(Note: I realize fantasy sports often make people sound like this. You’ve been warned.)
Winning the fantasy baseball auction — any auction, really — is a lot like winning poker. The novice way is to play the hand that’s in front of you. The expert way is to play every one of your opponents’ hands for them and to subtly shift the entire draft landscape in your favor. Sure, like in poker, you can accomplish this by bluffing effectively. But if you’re as terrible at poker as I am, the more surefire and sneaky way is to use psychology to just subtly be a ruinous jerk.
Most gentleman managers use the following rules to guide their participation in a fantasy auction:
- Come up with a rough idea of which players you want to spend your money on (and which ones you don’t)
- Nominate the most expensive players left in the pool
- Bid on players you like, don’t really bid on players you don’t like
Generally, the goal in your auction is to capture as much value as possible — if you start with $260 to spend (standard in baseball leagues) and wind up with $300 in value, you’re in pretty good shape. The gentleman’s way to do this is to follow the guidelines above and hope (fingers crossed!!) that you can win the players you want at a price below their face value.
But let’s not leave things so much to luck, and take a little more control of the battlefield.
The ruinous jerk way to do this is to annoy all the other co-managers, frustrate them psychologically, and beguile them into spending more than they ought to — which leaves them with less spending power and mental fortitude with which to compete with you.
We accomplish all this by flipping the gentleman’s strategy pretty much completely on its head.
1. Come up with a rough idea of which players the other managers want to spend their money on (and which ones they don’t)
There’s one guy in my fantasy baseball league who once drafted Torii Hunter every year for like five years straight. It was a fun running joke, but also, it was obvious that the manager really liked Torii Hunter. If I was more of a jerk years ago, I would have made a point of nominating Torii Hunter very early, and forcing that manager to fight for Hunter while all the other managers still had ample budgets available.
The easy way of being a jerk and adhering to this rule is to just actually watch baseball and see which players are exciting. (If you can’t handle the devastating monotony of actually trying to sit through a few baseball games, try just skimming a few ESPN Fantasy “sleepers” articles written by “experts.”) For example: Everyone gushes over Matt Harvey; he’s some kind of superhero or something. I’m confident plenty of managers will be waiting patiently for his name to come up with the rest of the $14-$16 pitchers and hope that he goes for about face value next to the substantially less interesting likes of Jeff Samardzija and Sonny Gray.
The ruinous jerk thing to do would be to nominate Harvey in like the second round, while everyone is still bidding on the likes of Adam Wainwright and Yu Darvish, and watch Harvey go for $4-6 over face value.
Some 2015 buzzy candidates: Matt Harvey, Evan Gattis, Jose Fernandez, Mookie Betts
The slightly harder way of being a jerk is to look at each manager’s rosters from past years. Assuming your fellow managers are human beings, they’re going to be predisposed to liking players who helped them compete last season. A player who is on the manager’s roster AND part of the team name is a dead giveaway. Intuitively, players who came out of nowhere and blew up big seem more likely, too. Watch for the holes in other managers’ rosters during the draft, nominate accordingly, and if you’re feeling poker-ey, bid aggressively.
Some (feasible) 2015 homer candidates: Jose Altuve, Corey Kluber, JD Martinez, Brian Dozier
2008-2013 candidate: Torii f*@%^# Hunter
On the other hand: To figure out which players the other managers don’t want, look for guys with really boring, vanilla names who’ve been around for forever but aren’t dilapidated messes yet like CC Sabathia and Mark Teixeira and basically half of the Yankees. Maybe guys who were big on hype last year and failed to meet lofty expectations. On eBay, one parallel strategy would be trying to bid on items which don’t have pictures, or have misspellings in the listing title — in all likelihood, these are meaningless aesthetic differences which lead to meaningful price savings. In fact, there are websites designed specifically to help buyers take advantage of this.
