Chris (Sunday March 15, 11:35 PT):

There was some chance I wound up in Swanay's situation, but actually the bigger risk was I'd panic and overpay to avoid it. I knew from prior experience what players typically fetch, and I had a keen eye on the diminishing talent remaining, so I knew most of the way there were still players on whom I could spend all my money. The one moment where I thought I might have screwed up was when I filled my corner, OF and UT slots because I had only a catcher, two MIs and five pitchers to buy with $48. Essentially I had shut myself out of potential players like Joe Mauer (who went for $11 late, and on whom I would have gone $12 had I been able to bid), so that hampered my ability to spend on some of the values still on the board. Had all the pitchers gone for $3-$5 instead of $6-$10, I might have left a few bucks on the table (though I could have bought more expensive end-game MIs in that case.) But I wanted to leave $0 on the table and overpay for no one. I feel I was able to do that, though in a perfect world, I might have passed on Ervin Santana rather than buying him for $8.

The problem for Swanay was as you mentioned, it was a mixed league, and he should have been less confident than I was about the room overspending early. In fact, if you brought your only-league values into a mixed format and stuck to them, I'd predict that would happen as the guys you have for $10 or $12 are $1 end-game buys (as they should be), and you'd be almost sure to leave money on the table.

But as I said, the more common error is what I think Lawr Michaels did in NL LABR this year which was let a lot of players go early, have a lot of money left and buy Kolten Wong for $25. At the time, it might have been the right move to spend the money rather than risk eating it, but that just means he probably should have spent it earlier on better players (assuming his opinion of Wong is roughly similar to mine.)

So there are different stages of recognition. Much better to realize you waited too long and just spend the damn money on someone than wind up taking it home with you, but you've still made a mistake and lowered your odds of winning because you got poor value. The interesting situation is what happens when your read is correct, but you're not being rewarded for it right away, i.e., people continue to overspend or buy at roughly market value. That's when you have to stick it out and not give into your fear of a worst-case scenario. It's a game theory problem where the second-best outcome is you pay the exorbitant going rate for $20-plus players like everyone else, the third best is you pay an exorbitant rate for lesser players to spend all your money and the worst is you leave money on the table. The best outcome is where you get discounts on most of your players (regardless of cost) and somehow spend all your money. But you have to risk the worst to get the best. And you'll only do that if you trust your read all the way to the end.

The flip side of the Swanay problem (in only-leagues at least) is where you've done a decent job getting your money spent, and you have $35 left for eight more players. Instead of waiting to fill up on $5-$10 guys you like, you bid $23 on the last remaining quasi-star, and, to your horror, it sticks. Now you've got $12 for seven players, meaning you'll probably be near the bottom in projected at-bats and innings pitched. One risk I ran in AL LABR was too many people making that ill-advised $23 (or, later in the draft, $12) bid they couldn't afford and putting me in a tough spot where I had to overpay or risk leaving money on the table. But because the other 11 owners have a strong incentive not to do that, I was able to get Carlos Beltran for $12 and Oswaldo Arcia for $14. Had they all gone nuts until they had $10 for 10 slots left, I'd have left money on the table, but still bought a lot of $6-$10 players for $2 and might still have eclipsed $260 in value, despite only being able to spend $230. But that's pretty unlikely to happen.

Finally, the situation where my values were higher than everyone's is exactly what happened in Mixed Tout (yes, it was 17 teams), where people were making only-style bids, and I was loading up with stars. It's hard to go wrong doing that because you know what the replacement value looks like, and you've already made peace with the $1 and $2 options in the end game. There's not much risk except filling your plate early with $3 profits when $5 and $6 profits show up five minutes later. But unless the league does this every year, there's no way to know that in advance, so I think you buy the too-cheap stars when you have the chance and watch people pay $12 or $14 for guys who aren't that far above replacement later in the auction. In only-leagues, it's the same thing, but you probably have to stop buying stars earlier and leave yourself a bigger end-game budget for at-bats, even if you're forced to pay market value or $1 more here and there to fill up.

