If the Price Is Right: Fantasy Baseball Auctions Are Here To Stay

Hope spring is eternal.

Every year, when March rolls around, every sports fan rises from the post-Super Bowl slumber. Spring is in the air, and not only does that mean that the NCAA basketball action is around the corner, but it also signals the coming of the new baseball season.

Around this time, all baseball fans are ignited with the feeling that just maybe, this year is the year for their ball club. Even Mets fans are invigorated at the sight of a clean slate.

But underneath all this renewed optimism in the baseball community lurks a multi-million dollar industry that has less concern for the wins and losses than for the home runs and ERA.

Yes, that's right: The fantasy baseball monster has awoken as well.

Over the past few weeks, many old high school buddies, co-workers, and other acquaintances have been reunited in the form of fantasy baseball leagues. It's a longer, more grueling version of fantasy football, so it's not exactly for the faint of heart.

Every year since my freshman year of high school, I have been in a competitive league with some of the biggest baseball fans I know. We have always divvied up the MLB player universe through a traditional serpentine draft, leading to much speculation and drama each year in the days leading up to the draft as to whom the computer would award the prized No. 1 overall pick.

With that pick came immense pride, trade leverage and usually, Albert Pujols.

However, those days appear to be coming to an end.

This year, a secondary league in which I participated (come on, we all have secondary leagues) alerted me of a harsh reality: These drafts are not the best way to hand out the players.

A trend that has been sweeping over the fantasy sports scene for a few years now has been the player auction draft: All league managers take turns nominating players to be bid upon, and the guy willing to make the highest bid gets the player.

As a relative old-timer in the fantasy scene, I dismissed the auction as an attempt by the youth of the game to make their mark, a mere flashy novelty that lacked practicality.

But after taking part in my first auction draft in this aforementioned secondary league of mine, I have been converted. The auction is absolutely the way to go.

It makes the classic snake draft look arbitrary and antiquated. Gone are the days characterized by 12 guys huddled around a hat filled with paper balls to see who will get Pujols.

In the far more democratic, egalitarian auction, if the price is right for the Cardinals slugger (which is usually about 20 percent of a manager’s budget), he’s all yours. The auctions gives you way more control over which players you want on your team, instead of some computer-generated draft order dictating your strategy. 

In addition, the auction has so many fun, little intricacies to it that the traditional draft lacks. For example, sometimes you may throw out a price with no interest of buying the player, but just to force your opponents to pay more. 

Because at the end of the auction, the name of the game is to have more money than your competitors. This gives you the edge in landing those true 11th-hour steals and adds new meaning to the saying “low-investment pitcher."

There’s a psychological aspect to the game as well. You don’t want your league-mates to know what you're thinking behind your nominations.

The general strategy is to nominate players you don’t want—and think others will overpay for—in the early rounds, and to nominate players you absolutely love later on, when you supposedly have more money to blow than everyone else. Thus, it’s the job of the manager to keep his opponents off balance throughout the day, constantly shifting between the two extremes.

It’s this and other nuances of the game that make the auction so much more appealing to me. Who knows—maybe one day I will convince my primary league-mates to adopt the auction into the league constitution.

Regardless if I get them to agree on the matter—then again, they don’t agree on anything—I think that auction drafts are here to stay. Hop on the bandwagon, folks.