Does anyone here know how to best use the auction values generated by the tool at Lastplayerpicked.com? I entered in my league parameters (10-team ESPN, $300 budget with standard cats) and it told me Albert Pujols is worth $51.
I can't see spending $51 on Albert in the real draft. How do I best use these values? What about the inflation column? I can't seem to find explanations on the site itself. Anyone have and advice? It seems like a great tool, but I want to make sure I use it correctly.
If more questions, you could send email to the owner of the site (his email is on the bottom of the page) He has been really responsive in the past
I think the key thing for this (and any valuation system) is they aren't telling you the "market price" for a player. They are telling you that players "value" based on their philosophy/algorithm. And there are many different ways of calculating value. And of course, that value is only as good as the projected stats anyway.
Just like every site has a different way to calculate value based on stats, every league has different market price for players. Some leagues may have people who go for high priced studs no matter what. Others may be more conservative.
Lets say the market price in your league for Albert is $42, that is the most anyone wants to spend. If you buy in to the algorithm used on last player picked, then it is worth it to you to bid 43 and go above everyone else because that is $9 under value. If you use some other value system that puts Albert at $39, or a philosophy that says it is never worth bidding more than $30 on a player, you won't go past that and the other guy will win at $42
There are a few things with the New York Yankees that never change. That's pride, tradition, and most of all, we have the greatest fans in the world. -Derek Jeter, 9/21/08 -- last words from old Yankee Stadium
Honestly, Albert Pujols in a normal year really is worth $51.
If you're seeing the Inflation column you either have keepers or did something to make the system think that you did. In a nutshell, here is inflation in auction drafts.
Say you have 10 teams. Each team has a budget of $200. Therefore, there's a total of $2,000 to be spent on players. Without getting too technical, sites such as LPP figure out the value of stats, give them a $ value based on the $ available, and then adds them up to get a player value. Now say that each team had a player whose auction value was $40 but they all kept them at $20. Now instead of $2,000 to be spent on players, there's really $2,200 (the $2,000 in salary money + the extra $200 that was saved by keepers). What this will do will push up by 10% all the prices of players not kept. So if they were a $30 player before, they're a $33 player now.
If you're not using keepers then just ignore this and take the values from LPP. Those are your auction values. Next step is researching the players and figuring whose projections you believe in more than others.
0-3 to 4-3. Worst choke in the history of baseball. Enough said.
in a 10 team league. Sure why not? the wire will be full of valuable 1 dollar pitchers and outfielders. Heck you could do a pitching staff of one ace, two closers, and some quality 1.00 pitchers for around 50 bucks and keep your staff in the top three. easy peasey.
You have a shallow mixed league. Albert is worth $51. In my league, a 12-team keeper with about 23% inflation, he's valued at $68 with lastplayerpicked.com's values for my league. I'd pay $55 for him (and we only have a $260 cap!).
Baseball is a game where a curve is an optical illusion, a screwball can be a pitch or a person, stealing is legal and you can spit anywhere you like except in the umpire's eye or on the ball. ~Jim Murray
Pujols is worth $58 in my league when I used LPP. He is worth $57 in RotoChamp using my league parameters (and a whopping $71 after keepers have been entered).
He normally goes for around $55 in our league. I used to think that was way too high for a player, but the winner of our league has drafted Pujols 4 of the last 5 years so I'm buying into the LPP/RotoChamp valuations this year.
FWIW, I think that generally speaking Pujols comes up undervalued when people apply methodologies such as the LPP one. Here's the thing that most people don't really think about, or if they do, not in a real formal way.
Pretend Projected Statline for Albert Pujols: .330/35hrs/102r/125rbi/12sb
Pretend Projected Statline for Carlos Gozalez: .310/35hrs/100r/105rbi/20sb
The way that these calculations work is they basically value each one of those stats, so Albert's .330 avg may be worth $6 to your team and Cargo's .310 avg may be worth $4 and then Albert's 35 hr's would be worth say $5 and Cargo's 35 hr's would be worth $5 and so on and so forth.
Here's the hitch. What people don't think about formally is that all these are just projections. IF both players hit these projections they'll be worth exactly what they're projected out to be.* With Pujols, however, you're pretty rock solid that you're going to get those numbers. Eventually you won't, sure, but if you were to put a %age probability on it it would be something like 85% where you have maybe 10% injury risk and 5% performance risk. For someone like CarGo or frankly most new arrivals to the top tier of players it's probably like 65% where you have 10% injury risk and 25% performance/coming back to earth risk.
So if you really wanted to know the value of these players you really should multiply their calculated value times the probability that they'll hit these numbers. And if you do that, I think Pujols' value, by virtue of being so completely consistent, jumps up even more.
People do think this way informally, of course. They'll say things such as, "I don't think they'll repeat" or, "I wouldn't spend more than $X on so-and-so" but they never really articulate the above as to what is going on.
* Well, not exactly as the value of a stat may go up or down depending upon the total league performance, but pretty close.
0-3 to 4-3. Worst choke in the history of baseball. Enough said.
Cafe Home
Fantasy Football
Fantasy Basketball
Fantasy Hockey
by 