Jeff (Saturday, March 14 at 8:00 a.m PT):

Likewise, I find that in the "Beat Jeff Erickson" leagues I do lose out on some of my pet sleepers, and in some cases it's explicit that they know I like a certain player and took them when they did because they knew I liked the player - either in the chat room or via Twitter they let me know. But you're probably right, in other cases it's coincidence when I lose out on a player - after all, we play in leagues where nearly everyone is exhaustively prepared, and our competitors can arrive at the same conclusions about a player. It would be myopic, even paranoid, to suggest that I'm being targeted in these leagues on all of my favorites.

The tough part is developing that feel for the room, and knowing when to pounce. As you described, you were walking the tightrope in LABR, believing that the good prices would come. If your spidey sense was off, and the bargains never came, you were royally hosed. You'd have the Scott Swanay Tout Wars problem - a lot of good prices, but not enough value overall.

His situation actually makes a pretty good case for approaching the draft like you do, and not having a rigid set of values. He said that he had a rigid set of predetermined values, and ultimately his values turned out to be off, and not by a small margin. Of course, this was a mixed league auction where values are notoriously unreliable anyhow - the replacement value is so high, that it's hard to properly cap the elite players. You've won that league (if I recall, it was 17 teams that year and not 15, but correct me if I'm wrong) before going with a Stars-and-Scrubs approach, and then Andy Behrens did almost the exact same thing the following year.

What do you do if you find yourself in Scott's situation, where you know you're in deep trouble? And how do you find a way to recognize that sooner? How many players do you need to have come off the board before you know that your assumptions were off? And what do you do if you're in the opposite situation - your values are consistently higher than the room across the board. Or is that even possible - if you do a rigid set of values, it should have to all add up to the same dollars spent eventually, right? Extricating yourself from trouble in a draft or auction when your plan goes awry is a field that needs more exploration.

Chris (Thursday, March 12 at 3:12 pm PT):

I know I played up the misery angle in my AL LABR writeup, but that was mostly in jest. While seeing all my targets go too high and my entire half-assed strategy crumble during a live auction forced me to focus more intently on every nomination than I normally would, it was for the most part an enjoyable challenge. There was some stress in trusting the early overpays to result in late bargains, especially because I don't do precise values and didn't have mathematical proof that would be the case. But I know what players go for typically, and as it turns out, my sense - as far as I can tell - was correct.

My lack of rigid dollar values and tendency to price players both relative to each other and based on historical norms does make the early nominations trickier, but even then I don't think I'm at a serious disadvantage. Even Larry, whom you mentioned and who bought Cabrera out from under me, had a $35 limit on him:

@RotoGut@SiriusXMFantasy I was shocked that I got Miggy. Never thought for a second b/4 the auction that he'd go for less than my $35 limit

— Larry Schechter (@LarrySchechter) March 8, 2015

Unlike Larry, I thought he would go cheaper, and but for Larry he probably would have. But notice I stopped at the exact same place he did - $35, and I very nearly went to $36. So even without a set of numbers in front of me, I had the same valuation as the guy with arguably the most rigorous numbers in the room.

I think nomination order has a huge effect on anyone's strategy because it changes the information you have when contemplating a buy, and you never know whether you'll wind up with a surprise bargain that sticks (Kyle Seager at $24, for instance.) I suppose if you were dead set on a few guys no matter what the price, you could limit the impact of when they came up, but even so the timing will affect their cost. Bottom line, if you're not affected by what anyone else is doing, you better have an awfully good crystal ball regarding the player pool.

My "plan" if you could even call it that didn't rest on Cabrera. I just thought - apparently incorrectly - he'd be available at a big discount, and I have him as the No. 3 overall player in mixed (behind only Mike Trout and Clayton Kershaw.) It's possible I'd have been better off going $36 on him, not buying a $20 Adam LaRoche and shaving off $16 elsewhere (though I don't see a lot of fat to trim.)

And I don't think I'm significantly handicapped by my role in the industry - certainly not in LABR where no one cares about my targets. The Beat Chris Liss League might be the one exception because you have a few guys who sign up specifically to take on the guy they're hearing on the radio, and I know they'll pull some of my players off the board earlier than usual. But it's not as bad as if it were an auction where they can constantly one-up your bids, especially if they're drafting at the other side of the board. Even in my home league - and I know at least one guy listens - the owners are knowledgeable enough not to care what I think all that much. So it might cost me a player or two, but I could be wrong about that player anyway.

