was pretty high on as a sleeper this year. I certainly didn't want to spend $8 on him though. I also nominated Adam LaRoche about halfway through in an attempt to get one of the richer teams to spend their money, but I ended up "winning" him for $6. He and Ka'aihue will end up splitting time at my utility spot.
At the end of the draft, I still had $5 left which basically means that I messed up in the early part of the draft. I wanted to have some money left toward the end of the draft for some of the sleeper/upside pitchers I was going to need to take, but I didn't anticipate the wild spending spree in the early part of the draft and how it would impact the endgame.
I drank 7 beers during the draft, 6 of them were Pyramid Apricot Ales. Those little bastards are delicious.
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