The following is an excerpt from the Fantasy Alarm Fantasy Baseball Guide Powered By Baseball Guys which is on sale now:

 

Auction Drafting

By Ray Flowers

 

Chances are that when you first started playing fantasy baseball you played in a traditional “snake’ league. In this setup you get a chance to pick when it’s your turn but your roster will always be limited by what is available for you to draft when your turn comes up. You have little control being left at the mercy of who other teams fail to take. It’s fun to try and predict who you will draft and what the best way is to construct a quad, but it’s admittedly a bit random in standard snake leagues. This is where auctions come in. In an auction you are given a monetary budget to spend on players. You can spend your money to target the players you want. You can spend as much as you need to get any player you want. There are limits of course, when your funds get low you cannot continue to bid on every player, but the point is that you have more control of your team and which players end up on your squad. That’s truly exciting to me (not to mention more challenging).

 

But what do you do if you’ve never participated in auction? You need to have an understanding of what to do in that setup so you can avoid crumbling under the pressure of not really knowing what you’re doing. Don’t worry, The Oracle has you covered in this piece. There is a bunch of ways that one can set up an auction league, but for the sake of simplicity I’m going to set a baseline for our discussion. I’ll go with the “standard” setup as our working example for the strategies that follow.

 

$260 budget

14 hitters: C, C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, CI, MI, OF, OF, OF, OF, OF, UT

9 pitchers: P, P, P, P, P, P, P, P, P

6 bench spots: any combination of players you like

 

This is the basic setup that most leagues should be using – please don’t participate in those lame leagues that only have three outfielders or one catcher – whether you are talking about a mixed league or a league specific setup (AL-only or NL-only).

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To read more of this article and 199 more pages of Fantasy Baseball Bliss, get the 2014 Fantasy Alarm Fantasy Baseball Draft Guide Powered by Baseball Guys and the great Ray Flowers.