I'm happy with all four of my teams (FSTA, Beat Chris Liss, League of Leagues and LABR) so far, so I'm not sure I'd alter much of what I've done for the NFBC Main or Tout. I mean I'd much rather get some players I actually like in Tout for fair prices because that's an easier, more relaxing path, but it mostly depends on what everyone else does, and the OBP abomination will change the prices a bit. The Main is also a tougher draft - the depth makes it less forgiving of mistakes.

If there's one thing I took away from LABR, it's don't be afraid to follow your read on the auction to its logical end. While it's nearly inevitable things won't go as planned, the question is how you handle that. Do you stubbornly stick to your plan, do you panic and overreact (it's tempting when you have a lot of money and little talent to buy the next good player who comes up, regardless of cost) or do you trust what you see happening? If you can do the latter, more often than not it'll pan out for you.

Jeff (Wednesday, March 11 at 9:20 pm PT):

Discussing draft strategy is great in the abstract. Our plans as we draw them up make perfect sense, all the numbers add up and we get the players we want. Then a live draft or auction happens, and inevitably we're not quite able to do what we want. Strangely enough, some of our competitors actually are sentient beings and share our draft philosophies or at least stumbled onto the players we like at a point where we like them. And it's not just that one other owner that you begrudgingly respect, but a handful of them that clearly have conspired to disrupt your draft enough that your first and second alternatives to your plan are also scuttled. This happened to you in the AL LABR auction this past weekend in Arizona, and from my reading this was the worst instance of that. I tweeted that you ended up with a Jason Grey special - and that's certainly not meant as a pejorative, given his track record, only that it's a completely different squad than what you usually draft.

You said you don't use rigid player values, but rather a sense of their relative and historical values. This is territory you've covered in exhaustive detail, dating back to the days when we played in the Cardrunners League. How many players into an auction do you feel comfortable about your grasp of the relative values? Do you feel you're temporarily at a disadvantage against the likes of Larry Schechter, who has a rigid set of values and constantly prowls for bargains? How much does nomination order matter to you when it comes to fulfilling your draft plans?

I caution fantasy players not to speak in absolutes - I try to stay away from "never" and "always." But it's generally a bad idea to have a strategy rest on your acquiring a particular player or two. I say this not as a rebuke to your plan going into LABR, but more as a general guide when mapping out a team. Because we have to adjust so frequently on the fly, we need to have counter-plans, much like a debater or chess player. If my opponents thwart my plan to nab one of Aroldis Chapman, Craig Kimbrel or Greg Holland, which happened in my "Beat Jeff Erickson" league, what's my alternative? I was ready to go with Cody Allen and Koji Uehara - roughly at the same time you got those two closers in your league.

It's easier to have contingencies for specialist categories like closers and rabbits - there's a finite number of viable commodities there (on an aside, you're right about finding speed late - it's not that easy to get right). There are fewer opportunities to replace your options, but that also means your choices are clearer.

Do you find you're handicapped by your role in the fantasy industry? Between the XM show, this blog and our other ventures, your putative opponents frequently get to hear the players you like and dislike, and your opinions on draft strategy, positional scarcity and so forth. Actually, I know you feel that way - we pretty much put Larry on the spot on that issue on the show last week - the better question is to what extent are you handicapped? Is that phenomenon worse in industry leagues, the NFBC or your home league?

That latter issue is already bad for me - I might not be as strident about my opinions on air as you are, but my rankings and projections are there for everyone to see. Moreover, I'm going to be presenting at First Pitch LA this weekend, and filmed a bunch of segments with 120 Sports where I discussed more than 100 players with Michael Kim, including sleepers and busts along with position rankings. Those should go live starting next week. So there are no secret players for me - maybe I'll have to draft an anti-Erickson team comprised of players I hate and strategies I don't like. Nothing but positional scarcity for the first five rounds! And then all middle-tier starting pitchers! I'll wait until round 15 to take an outfielder. Could be the new big thing - I'll have to come up with a good acronym for it.

What other tips do you have about adjusting your draft strategy in the middle of the draft? Will your experiences in LABR change how you prepare for Tout? How about the NFBC - even though it's a 15-team league in the Main Event, there's still a lot of crossover from the online league in terms of league rules and opponents - will the "Beat Chris Liss" experience change your Main Event approach?