Some boring 2015 candidates to get for yourself: Brian McCann, Evan Longoria, Jimmy Rollins, Matt Holliday
2008-2013 candidate in any league but my own: Torii f*@%^# Hunter
2) Nominate, like, the third-most expensive player in a category
Check out the list of shortstops available in 2015:
If your fellow managers are following the gentleman’s guide to drafting, I guarantee that a handful of them are eyeing the top 3 shortstops because everyone after Jose Reyes is boring or flat-out horrible.
The ruinous jerk strategy here is to nominate Jose Reyes as soon as possible.
By taking Reyes off the market, you prematurely create artificial scarcity around the three premium shortstops — like DeBeers creating artificial scarcity in the diamond market.
With only gentlemen drafting, managers will probably bid on Big 3 SS’s up to around their face value — the fourth manager sighing politely and accepting Reyes at a slight discount.
With you, the ruinous jerk, taking Reyes off the board, there’s now a monstrous drop in value between Ian Desmond ($25) and Alexei Ramirez ($10). Gentlemen managers following their 1st rule know that they want a big 3 SS and don’t want to get stuck in the dredges — so it’s very likely that they’ll pay a sizeable premium in order to stay close to their draft strategy and avoid the SS gutter. The unfortunate manager who does get stuck with Alexei now has to re-configure their draft strategy around your tomfoolery — and they might be steamed from losing the Desmond bidding war, to boot.
Remember, somebody’s probably going to nominate the most expensive player pretty soon, anyway. Even when the plateau candidate isn’t as obvious as Reyes above, continually and strategically nominating the 3rd or 4th best player gives you consistent opportunities to force other players to overspend on their rosters.
3) Bid fast and start low on players you don’t like; bid slow and start high on players you do like
The goal here is to manipulate the fatigue and attention spans of the rest of your league.
Here’s some research on auctions from the Kellogg School of Management. They found that eBay auctions with a low starting price ($1) wound up with a higher end sale price. The key: Get more traffic and attention in the auction.
Some quotes from a corresponding article in the Chicago Tribune:
When someone enters an auction, they invest time and energy in bidding and watching it. This is called “sunk costs.” In business school, students are taught to ignore sunk costs. But most bidders do not.
“Early bidders get trapped, because they’ve spent time and energy in the auction, and it motivates them to spend more time and energy on that auction,” Galinsky said.
Get it? So, more bids → more bidders → higher price. This also means that for players you don’t want, it’s a subtly productive & malicious strategy to actively bid-up players in $1 increments until they get closer to market value, whereupon you can safely walk away.
And bid quickly. Clicks are easy to get caught up in, and you can goad managers into bidding wars simply by inciting them to quickly click back and forth. (Just be careful not to get caught yourself.)
Employ the opposite logic for players you’re interested in: Start the bidding high — or jump-bid them high if they were nominated by a different manager. Again, we want to make the auction appear very uninteresting and weed out attention. Also, because you’re a jerk, this makes the draft less fun for observers who just like to participate and click on stuff.
I think a good rule-of-thumb is to set your targets’ auction price at two thirds of their face value. So If you actually wanted Reyes ($19), and somebody opened him at $1, you should quickly write in a $12-13 bid. There’s some fear that you might be leaving value on the table — some stray chance that you might have been able to nab Reyes at $11 or less — but based on the research above, that fear’s probably unfounded. In 9 years of auction drafts, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a player taken for more than $10 under face value. Your actual odds of winning are way better when you remove bidders from participation.
Also, when bidding on your targets, bid slowly. Because the slower you bid, the fewer bids there are. And because long, drawn-out bids every 15 seconds are infuriating — each additional dollar feels like torture. I’m inclined to reference Prospect Theory, and suggest that, say, five individual spends of $1 are collectively more painful than a bunched spend of $5. But your mileage may vary with this one.
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End of the day: What’s perhaps nicest about the ruinous jerk draft strategy is the fact that you can employ it year-over-year, sport-over-sport. Just try not to get caught. And try not to get punched.