The 2014 AL LABR auction went down at the Arizona Republic offices in downtown Phoenix Saturday night. It's a 12-team, 5 x 5, AL-only league with 2 C, 1 1B, 1 2B. 1 3B, 1 SS, 1 CI, 1 MI, 5 OF, 1 U and 9 pitchers. Everyone has $260 to spend.

My strategy was to buy two elite starting pitchers, back them up with a couple mid-level guys and then spread the wealth on offense. The reason I went after top pitchers is I believe the best ones are grossly undervalued. (I explain why in detail here. The short explanation is when people do their dollar values they assign roughly 70 percent of the money to hitting and 30 percent to pitching even though pitching comprises five of the 10 categories. The only plausible rationale for this is hitting stats are more reliable than pitching ones. But when you're talking about the elite players, that's actually not true. Were you to assign half the money to pitching rather than 30 percent, the top starters would go for $40-$50, making them huge bargains as they go for a little more than half that at auction.

One other quirk I noticed with the AL player pool is that middle infield was thin, catcher was deeper than usual and there were a lot of third and fourth outfielders available who were roughly interchangeable. Accordingly, I spent on middle infield and left outfield for last.

Finally, while I always go through the RotoWire depth charts painstakingly to build my cheat sheet, this year I also ran Cory Schwartz's composite projections through my dollar-value formula to get a more objective baseline for players about whom I didn't have a strong feel.

The result was a very different team than I usually buy, but one to which I've been increasingly warming the last 48 hours. Here it is:

Full results are here.