A commenter asks,

Have you thought about efficient markets and fantasy baseball?

I.e., if you knew the market prices (via aggregating other auctions from this year) for a standard Yahoo! league, can you think of a better strategy than trying to maximize the difference between those values and what you pay

I do not think that the market is efficient. For one thing, On Yahoo, prices seem anchored much too closely to the pre-draft values posted by Yahoo. I jokingly refer to it as the YSRP–Yahoo Suggested Retail Price.

But here is a major inefficiency. Suppose I told you that there is a pitcher who last year won 13 games, struck out 203 batters, had an ERA under 2.5 and a WHIP under 0.9 In a 12-team mixed league, in what round would you be willing to take that pitcher?

It sounds like a starter you would take early in the 2nd round. But it actually is the combined statistics of Chad Green and Chris Devenski, who in 12-team mixed league are drafted in garbage time if they are drafted at all. So we can not spend resources on a top starter and pick those two guys instead.

You cannot use that trick with hitters, because they don’t take days off the way pitchers do. If you have two first basemen who each hit 20 homers, you can only play one of them at a time (assuming all your other positions are filled), so it does not give you 40 home runs. Although dang if owners on Yahoo don’t act like they can play their bench hitters. Some owners draft a bench that consists entirely of hitters, which I think has to be wrong. If I have 5 players on the bench, then I want at most 3 hitters. The strategy I am favoring here calls for 3 pitchers and 2 hitters on the bench.

With four of the top middle relievers, the top of our pitching staff is taken care of. Fill out the rest with 2 top-tier relievers and 5 late-round starters. That means in the Yahoo format that 10 out of your first 12 picks can be hitters. (In an auction format, it means spending over $200 of a $260 budget on hitting).

Another way that the Yahoo Rotisserie format favors this approach is that there is no innings minimum but there is an innings maximum of 1400. If we find another closer early in the season and everything else is going ok, we might blow off wins and strikeouts to lock up the other pitching categories.

With this approach, I think we can come out of the draft close to the top in all five hitting categories plus the pitching ratio categories. We are near the bottom in wins, but not hopeless. We are decently positioned in saves, but that is a category that really gets shuffled once the season gets going. We’d better hope that the closers we chose are not among those who lose their jobs during the season, and it would be nice if we pick up one of the relievers who gets promoted to closer and does the job.

We will have a good ratio of strikeouts to innings, but we will be short of innings (late-round starters usually give you only 160 innings or so). If we can add a 6th starter without messing up our ratios, then we can be competitive in strikeouts.

In an efficient market, we should have a one out of three chance of finishing in the top 4. But with this strategy, I think our chances are closer to two out of three.

This year, I tried this strategy in a Yahoo money league. Money leagues are the only ones you can rely on to be reasonable. In other leagues, owners will bail out before the draft is even over, and then you are stuck playing the whole season with only a handful of serious owners.

Anyway, I executed the strategy, spending mostly on hitters. Fortunately, others in my league were not into this strategy. If anything, starting pitchers went above YSRP more than hitters did.

By May, when a hitter comes off the disabled list, nine of my ten hitters will be projected to hit at least 25 home runs (and my tenth is projected to hit just under that), with eight of the ten projected to have batting averages over .280. My team is not projected to be near the top in stolen bases, but that is not a big worry.

I only bought two middle relievers, but I will raise that to four right away, because I also took two players that I knew were on the disabled list, and I will immediately bring in middle relievers for them. When the two players return from the disabled list in late April, the plan is to keep the middle relievers and to drop my least-useful bench hitter and starting pitcher as of that time.

On paper, by May I will have a 1st-place team. But meanwhile, there is the actual baseball season, and nothing happens like it’s supposed to on paper.