How I Assign $$ to Players

Valuing players for a draft is an inexact science. There are various calculators that allow you to input your league parameters to generate a list of pure values based upon the calculator’s parameters – total money available to be spent and number of players to be drafted. Some of these spit out negative values. Some provide fractional values i.e $1.58.

Anyone who has read my site for a while knows I base my values on a more intuitive scale. This is not a popular way of doing it. In fact, it is an unpopular way of doing anything in any field of knowledge. Price target for stock? Number of uninsured? Presidential approval rating? Number of calories to consume in a day?

My valuation system is based on my experience in auction drafts and the minimum and maximum bids in those drafts. For scaling purposes, the minimum bid is $1 and salary cap is $260 with 23 rosters spots all of which must be filled. The maximum bid on any player is $238 (22 $1 players and 1 $238 = $260.)

As I have never seen a bid of $238, the de facto maximum bid is $47. That was for Randy Johnson three years ago. For simplicity, I always operate on the theory that the maximum bid is $40-$45, and this will only be reached by a handful of players, at most, and only in keeper leagues.

So my player values range from $1 to $40+. There will be no negative values and no fractional ones.

I am going to begin posting these values for deep keeper leagues with auction drafts. If your league does not meet those three criteria (1. deep 2. keeper league 3. auction draft), the dollar values will be higher than what you should anticipate.

They are still useful as I will be grouping similarly-valued players to together i.e Johann Santana, Randy Johnson, Mark Buerhle as $30 pitchers. It will be up to you to determine which of the grouped players are the best (Santana) and which is the worst (A very tough call.)