Collette Calls: LABR By The Numbers

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Published on March 11, 2021

The first ever LABR auction took place 28 years ago and all bidding was done over the telephone. The first player ever nominated was Bernie Williams according to LABR historian Lenny Melnick. The 26 subsequent auctions were live somewhere, until this year when the unresolved pandemic forced us back in time to do LABR remotely for the first time this century. The online auction was hosted by RTSports, which performed admirably well, and I quite enjoyed it. There are some quirks to RTSports auctions that need to be explained as I believe it influenced some of the bidding.

RTSports allows you to nominate a player at any set amount, but once that player is nominated, the rest of the league can bid on the player in one of the following manners:

Manually type in a bid amount
Type in a MAX amount, which allow the system to +1 competing bids until either your max is reached or the bid is counted out.
Pressing the +1 button.

The risk of the latter move is that if someone manually inputs a bid amount and it makes it in just before your +1, the $13 you though you were bidding on a player could suddenly become $18 if the person manually inputs 17. I frequently put in MAX amounts on players at prices I was comfortable rostering to move things along and try to get people off their game while they got a handle on it. Maybe that is how I got Gerrit

RTSports allows you to nominate a player at any set amount, but once that player is nominated, the rest of the league can bid on the player in one of the following manners:

Manually type in a bid amount
Type in a MAX amount, which allow the system to +1 competing bids until either your max is reached or the bid is counted out.
Pressing the +1 button.

I wanted to present some overall numbers from the results of both auctions; the full auction results are available at the links below. To avoid this article becoming excessively long, I will write up both my thoughts on my AL LABR draft and my RotoWire Online Draft Championship in a separate posts in the coming days.

Average Spent By Position

LABR uses a 10-game eligibility rule, so the following players were UT-Only for the AL auction, thus driving up the average price at the position:

ESPN's Tristan Cockcroft played this very well getting Calhoun for $1 in the end game because everyone else had filled their UT spot with one of the other names or with a sixth outfielder. I had intended on nominating these players to fill other rosters, but nominated and then won Stanton myself. If I could do it over again, I would have started with Calhoun and worked my way up.

Starting Pitching

GROUPING	AL	NL
$40+	2	1
$35-39	1	0
$30-34	0	0
$25-29	4	6
$20-24	2	4
$15-19	8	8
$10-14	12	13
$5-9	16	17
$1-4	31	20

The AL managers selected seven more starting pitchers than their NL counterparts. Shane Bieber, Lucas Giolito and Cole commanded top dollar in the AL while deGrom stood alone as the only pitcher acquired for more than $30 in the NL. AL owners spent $14 or less on 77 percent of the starting pitchers they acquired compared to 72 percent for the NL. The two leagues combined to roster 36 pitchers for $1 or $2 with 35 percent of starting pitchers being acquired for less than $5.

Relief Pitching

GROUPING	AL	NL
$20+	1	1
$15-19	6	2
$10-14	3	3
$5-9	8	11
$1-4	15	21

Relief pitching is as uncertain this year than it has been in any other year in recent memory. There are many unsettled closing situations in camps, or clubs openly discussing letting the situation dictate the pitcher rather than the label. The NL is rather unsettled with fluid situations in Arizona, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Colorado, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Diego and San Francisco, and the distribution of prices toward the end game shows this. A $4 Jake McGee could be a big profit if the recent addition of Jose Alvarez to an already heavy lefty pen was to allow McGee to be the primary closer.

The AL has roughly half of the closer situations in an unsettled state, and it shows by the bidding. The theme repeats here in that someone's cheap end-game buy could become rather profitable should Terry Francona decide James Karinchak is better used getting the ball to Nick Wittgren or Emmanuel Clase or if Hunter Harvey gets hurt again allowing Tanner Scott to take over the end-game duties. We have already seen two big hits to the closer-in-waiting strategy with Jonathan Hernandez going down with a slight tear to his UCL and Zach Britton needing arthroscopic surgery to remove a bone spur in his left elbow. Hernandez at least had a clear path to the job with the unsteadiness of Jose Leclerc, but I know several people who were targeting Britton late in drafts for his skills regardless of his role.

The End Game

The table below shows how the $1 and $2 players played out as well as the splits in the reserve rounds:

GROUPING	AL	% Pitchers	NL	% Pitchers
$2 players	31	58%	26	50%
$1 players	33	52%	33	58%
Totals	64		59
% Reserve Hitting		43%	37%
% Reserve Pitching		57%	63%

The NL group was particularly aggressive with $1 pitcher picks while that activity floated to the $2 level in the AL, perhaps even with my influence. I started throwing $1 pitchers out in the middle of the draft as I had a pool of them I would happily take for $1, but was not sure if I would pay $2, so I let the room decide. Nick Pivetta, Randy Dobnak and Josh Fleming were three such names I threw during that phase. Each pitcher, in fact, went for $2.

The reserve-round dynamics were mostly a factor of the league differences. The AL reserves always have more bats to speculate on because the DH adds more hitters to the pool, leaving more names in the reserves. None are game changers, on paper, but there are at least names to grab. The NL affords less luxury because the hitting pool is nearly evaporated by the end of the active phase of the draft. There are few things left to buy, so clubs will load up on pitching to make early replacements on injuries or demotions.

I encourage you to get into the individual league results and look at how managers constructed their teams and the prices they paid. It was my observation that there were few auction dynamics in play outside of the UT-only anomaly in AL LABR. If you see gaps between what your auction values are for a player and what the analysts paid in this auction, use the time before your own auction to study what you may be overlooking with that player. Most of these analysts publish writeups of their auctions on their respective sites and/or are very approachable on Twitter.